Hacker News: makstaks

New comment by makstaks in "The reality of working in tech: We're not hired to write code (2023)"

makstaks — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 05:24:34 +0000

I think it depends on your company rather than saying "most". If you are in a software company (i.e. you sell the software you write), then your value is the unique IP you create from writing code. In that case, hopefully a larger portion of your day is coding.

edit: When I say coding, I don't mean plumbing code, I mean something that is actually a unique invention.

New comment by makstaks in "Scrum is a cancer"

makstaks — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 05:14:44 +0000

I have delivered successfully projects using Scrum, but we were fortunate that our Scrum Master was well trained and a senior engineer. Our CTO also let us figure things out, and helped us when we were blocked. He was genuinely concerned with the team having a balanced workload, ensured we deliver user value and our software was of high quality. Story points were not used as performance metrics but a tool to help provide stakeholders with some estimation, but only when our velocity became stable. Overall, our process was light-weight, we spent most of our time coding, and we pushed hard to deliver value to the user. If we fell short, we learned from it, no blame, just learned.

New comment by makstaks in "Sweden Sans"

makstaks — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 04:54:21 +0000

The documentation is pretty standard, it allows users of this typeface to build out a design system that scales.

New comment by makstaks in "MuseScore 4.1 is now available"

makstaks — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 00:56:54 +0000

Doesn't autoplay for me, maybe I have a different local setting.

New comment by makstaks in "CheatGPT"

makstaks — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 00:19:41 +0000

As a parent, I'm hoping this will reduce the at-home workloads and shift more work towards school. What's the real life value of having students go to school and then spend all-nighters trying to do homework and all the expected extra-curricular?

New comment by makstaks in "An unexpected benefit of unit tests"

makstaks — Sat, 21 Jan 2023 18:39:07 +0000

I wish HN had a central thread feature for discussing oft-debated topics like TDD, microservices, and agile. This way, we could contribute to the conversation instead of constantly rehashing the same points through new posts.

New comment by makstaks in "Ask HN: Why the Linux Kernel doesn't have unit tests?"

makstaks — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 18:11:30 +0000

I was genuinely interested in OP's question and was hoping responses would not fallback on the much-already discussed "TDD or not" topic.

Ask HN: Web or Desktop App for distraction free experience?

makstaks — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 01:45:17 +0000

I want to create an app that emphasizes a distraction free experience. I'm a web dev so a web app would be easiest for me to build, but browsers are filled with distractions (e.g. other tabs, search bar, plugins). My other option is to create an electron app, which leverages my web skills. A desktop app allows me to control the entire app experience, but would require that I learn electron and how to distribute a desktop app. Anyone have experience in this area or other options that may have worked well for them?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30052710

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by makstaks in "Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell"

makstaks — Fri, 24 Dec 2021 08:51:15 +0000

This is great! I messed up my ankle when I began taking transit and walking to the office in a pair of terrible dress hoes.

New comment by makstaks in "Ask HN: Is it worth it to invest in learning TypeScript?"

makstaks — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 01:05:07 +0000

Maybe then question then is how does one get every developer to design and build modules as you have prescribed? (Recognizing different talent levels across the industry / delivery deadlines). Genuinely curious to know a scalable solution for this.

edit: typo

New comment by makstaks in "Impossible food sues to cancel earlier trademark owners"

makstaks — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 19:46:00 +0000

Be curious to know if anyone who has trademark legal knowledge can answer this question. Since the word Impossible is common, as far as I can gather, if it is for a different industry you indeed could use it?

edit: typo

New comment by makstaks in "Ask HN: Is it worth it to invest in learning TypeScript?"

makstaks — Sun, 07 Nov 2021 16:57:38 +0000

If you are writing code by yourself and your code base is relatively small, then I agree it's hard to see the benefits at first.

If your team and code base grows, one of the first things you'll notice is a lot of time wasted trying to figure out what parameter types a method takes. If you can imagine, a new person onboarding on your code base and having to figure this out constantly and then forgetting, is pretty inefficient.

TypeScript solves that problem since you declare types explicitly in code. The new person will know exactly the parameter types, the IDE can support you more intelligently, and you'll get upfront compile time errors.

The downside is the initial setup and the extra effort of declaring types, so it comes with a cost, but personally I think the benefit outweighs the cost.

New comment by makstaks in "Patagonia Is Boycotting Facebook, Urges Other Companies to Do the Same"

makstaks — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 17:51:27 +0000

I think it's a business problem rather than a technical one, how do I get people to even know my website exists? Google Maps, Facebook pages, Instagram are your immediate choices.

New comment by makstaks in "Show HN: Pop.com – pair programming with low-latency, Screenhero-style sharing"

makstaks — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 03:53:24 +0000

Huge fan of Screenhero back in the day so I'm happy this is back and you have full control over pop.com's future.

New comment by makstaks in "Writing books is not really a good idea"

makstaks — Mon, 10 May 2021 21:38:09 +0000

One challenge I had with the opening statistics in the post is that it treats all books being equal in writing quality and market demand. Just because I write a book, doesn't entitle it to be bought.

New comment by makstaks in "I passed 2 AWS Solution Architect exams in a month"

makstaks — Sat, 28 Nov 2020 06:22:34 +0000

I don't doubt your technical skills, this comment is just to help you see the side of the employer. They don't have time to onboard someone on AWS, they need someone to be able to speak "AWS" out of the gate and contribute immediately. General knowledge isn't helpful, when you need to be able to fine tune each AWS specific services.

New comment by makstaks in "I passed 2 AWS Solution Architect exams in a month"

makstaks — Sat, 28 Nov 2020 06:15:42 +0000

At the end of the day, those that get hired because of their certificate can't actually take up budget resources and not be able to expertly talk about HA architecture and deliver on a technical roadmap. You can't hide behind a certificate. A technical professional actually needs to deliver a solution to a real-world business problem and when you don't it is highly visible. (Slow service, downtime, lost data, breaches)

If certification is indeed useless, and exams are simply basic marketing exams, it will eventually become a red flag in the hiring process.

New comment by makstaks in "I passed 2 AWS Solution Architect exams in a month"

makstaks — Fri, 27 Nov 2020 21:21:23 +0000

I disagree. I've worked with two groups of professionals, those that have certification and those that say they "know" AWS or have working knowledge or experience. It's quite painful to work with the latter when you depend on their expertise.

Give the content a try, you'll find at the foundation of it is building highly scalable distributed system, just that the execution of it is via AWS. You can apply the same knowledge to any cloud platform.

New comment by makstaks in "Ask HN: Where are the Beautiful clean HTML/CSS templates?"

makstaks — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 18:55:19 +0000

I found these to be clean and easy to use. I converted the templates to React components without issue, but now they offer that too.

https://cruip.com/

New comment by makstaks in "Git is too hard"

makstaks — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 17:23:21 +0000

I went from typing everything out to using aliases via Oh My Zsh.

https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/wiki/Cheatsheet