Hacker News: rentonl

New comment by rentonl in "Git Commands That Cover 90% of a Developer's Daily Workflow"

rentonl — Fri, 02 May 2025 16:00:18 +0000

my co-workers used to think I was an expert in git. In reality, they memorized 7 commands while I memorized 15

New comment by rentonl in "AI speech generator 'reaches human parity' – but it's too dangerous to release"

rentonl — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 15:10:53 +0000

Of course, this technology must only stay in the hands of our trusted corporate overlords.

New comment by rentonl in "Health Services as Credence Goods: a Field Experiment (2020)"

rentonl — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 20:34:42 +0000

I've been following a method where every year I see a different dentist and I only get something fixed if two subsequent dentists diagnose the same issue.

New comment by rentonl in "Learning Is Remembering"

rentonl — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 19:29:56 +0000

I've always felt there is... 1.) Things you know you know 2.) Things you don't know you don't know 3.) Things you know you don't know.

New comment by rentonl in "Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games"

rentonl — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 13:33:04 +0000

Spent so much time playing this. There was a spiritual successor of sorts called "Pocket Tanks" in 2001 which was also a lot of fun.

New comment by rentonl in "Ask HN: Tesla is making us move or quit. Would I get severance?"

rentonl — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 14:01:29 +0000

Serious question: Why would you want to work at a company that treats their employees like this? Is the prestige of working at Tesla really worth it?

New comment by rentonl in "62% of Americans Say They Have Political Views They’re Afraid to Share"

rentonl — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 22:09:28 +0000

Being a centrist isn't about avoiding change or believing in the status quo.

It's about making changes based on rationality rather than emotion and ideology.

New comment by rentonl in "Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?"

rentonl — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 16:29:39 +0000

This is an interesting conversation and one I think about a lot myself. I currently work for a large-ish company with "quite good" practices, and I often wonder what sorts of policies other companies implement. As you grow in your career and continue to join teams that were better than the last, it's sometimes hard to know if your standards are a product of your career trajectory, or simply a product of the times.

However, I do think there is some mid-ground between what you are used to and what the company currently does. In my opinion, these are the minimum requirements of what a mid-sized company should be doing:

- Version control. No excuses here.

- Code Review. This needs to be done.

- Test frameworks are setup and make it easy for a developer to write and run tests. I wouldn't necessarily get hung up on coverage, but large features should have tests in the PRs, and there should be a good culture of testing within the company.

- A CI pipeline that fails the build if tests or linting fails.

- I wouldn't be too concerned about automated deployment from the CI. This also depends a lot on the type of product. It's much easier to automatically deploy a b2p application than a b2b one that might require proper release correspondence with clients beforehand. I think the minimum here should be a system to handle provisioning and deploying to boxes (whether that be something like ansible or in-house scripts).

I'd be interested to know what others think the benchmark should be for mid-sized companies. One last point: You are in an excellent position to make changes within your company. If the truth of the matter is that your colleagues "just can't imagine another way", then you can work with them to try to get some of these policies implemented. If you can convince them that there are actual benefits to doing their job a different way, then I think they should be receptive. You can come out of this job knowing that you helped level-up the developers and left the company in a better place than when you started.