diiq · HackerTrans

diiq

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Submissions

The Inefficient Courtroom

sambleckley.com

1 pointsby diiqel año pasado0 comments

One Song in Your Musical Is Wrong

sambleckley.com

2 pointsby diiqel año pasado0 comments

I Rewrote a Century-Old Artist's Anatomy Book

sambleckley.com

1 pointsby diiqhace 2 años0 comments

The Anatomist's Fallacy

sambleckley.com

1 pointsby diiqhace 2 años0 comments

AI in 2024: What Good is Bullshit?

sambleckley.com

1 pointsby diiqhace 2 años0 comments

[untitled]

1 pointsby diiqhace 3 años0 comments

[untitled]

1 pointsby diiqhace 3 años0 comments

Garden Path Content

sambleckley.com

1 pointsby diiqhace 3 años0 comments

Show HN: Monte Carlo simulation for predicting project timelines

quotes.vistimo.com

136 pointsby diiqhace 5 años86 comments

On Trouser Pockets

sambleckley.com

769 pointsby diiqhace 6 años390 comments

On Seeming Simple

sambleckley.com

2 pointsby diiqhace 6 años0 comments

Not Worrying Much About Crates (NPM Analysis Follow-Up)

sambleckley.com

1 pointsby diiqhace 6 años0 comments

Worrying about the NPM Ecosystem

sambleckley.com

174 pointsby diiqhace 6 años86 comments

Better Estimation Math

blog.vistimo.com

4 pointsby diiqhace 7 años0 comments

What We Talk About When We Talk About Math

mutuallyhuman.com

4 pointsby diiqhace 11 años0 comments

Phage Oriented Programming (a fantasy)

diiq.org

1 pointsby diiqhace 11 años0 comments

None Pizza and Multiple Choice

mutuallyhuman.com

4 pointsby diiqhace 11 años0 comments

The Call is Coming from Inside the House

mutuallyhuman.com

5 pointsby diiqhace 12 años0 comments

Atom is Buggy, Beta, and Slow; You Should Use it Anyway

mutuallyhuman.com

5 pointsby diiqhace 12 años0 comments

Dog Trainers and Pull Requests

mutuallyhuman.com

2 pointsby diiqhace 13 años0 comments

comments

el año pasadodiscuss

SEEKING WORK | Remote (happy to travel for kickoff, though) | Michigan, USA

I'm Sam Bleckley, a full stack engineer with 2 decades of successful outcomes consulting across dozens of industries. I can help with:

- Technical challenges ("We know the feature we want, but we don't have the expertise or the time to get it built")

- Process challenges ("We keep missing deadlines," "We're deploying too many bugs," or "The team has no motivation")

- Product design challenges ("We believe this solves our users' problems, but they aren't using it they way we expect")

I also offer fixed-bid development of small prototypes and MVPs, if you need to prove an idea, or have a new project hit the ground running.

If you're looking for experience in a specific tech stack, here are some of the technologies I'm comfortable using:

```AngularJS, Angular, AWS (S3, Lambda, RDS, &c.), C, CSS, Creative Cloud, Flask, git, Glamor, GCS, HTML, Javascript/ECMAscript, Lisps of many varieties, Next.js, Node, Photoshop, Python, Ruby on Rails, React, Ruby, SASS, SCSS, Svelte, Swift, Typescript, Vue, whatever legacy DSL you've got ```

If you want to know more about me, the services I provide, or my approach to software, check out https://sambleckley.com, or reach out to [email protected]

el año pasadodiscuss

Tip: if you open your comment with SEEKING FREELANCER (as the instructions suggest), you may get more leads

el año pasadodiscuss

SEEKING WORK | Remote | Michigan, USA

I'm Sam Bleckley, a full stack engineer with over 2 decades of experience consulting across dozens of industries. I can help with:

- Technical challenges ("We know the feature we want, but we don't have the expertise or the time to get it built")

- Process challenges ("We keep missing deadlines," "We're deploying too many bugs," or "The team has no motivation")

- Product design challenges ("We believe this solves our users' problems, but they still aren't using it")

I also offer fixed-bid development of small prototypes and MVPs, for the right project.

For people using text search, here are some of the technologies I'm comfortable using:

  AngularJS, Angular, AWS (S3, Lambda, RDS, &c.), C, CSS, Creative Cloud, Flask, git, Glamor, GCS, HTML, Javascript/ECMAscript, Lisps of many varieties, Next.js, Node, Photoshop, Python, Ruby on Rails, React, Ruby, SASS, SCSS, Svelte, Swift, Typescript, Vue, and whatever legacy DSL you've got

If you want to know more about me, the services I provide, or my approach to software, check out https://sambleckley.com, or reach out to [email protected]

hace 2 añosdiscuss

SEEKING WORK | United States / Michigan | Remote | Full Stack Software Engineer and Designer

I'm a software engineer and designer with 2 decades of experience across a wide range of industries, from B2B factory-floor logistics to language design to cute consumer web apps. I specialize in helping small teams solve tricky technical and process problems, quickly. Is your team not delivering as fast as you expect? Are you dealing with more bugs or more setbacks than you think you should? Is there some tricky architectural or design problem you can't crack on your own? I can help push your codebase and your team to improve, so that you'll be running on greased rails even after our contract is done.

For people using text search, here are some of the technologies I'm comfortable using:

    AngularJS, Angular, AWS (S3, Lambda, RDS, &c.), C, CSS, Creative Cloud, Flask, git, mercurial, svn, darcs, Glamor, GCS, HTML, Javascript/ECMAscript, Lisps of many varieties, Next.js, Photoshop, Python, Ruby on Rails, React, Ruby, SASS, SCSS, Svelte, Swift, Typescript, Vue

Check out me, my projects, and my writing at https://sambleckley.com, or reach out to [email protected]

hace 2 añosdiscuss

SEEKING WORK | United States / Michigan | Remote | Full Stack Software Engineer and Designer

I'm a software engineer and designer with 2 decades of experience across a wide range of industries, from B2B factory-floor logistics to language design to cute consumer web apps. I specialize in helping small teams solve tricky technical and process problems. Is your team not delivering as fast as you expect? Are you dealing with more bugs or more setbacks than you think you should? Is there some tricky architectural or design problem you can't crack on your own? I can help push your codebase and your team improve, so that you'll be running on greased rails even after our contract is done.

Here are some of the technologies I'm comfortable working with:

    AngularJS, Angular, AWS (S3, Lambda, RDS, &c.), C, CSS, Creative Cloud, Flask, git, mercurial, svn, darcs, Glamor, GCS, HTML, Javascript/ECMAscript, Lisps of many varieties, Next, Photoshop, Python, Ruby on Rails, React, Ruby, SASS, SCSS, Svelte, Swift, Typescript, Vue

Check out me, my projects, and my writing at sambleckley.com, or reach out to [email protected]

hace 3 añosdiscuss

I absolutely agree that an arbitrary line can be drawn; I don't see that that line can be clear and bright enough that forms the kind of precedence that can be relied upon by folks who don't have the money to fight an uncertain battle in court.

But would be overjoyed to be proven wrong.

hace 3 añosdiscuss

Author here! As noted in another reply, I'm using a custom justification tool I built almost a decade ago called unjustifiable.

The way it goes about it very silly; you can read more about it at https://sambleckley.com/writing/text-justification.html

hace 4 añosdiscuss

That is also valuable, but a different premise! Barbara Sher originally wrote books based on that premise: find Your Thing and you'll shine -- but discovered that some people didn't seem to have A Thing, and any talk of having A Thing made them stressed and unhappy.

The Barbara Sher book for people who want to find and follow Their Purpose is "I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was". "Refuse to Choose" is for people who want to do 70 things but the thought of doing any one of them exclusively is horrifying.

hace 4 añosdiscuss

You don't need focus; you need to understand what your goal is. If you're dropping projects that look "unfinished" because, in reality, you've gotten what you want from them, that is fine. It only looks sloppy from the outside.

If you're dropping projects before you get what you want from them, introspect on why. What's happening that leads you away? Address that.

I recommend reading Barbara Sher's "Refuse to Choose"; it provides some useful tools for people who like to do 70 different things, including how to have lots of ideas without having to act on every one immediately.

hace 5 añosdiscuss

This appears to be based on a strange assumption that developers' estimates can't take historical work into account, but dev managers' can; and that estimates coming from dev managers and based on historical work will not be questioned for being too high even in orgs where the devs' estimates will.

I'm not sure the prescription given fits the disease described; it feels more like passing the problem on to a different role than actually changing the approach.

hace 5 añosdiscuss

Absolutely, extensive notes are a huge part of my practice both on teams and solo [1] -- I'm trying to say "solve the problems you actually have" not "when solo, cowboy-code everything like a madman".

[1] https://sambleckley.com/writing/lab-notebooks.html

hace 5 añosdiscuss

Pretty much anyone you can pay to host a database, you can pay to back it up. Amazon rds, heroku postgres, google cloud sql... pick the service that works for you, and they have some affordance for backups. Backups are something I expect, rather than something I shop around for.

hace 5 añosdiscuss

Lots and lots of best practice exists specifically to help teams, and especially teams with some normal amount of turnover.

The problems of a solo dev are very different than a dev on a team. Knowledge silos don't exist. Distributed expertise doesn't exist. There's no one to mentor, no shared vision to maintain, no intertia to combat.

I consult on big complicated team projects. I also manage multiple solo projects.

On solo projects, deployment is a script I run from my dev machine. I'm the only person who deploys; anything else would be solving a problem I don't have.

The only "CI" is running the tests before I run the deployment script. I'm the only one who needs to see the outcome of the tests. Anything more would be solving a problem I don't have.

Architecture is whatever makes the most sense to me personally -- which is often miles away from what I would recommend to a client, who needs something any new hire will recognize and be able to work with.

I pay a service to manage backups so I can walk away from a solo project for months and know it's ticking away.

The point is: solve problems you actually have. Don't try to run a "professional" operation by doing what big teams do all by yourself. Big teams have different problems.

hace 5 añosdiscuss

If you don't want to script your own, Vistimo Quotes lets you do monte-carlo simulation with vague, uncertain estimates; and lets you play with variables like the number of people working, vacation time, etc.

https://quotes.vistimo.com

hace 5 añosdiscuss

I use a statistical model, where each task gets a "best case" and "worst case" estimate; those estimates are used to create a log normal distribution, and the project is simulated as the sum of those distributions plus sick days, social loafing, etc.

I use that method for all my consulting estimates, and it has been very reliable for me; no crunch time, and I often come in under time. I've also made a tool that does the math so my clients and other people can continue to use the same process without me.

[1] https://quotes.vistimo.com/

hace 5 añosdiscuss

I suppose if you consider software to be somehow magically different than all the other human activities which go over-time or over-budget, maybe you could claim that research doesn't apply. But I guess I'd still expect you to know about the fundamentals of the multiple researched approaches to getting experts to predict accurate numbers in the face of uncertainty and social pressure, before deciding to discount it entirely for our specific field.

But it's certainly made a big difference for me in practice, and given the gushing about Steve McConnell in another comment thread, I'm not alone.

hace 5 añosdiscuss

Forty volumes of the "Journal of Forecasting" would be a place to start for peer-reviewed articles, I guess

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/1099131x/current

hace 5 añosdiscuss

Would upvote twice if I could -- These are 5-star rules of thumb.

(I'm glad to see lognormal making more inroads in software estimation. McConnell is great, but assuming the normal distribution leads to some weird edge cases.)

hace 5 añosdiscuss

1) The big if is written out in the abstract -- "if it is accepted that algorithmic complexity is an appropriate definition of the complexity of a programming project." Relating algorithmic complexity to "how long software takes to write" seems, to me, to ignore that the vast majority of my time as a developer is spent discovering and communicating requirements, handling human questions, not writing novel code. The conclusion touches on this, but ignores it.

2) Even if you accept that "if", this is like a halting-problem proof. Fine; it is impossible to estimate the complexity of ALL software. That does not mean that it's useless to quantify the complexity of software in limited but well-behaved problem spaces. How much of any commercial project is actually spent working on the cutting edge of computer science, facing complete unknowns? An estimate being wrong occasionally is worth most estimates being mostly right.

3) Why do you consider a 20 year old paper that's only been cited 16 times to be critical reading about estimation, when a vast body of research in forecasting exists, written by people who have measurements of the accuracy of estimates to base their theoretical models on?

hace 5 añosdiscuss

McConnell's 50/90 approach makes a big difference in my opinion because it lets you encode your uncertainty. The extra math means you don't need to be good at estimation as long as you know roughly how bad you are at it.

If that seems like too much effort, I also run quotes.vistimo.com , which takes a similarly (if slightly more advanced) statistical approach, but does all the math for you.