I don't expect amazon to have my best interests at heart. To the contrary, this entire post is about how their actions dont have their best interests at heart. When I pause a purchase because of this crap, I might not ever return to pick it up.
I never expect a faceless company to care about me. I do expect that when I willingly align my interests with theirs, things should get easier.
I spent 11 years working as a contractor for the U.S. State Department. During this time I:
- In 1996 built and deployed a system to keep track of the removal of landmines in Bosnia. In 2015 I met someone who knew my work as a child in Sarajevo, producing the maps they’d give out to schoolchildren.
- I managed a project with over 30 team members to build a system to help former Soviet Union countries manage their import/export control policies.
- I helped create a system for generating some annual reports for Poland that was a requirememnt for them to join NATO.
I realized I should clarify “I could find”. I’m in the Washington D.C. Metro area, but I spoke _at least_ once a week everywhere from Richmond to Philadelphia, and occasionally as far as Ohio.
For 10 years I spoke at every conference, user group, etc. that I could find. I sustained a 9 person consulting company finding gigs through the network of other speakers and attendees that would come up and ask me questions. Every question can be rephrased as “I have a problem you can help me solve”, but you also have to qualify to make sure there is a company with a budget for solving that problem. That takes a little business development.
For conference attendees, you have to have some free giveaway to keep a connection… like a free 2 hour code review of your existing project, or “I’m willing to do this presentation for an in-house user group as a lunchtime thing if you’re interested”. Those little giveaways get you closer to the management and the confidence you know what you’re talking about.
2. You should be able to write pseudocode on a whiteboard without worrying about syntax.
3. Pseudocode should be loose enough that it suggests a domain-specific language that it might inspire.
4. If your pseudocode requires a mechanism for comments, you’ve lost the plot. In their example, they comment ‘v1’ as ‘variable holding candidate 1’s tally’. Then name it that! ‘tally_can1’ would be much better.
I started watching it, but the whole thing turned me off because they took two fantastic women involved at NASA - Margaret Hamilton and Poppy Northcut, and combined them into one character that in the several episodes I saw was trending towards being a love interest.
For a show that should have accuracy at the start, this was unforgivable given the need for strong women role models in tech.
This alsp pissed me off. He is totally ignoring Benoit Mandel brot’s work in the 1950’s and John Conways work in the 1970’s. He sounds like a petulent child who takes himself too seriously and expects others do the same. It distracts from an otherwise interesting classification paradigm.
I do not see much difference between his 4th paradigm and a breadth-first search through an np (nondeterministic polynomial) problem. I’d love to know what other mathemeticians that work on dynamical systems (Dr Krieger, anyone?) think of his work…
How can this article, as well as the hundreds of comments here, not acknowledge that all they are doing is solving the Drake Equation for new values they are estimating?
Training on a common ‘software engineering body of knowledge’. The state of the art is so different across organizations it’s like having medical tricorders at one place and leeches at another.
Washington Apple Pi in the mid 80’s. Had no idea that would be thought of as a ‘heyday’. I was in high school and used it mostly as a group of people to get software from...shareware and... otherwise.
There were also some fun bbs games like TradeWars 2000, of which nothing like that exists today. I remember racing home from school to see if there were still colonists left on Earth to take to my planets.
Audible, I’m a regular user and a big fan, but if you want to make me happy and increase my book purchasing volume:
1) get rid of the subscription service, I have avoided purchases altogether because the book was cheaper than my credit was costing me, but couldn’t bring myself to give you more money when I have a bunch of credits there.
2) include the kindle book. Just make it so I’m buying the rights to the content and I’ll willingly let you lock me in to both the kindle and audible.
3) improve the UI of the apps. I have 50 or so booos now, and it seems inconsistent how they are ordered, where they are downloaded, which devices recognize I’ve listened to them, etc. give me a way to organize my books, give me adjustable playback speed on my echo.
I never expect a faceless company to care about me. I do expect that when I willingly align my interests with theirs, things should get easier.