Wrote a blog post about how I learned to use monte carlo simulations, and histogram charts to help me estimate and project things like costs, or project delivery dates ... while still communicating the uncertainty of the thing. I'd love to get any feedback or thoughts on this :)
Ever worked with a "Cowboy Coder"? Or perhaps, you yourself are that gun-slingin' cowpoke! What works in a smaller team or startup, can eventually become a liability as a team grows if not managed correctly.
Does your team "move fast and break things"? Or do you slow down and find/fix the root cause every time? As always, the right answer is the classic "it depends", and each approach comes with its own pros and cons.
This is so friggin' cool!! I was wondering recently why Nintendo doesn't use it's already-existing channels of the on-Switch emulators, to let gamedevs make _new_ games for those platforms. That would be such a cool, nostalgic, and potentially lucrative market!
> Ryan Seacrest (yes the Ryan Seacrest) bankrolled a startup 10 years ago with an almost identical product. (They were sued out of existence by an already dying BlackBerry.)
> You'll never get away with an illegal U-turn ever again because the city will pull footage from peoples' internet-of-crap dashcams and the machine learning algorithms will comb the feeds and send fines directly to your mailbox with basically no human intervention.
I completely respect wanting to live in SF ... I have personal reasons why I can't move away from where I'm at, but I also have a full time job with a company headquartered literally as far as possible from me in the continental united states. So I get to live where I have to live and make a good salary to support my family, and they get to use my talents as long as they continue to feel I bring them value.
That's the thing ... this discussion isn't saying everyone has to move away from SF, that's ludicrous. But if you want to live in SF, my point is why would you want to have to be on public transit for four hours every single day? It takes time you could use for living your life, and contributes to pollution.
In an ideal world, you could live in SF, work for google remotely, and maybe pop into campus every few days or even weeks, as needed. And then google can also hire from the millions of developers that live elsewhere as well. That way: you could live on the beach, live in socal, live in norcal, live on a farm in Iowa, live in Hawaii, live in New Jersey ... whatever kind of life you want to build, would not have to be linked to whether there is a company you want to work for in that place.
This is why assigning an "onboarding buddy" is so important (even on-site) ... a new team member isn't going to feel empowered to ask questions and interrupt people right off the bat usually. Their more-senior onboarding buddy can make the introductions and get their questions answered by the right person without feeling awkward about it.
We are an adaptive species ... just because some folks are strong in-person (due to years of experience at it), doesn't mean they won't adapt to have better digital communication skills when it becomes a more prevalent practice. I think people will be fine ... even if there's an adjustment period :)
that's why you shouldn't use _either_ of those as repositories of information ... they're great for the ephemeral discussions, but once consensus is reached, you should have other ways of tracking that, whether it's: github/devops/jira issues and tickets, or some kanban board somewhere, or design documents, or a wiki. The discussion itself shouldn't be the artifact that records the decision.
Has anyone ever made some variant of these "* does not exist" sites with some control sliders/options, that controls various aspects of what's generated?
So things like: gender, hair color, face shape, etc?
Basically, an AI-driven character generator that isn't completely random?