Maybe I was super lucky or somehow immune.. but as a Kid I got zapped by flyback transformers quite a bit of times.. (5 or 6 times?) It hurts,and it leaves a burn point where it touched.. but did not killed me.
Eventually I learned to ground the whole thing with a cooper cable and a resistor.
To me, Unit Tests are live documentation for your code.
You definitely do not need 100% coverage, but if you can exercise a good percentage of your code, you are making your future "you" live easier.
Just consider that in many cases code lifespan is 20% dev , 80% maintenance.
In my experience, At large companies that hire a lot of contractors, it is not that hard to pull this off. I've seen where the contractors A team do all the interviewing, then you get a C or C- team assigned to work in your project. By the time you "give them a chance", complain up the management chain, go sideways to HR and actually change the team, the contracting firm already got 6 months worth of salary from the team.
In short, they do it because it is profitable.
PS.. To add insult to injury, the "engineers" on the team will update ther CV's to show that they worked for "large company X".
Our minds are wired to wonder, recall previous similar situations , associate and predict what is coming.. some minds are more active at this than others.
If you want to get some control over this, try practicing meditation. It will strengthen your ability to focus.
I recently found out that "unfinished" structures in Peruvian emerging towns is by design, as you don't start paying property taxes on a building until is "finished" , leaving it on an eternal state of construction, avoids you those taxes..
"His buildings are nicknamed cholets, a portmaneau of chalet (a Swiss mountain house) and cholo (derogatory slang for indigenous person)."
Just a small comment on the above paragraph from the article:
While in mexico the word "cholo" is used on a derogatory manner, in the andes (Peru and Bolivia) the word Cholo is used also as a pride term (like the N word can be used in the US) So people often claim "Cholo Power" for amazing endurance or Cholo Pink for a vivacious color on clothing or "100% Cholo" as a term of proud heritage.
In this particular case, I believe "Cholets" is used as a proud "originality" term.. but it certainly could be used as a demeaning term by the local equivalents of the infamous USA "Karen" type :)
1. This in Peru, far away from FAA's reach ;)
2. No,It must be a camera sync issue.. I was giving it just enough power to keep altitude
3. This was done just for fun.. To prove it could be done, if you wish. The engine (cheap chineese model) crapped out within 10 hours.. Sometime I'll put a newer/better and use it as a sustainer for when thermals are not available
And one more niche area.. Electric engines do not care about low oxygen, going up and down from coastal areas to high altitude Andes is economically achievable. Going from a place like Lima to Jauja in Peru can take 12 hours on a road, but barely 45 minutes by plane.
An early attempt with a Pipistrel sinus motorglider
* going back down to the coast requires very little engine time :)
Agree with the big benefits for training, specially if you can swap batteries like you do with industrial drones.
Other niche area where there would be a great benefit:
Remote regions like the amazon jungle where a regular trip between villages (no roads what-so-ever) takes hours or days on small powered canoes vs 15 minutes when flying. Electric seaplanes would not only deliver basic modern services (Medical, Police, Business, etc) to these areas but it could do it without the need of shipping expensive fuel from far away.. Solar chargers would take care of that. ( maintenance would be easier too.. )
In this case, ships will be heavily loaded on the way down (carrying heavy produce) and lightly loaded on the way up (carrying lighter products like medicine or high value manufactured goods)
All along the Andes in South America there is a dire need to efficiently move products from high altitude to the coast (where major cities are)
In Peru for example, there are hundreds of small farming towns sitting at 10'000+ feet of altitude but just 40 straight line miles from the ocean.. Today to get there, trucks have to use one of the few roads that ,zig-zag up to the high lands before heading into any of this towns. ( an 8 to 16 hour trip )
Being able to ship produce straight down to the big cities on the coast would be a game changer.
* I posted this on another thread, but I just found this is the OP
All along the Andes in south america there is a dire need to efficiently move products from high altitude to the coast (where major cities are)
In Peru for example, there are hundreds of small farming towns sitting at 10'000+ feet of altitude but just 40 straight line miles from the ocean.. Today to get there, trucks have to use one of the few roads that ,zig-zag up to the high lands before heading into any of this towns. ( an 8 to 16 hour trip )
Being able to ship produce straight down to the big cities on the coast would be a game changer.
This brings nice old memories to me..
Some forty some years ago, as a kid, I wrote a morse-to-text decoder program in Basic that took it's input from the audio in port that Tandy's Model 1 had to load code from audio cassetes. Big was my surprise when the text coming out was mostly few letters long amateur radio "codes" sparkled with actual words here and there.. pretty much uninteligeble stuff. Still it was a great experience for a young kid of the time.
Agreed and point taken.. A good MBA's would realize the short sightedness of the actions they are taking (like they should have done in Boeing's case) and good engineers should have the integrity to say "you want me to do what? hell no!" That said, the malady I speak about is very real. (maybe even endimic?)
I might be biased (I am an engineer) but I call this behaviour " MBA mentality VS Engineer mentality". Is this malady that slowly has infected top engineering firms (Read HP, Boeing, IBM) and converted them into "sales organizations" that rely on marketing and old reputation to survive. MBA's concentrate on the (albeit short term) profits, Engineers concentrate on the the product.
In my experience this is not 100% true. Many times you get involved on OSS to "scratch your own itch" be it a personal project from scratch or collaborating on somebody else OSS project by fixing/adding something that irks/needs you specifically.
Eventually I learned to ground the whole thing with a cooper cable and a resistor.