abbottry's comments

abbottry | 9 years ago | on: To fix L.A.'s traffic, we need tolls

Miami tried this, made tolls $7+, it did nothing. And because they put up barriers between the express (toll) lanes and regular lanes, when someone got in an accident in the express lanes, it was FAR slower than the regular lane. The mentality was/is '$7, well its worth it because I can't sit in traffic'

abbottry | 9 years ago | on: Some Silicon Valley Tech Workers Get Home Loans with No Money Down

Came here to mention this exact thing -- you don't even have to be an attending, my wife and I have this loan through a different company, and she is still a resident. We had banks fighting over our mortgage. No money down, no PMI, and they portfolio the loan instead of selling it right away like a standard mortgage. We live in a Detroit suburb.

abbottry | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: Do you need a new Issue Tracking and Project Management tool?

The largest issue I've run into with respect to issue tracking is making it accessible and easy to use/understand for the entire team. Non-technical team members don't have GH accounts, they don't know if what they are seeing is a bug, they don't know if its already been reported (because they don't understand the root cause), always seem to be afraid of doing it wrong.

Further, a tool that tracks the resolution of issues into a simple to read 'This was just deployed' or some kind of digest would be insanely useful. It's not an easy task, but so often someone is waiting for a fix, or waiting for a feature, and then gets upset or something gets overlooked because they didn't know the feature/bug was deployed.

Something simple, with an app-store style approach to customization could be really handy.

abbottry | 11 years ago | on: Mystery Bidder Bids $3.2M for 6000 Detroit Homes

I don't think you understand. There is NOTHING in these houses. Its old, rotten wood, and crumbling brick.

The purchase of homes in Detroit is NOT to sell or repurpose ANYTHING.

I work downtown, and drive through these neighborhoods every single day to avoid traffic (thanks Google!).

abbottry | 11 years ago | on: Show HN: Upmin – An Admin Framework for Ruby on Rails

Did rails development for 6ish years full time, about 6 months ago I joined a startup using Django. The admin is QUITE nice, its very flexible in terms of models but as well as templates, allowing you to override specific blocks from a standard template, rather than copying a template.

This looks like the very beginning of the Django admin, something that Rails could seriously use. Admin functionality isn't meant to be user friendly, its essentially a CRUD system that mimics your schema.. something that would be quite handy in Rails. While I've always painfully just created my own admin for every project, I've used https://github.com/activeadmin/activeadmin a few times, and known others who have as well. It's great, but again not nearly as simple as Django.

Personally I would love to see a Django Admin style tool for Rails.

Of course, you do kind of get this with Rails Scaffold, but its not admin, its all user facing as its produced with the model and controller, far from ideal.

abbottry | 12 years ago | on: Why I moved to Miami

As Miami as the Miami Dolphins.. are you suggesting that Miami is drastically different than it's surrounding area.. the city limits of Miami are quite large, and have many different types of neighborhoods. I love that everyone that lives in Miami thinks they are different, and never want to be grouped with 'outsiders' (folks that live in neighboring counties), but anyone that doesn't, considers all Broward, Dade, and Palm Beach the same. It's always referred to as SFL, South Florida.. All the startups, investors, etc mentioned in articles like this are not located IN Miami.. they are spread across SFL.

abbottry | 12 years ago | on: Why I moved to Miami

There are plenty of great places to build your startup. I don't think SF is one of them, but I'd live on the street in SF before living in Miami (again).

abbottry | 12 years ago | on: Product Managers, Stop Pissing Off The Engineers

"However, the reality is that you need engineering more than they need you."

Whatever. I like the article, it makes some good points.

It's hard to write an article explaining one side of a situation like this without 'taking sides'.

I think the the PM role/title has become such a generic position that articles like this one are really taking a stab at anyone non-engineering, not that I am upset by it.

As a startup founder, meshing technical teams and non-technical teams is extremely difficult to do. The work environments, thought processes, personalities, etc. are so different.

abbottry | 13 years ago | on: Founders: You don't own your employees

I think side projects are very important. It's funny, a lot people have a hard time distinguishing between free time and work, without realizing that for some of the best engineers out there, they are the same. Just because my laptop is open, doesn't mean I have to be working. In the evening, on the weekends, or whatever you consider your free time to be, YOU go to movies, go out for dinner, go to the gym, go skiing, etc. But, as someone who really likes to build things, the time I would be doing those things (yes, I do those as well), I'm writing code.

The key is to hire people you trust to make good decisions when it comes to side projects, and the amount of time they spend on them.

But also on the employers, have you created and maintained an environment that someone wants to work for?

One of the things I think about most often while hiring, because it is true for me is that, I would be half the developer I am without side projects. My college degree and job I had out of college taught me nothing but concepts and theory, and how to be micromanaged. I WANT to hire people that have side projects because it means they ENJOY what they do, they dont just do it because someone is paying them to.

I recently wrote about this myself: http://ryanabbott.com/side-projects-learning-experience-vs-d...

abbottry | 13 years ago | on: Side Projects: Learning experience vs. Distraction

Problem is the agreements were discussing typically have a 'non-compete' for a period of time. So you can't create anything that resembles work you were doing at your employer for typically 2 years. For this reason :)
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