acesubido's comments

> Buying Bitcoin isn’t so much a hedge against inflation as it is a bet that demand will continue to rise.

While I do agree with majority of your points, I think people are missing a crucial point why Bitcoin was made in the first place: the 2008 bank bailout. Buying Bitcoin isn't a bet that demand will rise, to BTC maximalists, it's a bet that a Central Bank will screw up. That spills over to mainstream hype, scams, and all the sleazy things people associate with Bitcoin.

It's not appreciated by majority of people right now. The USA, with the might of the dollar and the Feds, will keep seeing Bitcoin as a nuance, it's not surprising. The only places where a globally liquid asset like BTC is appreciated right now are countries with a weak central bank. Either the central bank is being cut off by trade sanctions and local businesses cant acquire USD so they go through BTC [0] or just the plain inability of a government to pay debt, and the currency devalues due to the mistakes of a few and ordinary people suffer [1] [2].

But right now with all the QE, that 2008 spirit lives on with that price ticker as Central Banks are bound to screw up somewhere in this economic uncharted territory.

[0] - https://asiatimes.com/2020/10/iran-to-use-bitcoin-to-fund-im...

[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47553048

[2] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crypto-currencies-africa-...

> And there are a ton of articles that talk about how microservices save you money over a monolith, but none include hard numbers.

Yeah, you can do that by collecting a ton of data related to development though. Breaking down sprints, correcting estimates, deriving cost from time per feature and salaries, comparing it over time across architectures; having to collect all these data from team members during development is way too tedious. It may hamper actual productivity just to produce a more accurate report that says "hey we saved money".

I'd bet there's a large co-relation between successful micro-service migrations and teams that don't squeeze metrics from every single action that each team member makes just to make more accurate reports.

Also, I have no data to back this up, as far as personal experience goes the reason why "hard numbers" are rare for "microservice vs. monolith savings" are because of 2 reasons:

1.) majority of software companies usually don't aim to put effort on collecting metrics for optimizing "savings"; they aim to collect metrics on growth/acquisition, churn rate, market share, customer service, etc. If a large organization wants to optimize savings they'd rather think of taxes, restructuring debt, moving server locations (cloud/baremetal) and other larger items. 2.) majority of software companies are not at that scale where it warrants a report with hard numbers.

Someone already mentioned it here, but Netflix has a lot of material on it, without the hard numbers of course. https://www.nginx.com/blog/adopting-microservices-at-netflix...

Usually development teams subconsciously quantify microservice migrations due to severe violations of DRY. Resolving DRY, opens you up to more business opportunities (both internal and external). A microservice allows you to move from just being an app, to being a platform. Customers and other teams in your company build on top of you. The move is not necessarily decided upon because it increases savings (this is also mentioned in that article from Netflix).

If 3-4 apps have a similar feature that needs building and maintaining, that feature warrants to be pulled out in it's own microservice.

> I simply can't answer what BTCs and other crypto coins are actually good for.

Everybody here is missing out why Bitcoin was made in the first place: the 2008 crash.

The benefits of a globally liquid asset (not USD) will only be appreciated if you're living from a country that has a weak Central Bank.

- Nigerians use it to import goods from China. This guy can't source USD to purchase imports for his mobile phone business, so he uses BTC [0]

- Venezuela remote workers getting paid in BTC, because their central bank clamped down on USD inflow. They also didn't want to be paid in the worthless local currency. [1]

- Remittance shops in Hongkong are using BTC to settle remittances by batch. Buy and sell to the last mile instantly, no exposure to volatility. This gives them way better FX fees and faster settlement (30mins vs. 1-3 business days). They pass the savings down to their customers as marketing spend, or they pocket the change to increase profit [2]

- Argentina Central Bank is hoarding USD due to dwindling reserves. So they imposed a $200USD/month cap on individuals transacting with USD. People are flocking to BTC for remote settlement. [3]

- Iran hit with sanctions cant use USD. So they're working on laws to use BTC for settling imports with China. They even issued BTC mining licenses for private companies. [4]

I come from a country, where if you remit more than $10K outbound you'd have to: pay big fees ($200+), suffer bad FX rates, wait for 2-3 days, do a physical appearance at the branch for and pay documents/notarial stamps, sign forms, present and print out government ID's, just to say: "This is my money, I just want to send money to my dad overseas for medical purposes".

December 2020, my mom had received USD in her dollar account. She wanted to withdraw and convert it to help build float for the family business, the local bank didn't have enough USD. They told her it was a 6-week wait, lots of people lined up. Lol.

People from first-world countries have it good.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crypto-currencies-africa-...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47553048

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crypto-currencies-remitta...

[3] https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-is-booming-in-economically-c...

[4] https://asiatimes.com/2020/10/iran-to-use-bitcoin-to-fund-im...

10-20 year horizon: Battery Technology. Manufacturing improvements, improving density and cooling requirements, recycling economy, etc. There's a huge race first-mover race that Japan has made a government-backed consortium tackling on batteries.

Most visible effect would be smartphones and laptop charging times and charging cycles.

For cars and work trucks: aside from cheaper cost, it'll also solve range anxiety and charging times.

For solar powered homes, you can opt to store cheaply in your home for night-use instead of sending excess back to the grid.

Lighter batteries on drones would have a multitude of uses from industrial to space exploration.

Longer time horizon: electric-powered flight and electric-powered freight. It will drop supply chain expenses on a macro perspective.

> Apart from saying you're a "generalist", how do you best sell yourself when you don't have a specialisation or a specific area you are focused on?

"I have a talent and process for evaluating new technologies at a systematic pace. This will allow me to produce the necessary POC that would help you to decide if a piece of new tech is the right fit for your business problem."

Usually that's the job description of an Enterprise Architect or a Solutions Architect. They usually start coding stuff for a POC, or put in initial devops tools/processes, dabble with new tech but not deep enough to be a specialist.

> Bitcoin has been in an upward trend since early September for no discernible reason (to me at least).

I think it's mainly due to purchases from institutions that believe that Bitcoin is a safe haven asset during the lockdowns. The spiel is: it's protection from currency debasement due to Central Banks everywhere printing out at low interest rates for the pandemic.

- Square spread 50MUSD worth buys @ 10K USD early October [1]

- Microstrategy spread 425M buys from 9-10K USD around August - September [2]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/08/square-buys-50-million-in-bi...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherbrookins/2020/08/14/...

I got around 300+ kills, I did that just by standing at the corner of the map and waited for them. Since they move slow, the turn rate was good enough not to be killed no matter how many spawned.

2 things for improvement:

- Demand more mechanical skill from players: Scale spawn and movement speed higher every 30 seconds, as timer nears 0. Make bullets finite. You could also implement day/night cycle + fog of war.

- Addressing repetitiveness: Shorten to 2-3 minutes. Unless I missed something, give the game an objective other than accuracy and score (find and collect X pieces to win or capture the flag, etc)

Other than that, great job!

I've always found the Sentry Gun UI in Aliens (1984) to be one of the more realistically usable ones.

For personalities try Jason Friedman. Martin Fowler's Refactoring is a nice read too.

But personally, I'd like to ask what business goal are we looking to solve? Because regardless of how murky a codebase can be, if that codebase keeps hitting a business goal, then we really can't drive a change in practices.

So, we first present business goals. Here's a few examples:

If the business goal is to give better estimates for fulfilling custom features faster, then testing would be the first in the list. Not even the release process. Tests lessens cognitive load for developers when they're asked "how long can we make this feature?". They'll have an idea that it'll probably break a bunch of services, etc. a.) If you're in leadership, ask for tests when people make a PR. b.) If you're not in leadership, look for the smallest part of the monolith. Write 1 integration test, add a CI integration, put it in a PR. Co-workers would probably like that.

If the business goal is to give better SLA's (turn around time for addressing breaking bugs, scaling better), then the release process would come first.

Regarding technical debt: One way to address technical debt is to slowly address it by folding in the effort of cleaning and refactoring inside a feature request. ex: making a new form about 2FA takes 3 days, but you can say 7 and explain that we'll setup a CI test build, then hit and address some debt regarding User Authentication along the way.

It'll introduce as a "Clean As You Go" culture in the legacy engineering team, which will pay off in the long-run instead of having a huge amount of time just dedicated to addressing technical debt.

The danger of separating "address technical debt" as a separate effort is it sometimes results into some unnecessary abstractions and over-refactoring: i.e. trying to make certain things too generic, bordering on building a framework.

But then again, if the business goal was to make a framework for a business goal (maybe something the bizdev can sell), then it can definitely be made as a separate effort. Otherwise, it'll be seen in the bizdev as someone just "playing" around with tech.

> I think scientists have made an overwhelming convincing case climate change is real and it's from an increase in co2, but I have seen no models that I can play with specifically predicting how it will affect certain regions..... I guess my point is the first step is better forecasting and modeling tools.

Crop yields per region: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aab63b

Also, this might help direct you in the right contacts for that first step: https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/impacts-climate-change-o...

> Otherwise we really don't know what we are fighting, other than higher temperatures.

Pretty important to fight higher temperatures too though, wet-bulb heatwaves can kill even under shade. "Some people" won't "suffer"; they'll actually die. https://www.pnas.org/content/114/33/8746

> they think of all the possibilities that go wrong and start from the edge cases inwards, which individually represent a small piece of functionality.

> I would rather they deliver a working chunk and just log.error when missing information is present.

Another way to look at this: they might be "afraid" of doing log.error and thus trying to overpolish; it could be a symptom of a lack in internal alignment on how to support a customer or meet customer expectations when the code hits that log.error line.

Sounds like a scoping problem.

Balsamiq if I just want to get an idea across (layout, story boarding)

Figma for higher-fidelity discussions (colors, spacing, icons, etc.)

+1 to Logitech K380. The only con I can think of are the arrow keys, but overall the key travel and typing is really good.

> So why are software companies so willing to offer more pay for a managerial role that is easy to hire for, and so unwilling to offer more pay for a technical role that is one of the hardest to hire for?

It really depends on which part of the "software world" the company is situated in and the value they put in engineering.

A lot of companies have this exaggerated structure to value the work done by the project manager and business analyst (usually spec-ing out work and abstracting customer interaction from the rest of the team). The effects of abstracting customer interaction allows them to be valued highly, which will make them reside on the top of the chain and get compensated accordingly. The rest of the team doesn’t matter that much as long as they’ve got the right qualifications to convert requirements into working code.

This stackoverflow answer will give you an idea:

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4577...

In 2029? I don't mean to sound "apocalyptic", but currently we're on track with a lot of global warming projections, 2030-2052 is the 1.5deg temp projection (https://www.c2es.org/content/ipcc-1-5-degree-c-special-repor...). So by 2029 time we might be at 1.3 or 1.4.

I don't know much about other industries, but I do know what happens when there's a long and hot summer in where I live. The water shortage was so alarming in Manila this summer, so I expect water shortages in certain parts of the world to be more exaggerated than what happened this year. Any industry that deals to contain/service water/ice during heat waves will be raking in cash.

In 10 years? I guess, not. Maybe 20 or 30? The world will have a different set of problems 10 years from now. A different set of verticals, regulations to work with. A different amount of platforms or hardware (quantum computers, more accessible VR/AR).

Take for example the current situation with agri-tech (vertical), it's pretty boring because it doesn't pay as much as putting different colored boxes in web pages for advertisers. With that vertical, you also have to take in localization for a region. Agri-tech vertical is nowhere near "tech-saturated" in other parts of the world. Random thought: it wouldn't be far-fetched to say agri-tech would pay a ton more if global warming went crazier in 10-20 years.

In 10 years, we can get better tooling, but if regional regulations/laws hamper new tech, we'll see tech-startups develop for that specific region. Things like data privacy laws in other countries would lessen usage of public clouds and more in-house data centers. Trade-wars also spawn events like Github/Google blocking developers based in other countries, etc. So you'll see more startups taking advantage of that by developing localized tooling leveraging regulations and laws.

Take for example, Alibaba. 10 years ago (~2009), you wouldn't know about that company unless you're from China. Now they're the Amazon/Google for a closed-economy of more than a billion people, more than twice the population of US. Grab, Paytm, Line are just getting started. So we'll probably saturate in 20-30 years? We might see more or less of these companies though, depending on the different set of problems/laws we'll see in 10 years.

> whereas Libra is a Plutocracy (you need to be wealthy to be one of the few)

Agreed. The same way governments require a large amount of capital to be a bank to ensure depositors of liquidity. You need to have capital to back the Libra tokens, otherwise it can get pretty scary, just like USD Tether shenanigans.

> or even possibly a Kleptocracy depending on how they actually run it and what their true motives are.

Banks, Central Banks, Governments, etc. whatever. Their motives are exactly "secret" when it comes to managing currencies. They all gear towards enriching their currency and making it more valuable. So yeah for this "oligarchy", I'd bet it's the same, Kleptocracy it is.

> That sounds amazingly dystopian. I mean, that’s literally a money built on an oligarchy. By design.

IMO, it's a small step towards a better direction. The "validator" consensus (oligarchy) is a much more transparent/inclusive solution compared to the closed financial ecosystems of Wechat/Alipay/Paytm/Grab. If Libra is an oligarchy, closed financial systems are dictatorships

This:

"There's a feature you and several other co-workers are building. The deadline is 3 days from now.

You and 'Co-worker A' are tasked in building a module of that feature. You've already written several classes and tried abstracting some repetitive parts that would allow you to hit the target deadline for the team.

However 'Co-worker A' has also worked on those same classes and wrote more methods that are too tightly coupled and doesn't read well underneath. He claims this is a better design than yours just to finish the feature and doesn't budge on changing it during code reviews.

How do handle this situation?"

I like this question since there's a wide range of answers of how people deal with conflict under pressure.

> the grunts who get assigned more menial pieces of work

Funnily enough if you automate and re-architect those menial pieces of work, you will turn that pile of boredom into a "serious growth prospect".

> Does anyone have similar or contrasting experiences?

The grass is sometimes, not always, greener where you water it. I've been in that position, most of the boring stuff for me are related to internal operations. "High profile pieces of work" usually equate to "greenfield" customer facing UI or features, while it's always great to work on new stuff, there's also serious growth into improving something that currently works.

Personal experience on preferential treatment? it worked for me where if you try your best that every boring thing you touch turns into gold, you can make a new 'market'.

Example: slowly refactor some boring internal backend services, take 30 mins to sketch a few wireframes and show it around of what it could be to fellow users/officemates. It gets enough eyeballs that it turns into something exciting that other engineers would want to work on too. Management decides if it's worth the time or not, the key to win their approval is if the refactor/re-architecture/development is small enough to solve a very painful process point (ex: accounting needs data from different databases, solving a very buggy scenario from a current product currently solved by shoehorning manual data entries in some backend, etc.).

If you don't get approval, it's okay, you've refactored something crucial and your other officemates have definitely seen your worth. Just keep repeating it.