birdstheword5's comments

birdstheword5 | 2 years ago | on: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

> Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is crud, and that explains almost everything

> In professional settings, approximately all of my time goes into solving problems introduced by people that are just indescribably bad

Translation: everyone except me is stupid.

Why do we let people say things like this without calling them out on it?

birdstheword5 | 2 years ago | on: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

You're right. But I think it can really vary based on which community you ask in.

I think most people dislike how hostile the main stack overflow site is to beginners, who despite being the ones who need the most help, are the most likely to get their question closed/ downvoted. It's unfortunately necessary to maintain the high quality of the site.

birdstheword5 | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: Using Vector tiles vs. raster tiles for web mapping?

I'm glad its a tossup for other people! I've been debating it with myself for a long time.

I agree very much with your "cartographic control" point.

I should have been more specific when talking about performance. For a raster tile, if it is performing badly on the server, that is solvable because you can pre-render beforehand. For vector tiles (which I guess most of the time are coming from a MBTiles file which is a cache) if they are performing badly in the user's browser its not really solvable because you can't do this pre-render step. The only solution would be to find a way to simplify the data more to lessen the load on the user's browser. I don't know if you have a similar experience?

birdstheword5 | 3 years ago | on: How Python virtual environments work

It sounds mean to say it, but it's 100% true. I moved away from using python wherever I can. I've had colleagues struggle for days to install well used packages like pandas and numpy in conda.

birdstheword5 | 3 years ago | on: Natural language is the lazy user interface

> Often I think new software is designed around looking impressive and fast to upper level management

Bingo, and it also impresses the upper level management at customer companies - i.e. the ones who make the decision to buy the software, not having to use it themselves

birdstheword5 | 3 years ago | on: You might not need an ORM

No, usually linq is used in combination with an OEM (e.g. entity Framework) to avoid writing raw sql. From the parent comment, I thought he meant something more like sqlx for rust

birdstheword5 | 3 years ago | on: You might not need an ORM

Hello! I've been looking for a library like this for C# and another for Python - I'm not sure which terms to Google to find them!

birdstheword5 | 3 years ago | on: Self Hosting a Google Maps Alternative with OpenStreetMap

Raster tiles are smaller in terms of amount data sent over the wire and work better for users with less powerful computers/ mobile

Really if you aren't interacting with the data on the client I would stick with good old rasters - it's harder to get set up with them but they perform way better

birdstheword5 | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?

My concerns about serverless aren't to do with them not scaling - quite the opposite! I'm worried that we'll sacrifice developer experience in the name of "scaleability" of Functions without any real benefit.

Our current hosting costs for the projects I work on are about two orders of magnitude below your "worth it" cutoff :)

The integration stuff you mention is indeed very interesting, thank you for mentioning. I can think of a couple projects that would would really benefit from Functions in this way. Our architect is mainly concerned with scalability here, however.

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