jdcskillet
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5 years ago
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on: Linux Productivity Tools (2019) [pdf]
My wife (a music teacher) was a Mac only video editing person. She now uses Open Shot almost exclusively, even though for $40 I bought her Sony Vega (she was complaining about Open Shot at the time). I think Open Shot is a good gateway to Blender or other video editing tools. She does all her stay at home videos on Open Shot now because she can do it so quickly. I would say it took about a week to get really comfortable making simple videos.
jdcskillet
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8 years ago
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on: What Makes a Great Software Engineer? [pdf]
I couldn’t agree with you more. I wish I could do more than give you an upvote, so here is an internet cheers and just know there are a lot of people who feel the same way. I also love what I do, read when I can, but at the end of the day I work hours which allow me to be with my kids and wife as much as possible. I hope to keep getting better, to become a great engineer, but I will take the slower road if it means more family time.
jdcskillet
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8 years ago
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on: Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?
Has to be the financial industry... because it is also eerily familiar.
jdcskillet
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9 years ago
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on: Setting Up .NET Core on RHEL
This a million times over. We have a very similar environment except you can add in a mainframe and a few MS SQL Servers in addition to the ridiculously expensive Oracle stuff. However, the cost of moving VERY productive .Net staff to something else would be even more expensive. So for now, we just wait and see (while running a .net framework version 2 years out of compliance).
jdcskillet
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9 years ago
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on: 45 years since its creation. The C language still very popular
I believe the company I work for is writing just under 500K lines of COBOL code per year... now... how much of that is "new" vs extending vs maintaining is a good question. It is very difficult to measure those things in our environment. If you were to ask the 60 - 75 mainframe programmers we employ, I'm sure they would answer that COBOL is very much alive, and no matter how hard you try to kill it, 40 years of system code is just not going away any time soon (depending on your definition of "dead"). Especially as we hire a good amount of "new to us" people to maintain the system.
I think individual companies should define a language as "dead" based on the number of new people needed to maintain the systems. As the number approaches less than 5%(?) of your replacement hires, have you effectively "killed" the language? At the very least it is on life support, and a decision needs to be made about its future. (A grim analogy, I know).
jdcskillet
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10 years ago
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on: Surface tablets malfunction during AFC Championship
I can confirm this. I don't know why they aren't mentioning the entirety of the broadcast in the article. My favorite is that Simms and Nantz had to think really, really hard about the name of the tablet and just gave up half way through their report by just saying "Microsoft Tablets" instead of the Surface or Surface Tablet.
jdcskillet
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10 years ago
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on: Why I quit my dream job at Ubisoft
I work in a very similar environment. I thought forcing a change would work, "they'll see, if I just work on this and show them", and technically it did. Except it then became the norm. Now if we don't deliver X number of features in tight deadlines plus all the expected but not well thought out "improvements", it is looked at like a failure by the clients. My point : setting expectations internally and externally is equally important. Don't go too far off the reservation with your ideas, but quite frankly, you're too valuable to completely stop you. Find a happy medium that works till you gain the skills you need to possibly move yourself elsewhere (internally or externally).
Not the worlds greatest advice, not the way I would want someone to start off doing, but something I am and feel I had to do to make my life more meaningful. Good luck!
jdcskillet
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10 years ago
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on: Please do not delete this commented-out version
I was just thinking the same thing... We have lines of commented out code from 1988 (yes. that is a correct date) that people flat out refuse to delete. I am so glad I got out of that mess...
jdcskillet
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10 years ago
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on: The use of JIRA is (often) a symptom of a Management problem
Ditto... it was a way for them to standardize reports from various teams veiled as a cost cutting initiative. Since they are unwilling to pay for anything (read plugins), our JIRA boards are shells of the tools we were using and paying for team by team.
jdcskillet
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10 years ago
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on: Microsoft Open Sources Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit
I am now left to wonder if IBM Watson will soon follow suit. IBM is really a very well constructed consultancy company.. I wonder if they plan to keep their IP for Machine Learning proprietary or if they see an opportunity to get more people using their technology (it has the better marketing name right now) and sell their services to a larger audience. Time will tell, but it is a very interesting time indeed.
jdcskillet
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10 years ago
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on: Flux is the new WndProc
This is just a high level thought : Will we eventually converge to the point where Flux will also provide an abstraction to the GPU to help speed up rendering? I know there are some tools in place now, but can we get to the point where the designer has no idea they are utilizing an underlying native GPU vs how the browser chooses to do the rendering?
jdcskillet
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10 years ago
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on: Compose Is Joining IBM
I just migrated from working directly on the IBM Mainframe in COBOL (gasp) to my true love of .Net and JS (yep, both of them) within the same company. I have been on a number of greenfield projects with IBM and quite frankly, my opinion of them differs based on the area of the company you are dealing with. For instance, I love dealing with the CI guys at Urbancode Deploy, whereas getting similar information from their Rational counterparts (Rational Team Concert) was like pulling teeth. Pretty much every experience I had with the Rational teams was terrible because they would hide information to sell more consulting services or additional products (even though they guaranteed the feature was available on our existing license). I despise the documentation sifting and information gathering required to use IBM products (developer works is a terrible site). However, I have much respect for the engineering that goes into those products and it is a joy when you get to work directly with their engineers to solve a problem. Good luck compose, I hope you get to be autonomous like Urbancode and not stuck in the sand of the Rational teams.
jdcskillet
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10 years ago
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on: A Random Walk Through Ada (2014)
Oh Ada. In college (six years ago), it was the language solely responsible for dragging down my grade right before graduation. I very much disliked the prof who taught it, which probably clouded my perception of the language, but I found it a lot harder to solve problems in the extreme type safety of ADA than C++ (our "core language"). Not sure why, just vividly remember being dead set against never seeing it again :)
I do remember the professor going on and on about why the safety was necessary for his beloved Military and Avionics software (he worked at an avionics software company in his "off" hours). It makes a lot more sense now, and oddly enough with my interest peaking in Rust and Go, it might be worth looking at again... or maybe I'll just stick with languages that don't invoke bad memories.
jdcskillet
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11 years ago
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on: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years
The scale is achieved through the local communities. I understand we would still need large scale farming ventures, but local communities can use aquaponics to be more self-sufficient. A large "regular" ag business can support many smaller satellite aquaponic setups. Much like a distributed computing system achieves scale.
