thackerhacker's comments

thackerhacker | 4 years ago | on: How to manage software developers without micromanaging

When I went from contractor to permanent at my last employer the goal-setting really stressed me out as I knew I didn’t want to be held responsible for something that might change.

In the end I just decided to stop thinking about it to avoid the stress and my manager stopped asking. End of the year I filled in suitable goals based on what I had done and explained how well I’d met them.

It worked very well for me and I did the same for every year I was employed there.

thackerhacker | 6 years ago | on: Having Kids

As a father of a 6-year-old I suspect that it will get easier and easier for you from here on in. The kids will start to do so much more independently and so so many things to lift your spirits you weren't even imagining. Have you considered counselling? Just having someone to talk your thoughts through with can be very helpful. Stick in there.

thackerhacker | 9 years ago | on: Why I'm not a big fan of Scrum

He's saying that eventually when your feature surfaces as a UI the customer may not like it.

To which I have 2 responses:

1. not all features need a UI to be useful

2. this also demonstrates the infantilising nature of scrum where no developers can be trusted to think deeply, talk to stakeholders and otherwise do the right thing in a fully-rounded way but must just follow the exact instructions expressed

thackerhacker | 9 years ago | on: Why I'm not a big fan of Scrum

It's a long time since I've had to deal with "strict" Scrummers. But I do remember being utterly baffled as to the insistence on user features being ready by the end of a sprint, even for quite complex, technical components.

Why can't we make some sub-component this sprint then the UI bit the next?

I tried various ways of reframing it such that the developer of the UI be the "user" but it didn't wash.

thackerhacker | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2016)

Vidados | Senior .net Engineer | London, UK | https://www.vidados.com

We are a young startup with a small but very capable development team. We have very big plans for our activity holiday marketplace platform so need a talented, goal-focussed, pragmatic senior engineer to help us put them into practice.

We are looking for a C# developer with lots of web experience. We also use CoffeeScript and AngularJS though this is primarily a back-end role. If you are a brilliant developer without .net experience and this appeals to you please go ahead and apply!

For more information see https://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/106736/senior-softwar...

thackerhacker | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2016)

Vidados | https://www.vidados.com | London, UK | Full Time | Onsite | Front end designer / developer

Around the world, many small businesses offer amazing activity holidays in great locations. Think wine-tasting in Bordeaux, surfing in Morocco, cookery in Tuscany. Due to their activity and their personal nature, these holidays do not fit into the standard package holiday systems.

Vidados is aiming to provide the tools to help these holiday providers fly. Starting with an online marketplace at www.vidados.com but progressing to bookings through all channels, email marketing, inventory management and much more.

We already have a beautiful, functional, responsive front end but there is so much more we want to do, so we are looking for an in-house designer / CSS developer to help us do it.

You should:

- have a great eye for design and feel for usability

- understand HTML and CSS and be able to turn your concepts into reality

- either be competent with JavaScript or at least have an idea for what is possible with it

We are an angel-funded startup but we already have a year of real revenue and growing traction. We have ideas coming out of our ears and are a very friendly bunch and it's really a great place to work.

If this sounds interesting to you please contact gareth[at]vidados[dot]com.

thackerhacker | 10 years ago | on: The Making of Lemmings

I played this a lot (on Atari ST - one mouse / one joystick - the mouser definitely had an advantage).

The most amazing thing about it was how you could successfully set traps for your opponent even though they were looking at the same screen but a few inches to the left or right.

Nothing better than them working so hard on getting over some obstacle only to scroll back to the beginning and see most of their lemmings disappearing into a big hole in the ground.

thackerhacker | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2014)

Code Trip - London, UK (Remote welcome)

C# Lead Engineer on new Marketplace platform Code Trip London, UK (allows remote) http://www.codetrip.co.uk

==The story==

Over the last year we have written a new full-featured Marketplace eCommerce solution from scratch. Our client base is now increasing so we need more development firepower.

We're looking for someone to help us mature and grow the platform to cater for the varied needs of our clients while ensuring it remains unified and coherent and preventing it splintering into a million special cases.

We are a bootstrapped startup which means we need our software to help us out as much as possible. This means it needs to be automated, reliable, flexible, comprehensible. Monitoring and diagnostics are key.

==Skills & Requirements==

Above all you need to be a generalist and a self-starter and see no boundaries to the technical work needed to make things work right. You will bring the size of the core development team to 3 and between us we tackle everything from application code to investigating problems to proactive monitoring to deployments to JavaScript in the browser.

This is a C# project so you really should be very comfortable with C# and .net.

We use RavenDB. If you don't know what this is - go and read about it. Working with it is just brilliant in so many ways. Experience of Raven would be a fantastic bonus but it's so easy to use you can learn it on the job - so not essential.

You should be comfortable with JavaScript and jQuery and at least have an understanding of CSS.

==In summary, must-haves==

- C# - great communication skills - a can-do attitude - ASP.NET MVC - experience of working in eCommerce or some other fast-moving consumer-facing web app

Experience of any of the following would be helpful:

- RavenDB (or other document db) - Lucene - git - building platforms with an configurable workflows, behaviours, themes, plugins, etc - JavaScript / CoffeeScript - Azure - Payment Providers (Stripe, PayPal and others)

==This is a huge task but the rewards are equally great:==

- reusability is a goal: and nothing is more satisfying for a developer than successful reuse - our clients tend to be startups themselves, so you get to help create not one but multiple new businesses - as an early-stage employee, you can share financially in the success you help bring about - We want to build our team out with talented, self-starting developers. This is an amazing opportunity to work in a developer-led company, using great technology on a product that is getting more and more popular all the time.

Remote working: Ideally we would like someone within commuting distance of London but we welcome applications for remote working for exceptional candidates with fantastic communication skills and a successful track record of remote working.

Please contact [email protected]

thackerhacker | 13 years ago | on: Show HN: Errordite, a new approach to exception management

Yep - if you're totally organised and completely on top of your app, then there may be little need for a service like this (although I'd say there's still value in the graphs, the multiple alerting channels and all the other good stuff).

We developed Errordite as a result of working on large(ish) eCommerce websites where the wide variety of errors produced made it impossible to understand exactly the different things that could be going wrong - and I think for this kind of thing, where you are not going to always be on top of your errors, Errordite is invaluable.

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