troysandal's comments

troysandal | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: As a developer, what are your biggest pain points?

End to End Testing Flakiness - at my last company we spent a large amount of engineering time automating end-to-end tests. In the end we found them flaky, maintenance heavy and couldn’t get to 100% browser coverage. E2E tests are of huge value but their costs are still too high.

troysandal | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?

I actively do, at least 1 person (I don't know) each year who's in my career track as well as the people who work for me. The way I get people to mentor is by telling colleagues that if they know anyone who might benefit from talking to me send them over and we'll see if we hit it off. That gets me about 1-2 people a year, some whom still seek me out years later.

I didn't start mentoring anyone until 15 plus years into my career, or so I had thought. After I was first asked to mentor I read up on what it is and realized I'd mentored many people in software since the moment I'd left college. Not all mentoring looks the same but the thing it always has in common is listening, asking questions, listening more then hopefully getting the mentee to listen to themselves. The best book I ever read on mentoring was "Inner Game of Tennis" despite it being intended to teach coaching. I highly recommend it.

I think you can mentor people outside your discipline if you know what questions to ask. It's not always about having a superior technical insight, if it is then it's probably coaching. FWIW I see mentoring as advising someone through personal growth area and coaching as directly training someone on skills improvement or change, the former initiated by the mentee, the later the mentor.

Everyone here is smart and has something to offer. Seek out mentors yourself and in turn mentor others when the chance arises, you'll grow tremendously.

Great question, thanks for asking.

troysandal | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: what features do you want in a geocoder?

Sorry for the confusion, let's see if I can clear this up. We'd like to see these locales translated to the same names that the native map program on a device would show (which is what I rely on now). For example, on my iPhone, when I switch to French and I'm in the Mission District of SF it says "Etats-Unis" / "Quartier de la Mission". Actually, that's a bad/rare example, a better one is a multi-lingual country like Switzerland where you can have 3 languages at once for some cities/neighborhoods. I want to pass the locale of the speaker to the API and get back what they'd expect in their local dialect.

Make sense?

troysandal | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: what features do you want in a geocoder?

Awesome. We need bulk requests (one or more lat/lng), and reverse geocoding with locale components (state, county, city, neighborhood) Extending tzaman's localization request, a globally unique identifier, e.g. ISO code, for every piece of locale when reverse geocoding is critical for us. When storing reverse geocoded points in our own database I want to key off the unique values but lookup the locale specific versions later on client devices (ideally via REST or an offline API if possible).

/geocode?latlng=47.639548,-122.356957&language=en,fr

{ "ISO":{ Country:"US", Administrative:"WA", SubAdministrative:"King", Locality:"Seattle", SubLocality:"Queen Anne" }, "fr":{ Country:"Etas-Unis", Administrative:"Washington", SubAdministrative:"Roi County", Locality:"Seattle", SubLocality:"Renne Anne" } "en":{ Country:"US", Administrative:"Washington", SubAdministrative:"King County", Locality:"Seattle", SubLocality:"Queen Anne" } }

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