xborns's comments

I live near one of these projects by chance. It seemed like back door deals for land which some happened to be sold by a former Oracle exec then magically the tax district approved unanimously by < 10 council people to put a tiny city of ~11,000 people on the hook for $500 million dollars in tax financing for their infrastructure?

For extra fun today the WI Realtors Association and other groups are suing the city to stop an upcoming vote from an accepted petition that forced approving projects over tax financed projects $10 million dollars get voter approval.

https://biztimes.com/mmac-sues-city-of-port-washington-over-...

I have to disagree. It all depends on the value I receive which some are a bit better than before.

For example for Office365 Home you get 5 licenses including 1TB of OneDrive all for $99/year.

If I had to pay for just one Office Suite License(word, ppt, excel) would be around $200(low end). If I needed 5 that would be $1000. Now divide that $1000 over how many years you would probably use before wanting upgrade which for me would be 3-5. At 5 years it is average $200/year for lesser product because it doesn’t even include the value of 1TB OneDrive.

Thus 99$/year is cheaper in my mind and I am happy to pay them instead of looking for for some pirated version. It just works and I get newest version whenever it is released.

Yes, distractions are not great - but communicating with your team is important. Even if the manager is not there the team does it and they do it usually < 5 minutes. Some days I literally don't talk to my team except for that 5 minutes.

But as a leader you want to make sure the team is rowing the same direction - it doesn't matter if it takes you longer on a ticket but it also helps in a team to know what others are working on in case you end up working on it later yourself. (We discussed at standup to implement it X way because of Y factors).

Many engineers (myself included) don't like asking others for help. But guess what when someone says they are stuck - it is easy to point them to a person or direction and not waste time debugging a problem already solved in the past.

If they were so horrible and unproductive, managers (who mostly were engineers in the past would get rid of them).

Actually I somewhat disagree with that. I think they should code to some extent, but it doesn't scale in my experience. I lean to say #7 is a good point.

If the manager is required to complete the feature their "free" time is't the same as an engineer - read meetings/discussions. I manage two teams and when I first became a manager my instinct was to take tickets along with the team. Yet my other responsibilities came in play and made it harder for me to finish tickets I assigned to myself and others on the team waited.

I still code review and partake in high level design and some scripts here or there etc. but not mainline code that another engineer will depend on to be completed by xyz date.

The goal of a manager is to ensure the work pipeline and project trajectory are on path with the company needs while still taking time to learn new tech and skill-sets of the team. Of course most importantly protecting their time from distractions.

To move from manager upwards, building a great team that trusts each other and follows and ensures the team standards is crucial. If I am required for every decision or code review, then I become the bottleneck. Empowering other people and trusting their judgement was one of the harder leanings growing from manager upward.

Hmm, as a frequent flyer once a week. I have gotten a cold maybe once so far that may be related to travel within last 12 months.

All I mainly do is wash my hands before and right after flights.

As many have said if you simply rate-limit with captcha and block it complicates checking against all emails via bots etc.

This rule doesn't apply well to say the majority of b2b systems that don't have account creations public. Thus now I can phish for users and send them targeted oh reset your password here emails because I harvested them from some other hack. Remember it is not always the password that is the weak link it is the user as well.

So calling it useless is shortsighted, yeah for many basic sites it is simple to say yeah tell them what is wrong. That is why they created the picture login to go with the email to ensure you are logging in on the right site. If anything you aren't sure try forgot password with your email.

Source: Real experience building auth systems for large corps.

I don't think they are making it that much better. They are making it nice looking.

They charge a ridiculous rate? 2.75% for swiped and 3.5% for virtual terminal. That is more than double what typical rates go for swiped and cnp transactions.

So the more volume you do the more you lose to them, for what, a fancy card swiper? I get it maybe if you are a small mobile vendor at a place with no connectivity, but once you have a brick and mortar I think you are probably better off doing a regular setup since those percentages eat into your margins.

I always wonder when people say Microsoft is holding back innovation why they don't say the same at Apple. I think Apple does some great marketing and design for their products but from a developer perspective I can see the noose closing more on Apple's platform versus Windows/Android these days.

The App Store removed a dictionary app (don't remember the name) that had foul language in it, really? I like that the App Store ensures quality from an operational perspective, BUT I hate that they can filter out content of the apps that they personally don't agree (illegal items excluding). Where does the line get drawn? Now with this sandboxing for the MacOs App Store apps it seems that they are creating a gate keeper like iPhone apps. Apple tries to block competing apps on its iTunes store while if Microsoft did the same people would scream bloody murder. I hate the word fanboi but I see quite a few Apple ones that after he passed like he was some saint, he was a business man don't forget. Holy shit.

Yeah Bill Gates did questionable things to get where he was but I respect him more for not being and arrogant dick about the products he releases, and now he is GIVING most of his wealth away. Steve Jobs was quoted as saying philanthropy would be distracting, and understandably stopped the charity program when the company was on the urge of bankruptcy but never reinstated it when it was flying high. I respect Apple more now that Tim Cook is in charge for re-instating the charity program.

Did I like Steve Jobs? No he was arrogant and kind of an asshole, traits I don't admire. But I respected him for taking quality products to market and marketing it to people making them think they absolutely needed it. I say he made technology fashionable, and fashion changes every season. That was good for business.