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I can see:

> Integration with your test framework and programming language

any indication which languages/frameworks? I've got a fair sized typescript monorepo with a build/test cycle I want more insight into


All of them eventually! JavaScript (and friends) is up next. Which test runner do you use? Jest?


Yep - jest.


Cool, we're on it :ok-hand:


It does in Australia: https://www.amberelectric.com.au/ (disclaimer: I work there)


I can see you're hiring; I'm on the market, what's your thoughts about the workplace? Super interesting industry!


Tangentially related but in Australia we run a household utility company that operates of that same assumption: https://www.amberelectric.com.au/

Our hypothesis is that market signals combined with the right tools (friendly app and home automation) can help households shift demand into less carbon intensive periods.

So far it's working pretty well.


A few good ones that haven't been mentioned yet:

* "IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems " https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ibms-360-and-early-370-system...

* "Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35953464-broad-band

* "Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1427580.Fire_in_the_Vall...


I second Fire in the Valley - there are a lot of good Mac-era anecdotes. Hertzfeld put a lot of them at https://www.folklore.org/ as well.


The First Computers—History and Architecture edited by Rojas and Hashagen


If you haven't read it, IBM's Early Computers is great.


https://devtomanager.com/ is a good one, especially for those just making (or about to make) the transition.


Kasparov had said that all players are worse in blitz, but that Carlsen gets least worst https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/1067826806823297029


Thank you! With that nuance added, I believe it now. Kasparov generally isn't the kind of person to make sweeping statements that I know are false.


Well, at least not about chess.


Doesn't he subscribe to the conspiracy theory that popular in Russia about how the years AD 614–911 never occurred?


"The legendary former champion Garry Kasparov suggested the draw offer was a sign that Carlsen was losing his nerve, and on Twitter he proclaimed Caruana the favorite in the tiebreakers. “They’re entitled to their stupid opinions,” Carlsen said with a smile of his critics after his victory."

-- from NYT


Post author here - logging off to go to bed because it's bedtime down under. Will pop by again in the morning.

Thanks for reading and all your comments.


Those are all really good points.

I have a recollection of seeing a study once that found the best balance point of review time vs dev time but haven't found it again. I recall it being somewhere around 20-30% but now that I can't find it I'm questioning my recall.


I definitely overstated here sorry. Found the excerpt I was remembering in my copy of code complete "On a project that uses inspections for design and code, the inspections will take up about 10-15 percent of project budget and will typically reduce overall project cost".

So assuming the same payoff benefit (big if, but let's go with it) between PR style reviewing and more formal inspections, every engineer should be spending around four or five hours a week performing reviews to hit the sweet spot.


> For sure, it's important to keep an eye on the code review culture, though. It's easy for code review to degenerate into nitpicking small things like whitespace, naming, coding conventions - these should be handled by tools instead.

I agree with this, but think there needs to be some balance. My experience has been that people generally add rules over time while rarely removing them - usually to quell disagreements without regards to the benefit of standardising the answer versus the cost of more rules.


That's not really true. A better formulation is that there's no way to manage programming productivity cheaply and/or non-intrusively.

I agree that the bulk of X vs Y comparisons are emotive and subject to what Alan Kay calls the "pop culture" but that in no way demonstrates that measurement is out of reach. It's just in most contexts we don't care to do the work to measure it out of personal preference or economic reality.


Good point, productivity measurement is probably possible, but so vastly expensive enough that it's not happened yet.

I really like this post and the one about managers programming btw. Your common sense explanation to why most new managers end up coming back and reporting that they shouldn't code is exactly what I've seen as well.


There was an old Tom DeMarco article I'm a fan of: http://www.systemsguild.com/pdfs/DeMarcoNov2011.pdf

In it he has a pretty interesting insight about late projects. "If a project offered a value of 10 times its estimated cost, no one would care if the actual cost to get it done were double the estimate. On the other hand, if expected value were only 10 percent greater than expected cost, lateness would be a disaster."

I imagine as our field matures measuring productivity and hitting estimates will get more important once software has finished eating the world. The unlimited (or close to) upside dev projects will be largely behind us and we'll need to hit tighter economic targets. I'm just glad I'm working in the era where I don't need to measure it :D

Glad you like the posts. Thank you!


You are the first person I've talked to who also thinks the "eating the world" will come to a natural end! I think the natural conclusion is that in X years there will be only a fraction of the number of working programmers as today. The margins will get tighter, and the gains smaller.

It is sad in a way, but also exciting as you say to be in the golden age.


Mind you, the maintenance burden and the dependency of the users on the legacy will be ever larger. Also - as things are digitized the opportunity for more and more digitization grows.


I think that DeMarco is wrong about that already in the corporate world. The budgets and schedules that I work with are organised around knowing what is going to arrive when, crudely 10x -> 5x means that 5x is not available for the next round of projects, which means that 5 projects get canned. Any project running 2x will result in a big change of "staff responsibility" basically because no one trusts anyone involved any more.


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