You get an interesting collision between two expectations on licensing in a modding community for an open source game. Modding communities have historically leaned on self-penned bespoke licences tending toward the,…
It's been a long time but I'm sure I remember something along similar themes being one of the essays in the back of the SimCity 2000 manual. Which now makes me all nostalgic for the days when game manuals were something…
One thing which really resonated: "But will you do the boring but necessary browser testing to figure out if what you’re describing is always true, or just most of the time? And will you repeat that testing once new…
I spent four years at an organisation rife with this. I found two major routes for getting to work on hard problems. The first was joining initiatives that were in such utter disarray people were willing to take any…
My experience working for the 800lb gorilla incumbent was that we didn't take competition seriously at all. Even stuff competitors did that would be trivial for us to replicate got put in the "not a priority" bucket.…
They're a great example of the unintended consequences of regulation. I'm sure the original intent was not to have a huge banner where the options for managing what the site tracks were a one click "sure, whatever" or a…
I loved this feature in Windows 7, because all it did there was an exact substring match over the items in the Start menu. As a result, it was instant. The Windows 10 one where it's trying to do a Bing search, look…
I'm fascinated by how many of the things they identified as helpful to new users were later reverted. Looking at my Windows 10 desktop all of the work they did to find a solution where all users identified a program as…
There are some categories of product I'm no longer willing to buy from Amazon: power cables, replacement chargers and batteries being the biggest offenders. They're such a minefield of fakery and shortcuts that are…
Something I've noticed about the culture of "work through midnight if that's what it takes" is how much work gets thrown away. I worked at a few places with this culture (startup and established), and it seemed entirely…
I think LinkedIn suffers from people treating it as an extension of a CV or prospectus, which probably isn't an unfair assumption on their part. Which means not introspecting failures, only commenting or reacting on…
In this context, the rationale was little more than this being the last version in which "John" had done significant day-to-day programming, and therefore felt informed enough to interfere with on a daily basis. My…
I went through this with power tools. What I found was products would end up with three broad classes of negative reviews, segmented mainly by price: * Expensive tools would have gripes about price or lack of inclusion…
In my experience, architects who are valuable to their teams tend to be the ones who rarely do any "architecture" themselves; instead they work their arse off trying to smash apart every last blocker to the engineers in…
I had a 17" CRT monitor on a 286, with a Trident 8900 SVGA card driving it. Hard to credit in these days, where even using a non SSD equipped computer is painful, I used to happily wait several seconds for Program…
Remastered has it too. Steam version even has achievements for doing things that require you to get a small way through the original. Agree on not needing to play Maniac Mansion first, too. I came to the original having…
Perhaps drifting slightly OT, but this is a good example of why I'm not a fan of the current trend to make the "any questions for us?" section of interviews evaluative. I get the theory, that good people ought to ask…
With our teams, the most useful thing we found was simply self-awareness that we were bikeshedding. So you need people to be prepared to stand up and say, "hang on, is this really important or are we just bikeshedding…
You get an interesting collision between two expectations on licensing in a modding community for an open source game. Modding communities have historically leaned on self-penned bespoke licences tending toward the,…
It's been a long time but I'm sure I remember something along similar themes being one of the essays in the back of the SimCity 2000 manual. Which now makes me all nostalgic for the days when game manuals were something…
One thing which really resonated: "But will you do the boring but necessary browser testing to figure out if what you’re describing is always true, or just most of the time? And will you repeat that testing once new…
I spent four years at an organisation rife with this. I found two major routes for getting to work on hard problems. The first was joining initiatives that were in such utter disarray people were willing to take any…
My experience working for the 800lb gorilla incumbent was that we didn't take competition seriously at all. Even stuff competitors did that would be trivial for us to replicate got put in the "not a priority" bucket.…
They're a great example of the unintended consequences of regulation. I'm sure the original intent was not to have a huge banner where the options for managing what the site tracks were a one click "sure, whatever" or a…
I loved this feature in Windows 7, because all it did there was an exact substring match over the items in the Start menu. As a result, it was instant. The Windows 10 one where it's trying to do a Bing search, look…
I'm fascinated by how many of the things they identified as helpful to new users were later reverted. Looking at my Windows 10 desktop all of the work they did to find a solution where all users identified a program as…
There are some categories of product I'm no longer willing to buy from Amazon: power cables, replacement chargers and batteries being the biggest offenders. They're such a minefield of fakery and shortcuts that are…
Something I've noticed about the culture of "work through midnight if that's what it takes" is how much work gets thrown away. I worked at a few places with this culture (startup and established), and it seemed entirely…
I think LinkedIn suffers from people treating it as an extension of a CV or prospectus, which probably isn't an unfair assumption on their part. Which means not introspecting failures, only commenting or reacting on…
In this context, the rationale was little more than this being the last version in which "John" had done significant day-to-day programming, and therefore felt informed enough to interfere with on a daily basis. My…
I went through this with power tools. What I found was products would end up with three broad classes of negative reviews, segmented mainly by price: * Expensive tools would have gripes about price or lack of inclusion…
In my experience, architects who are valuable to their teams tend to be the ones who rarely do any "architecture" themselves; instead they work their arse off trying to smash apart every last blocker to the engineers in…
I had a 17" CRT monitor on a 286, with a Trident 8900 SVGA card driving it. Hard to credit in these days, where even using a non SSD equipped computer is painful, I used to happily wait several seconds for Program…
Remastered has it too. Steam version even has achievements for doing things that require you to get a small way through the original. Agree on not needing to play Maniac Mansion first, too. I came to the original having…
Perhaps drifting slightly OT, but this is a good example of why I'm not a fan of the current trend to make the "any questions for us?" section of interviews evaluative. I get the theory, that good people ought to ask…
With our teams, the most useful thing we found was simply self-awareness that we were bikeshedding. So you need people to be prepared to stand up and say, "hang on, is this really important or are we just bikeshedding…