Posts by Herring` 298 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Mar 2018
Back in the day, a few management types figured out that if they asked me nicely, I could answer questions like "How many $things of $type happened in $timewindow in $areacode". We only had the prod DB - no reporting replica.
Once or twice a month, I would see one of the DBAs stand up and walk over to my desk to ask what the fuck I was running cos it was maxing out the CPU. Happy days.
It also promised a new age of connectivity will accompany the electric motorcycles
Please someone. Make it stop. If I buy I thing, I want to own it. I want to be able to bugger about with it. I am not interested in "exclusive subscription features for your convenience". I don't want my use of my thing reported to "enhance user experience".
Yet another stupid lawsuit from Musk who seems to believe that all should bow down before his greatness.
“One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he’s a genius.”― Iain M. Banks
might think that the problem crypto represents is that it brings the capability of money laundering and tax evasion into the hands of just anyone. Whereas previously it was the preserve of rich people and large corporations. Private Eye has a nice map of property in the UK owned by offshore companies, but setting that up must've cost the actual owners a bunch in lawyer's fees.
I think about when I am driving in traffic. I am doing stuff like establishing eye-contact with pedestrians, cyclists, other drivers. Assessing whether they know my intentions and I know theirs. Then there's classic scenarios like a football rolls across the road from between parked cars - probability that a kid chasing it might run out. Someone is in that parked car - are they going to open the door. If you've spent time on the road on a bicycle or motorbike and you're still alive, you've probably got used to assessing stuff like that.
Motorways are probably a better option for automation. But there's still stuff there - like if you've got cars both overtaking and undertaking a middle-lane dope, they might follow the manoeuvre with attempting to both occupy the same space in the middle-lane at the same time.
It's a little more complicated than that. This article is interesting.
Precis: Privatising everything produced the expected results
The people who need a solution are presented with a choice:
Go to IT to get something developed properly. Spend the next n months on estimates, plans, budgets. Watch as project managers, business analysts, architects (business, data, application, technical and enterpise) are brought on board. Proposals are taken to steering committees, potential solutions are evaluated for whether they are "strategic". If you're lucky, some external consultants will be brought in.
Or just knock something up in Excel. Something that will grow and mutate and eventually - 4 years after the original creator has left - will be recognised as "mission critical".
I've mostly worked in the private sector where these fur cups rarely get made public. But they are out there.
then not making the office so horrible might have been a start. Vast open-plan spaces, hot-desking - no way for a team to sit and collaborate together without annoying the hell out of everyone else or booking a meeting room (good luck with that). Surrounded by people on different calls or having their own at-desk discussions about unrelated topics. I go into the office when I know I'm going to be able to buttonhole people I need a chat with (without booking a meeting) and that's useful. As a space for getting work done, it's horrible
How does it happen? Many ways. For instance, I have worked places which are very project-centric and PMs get their bonus depending upon time taken and money spent. So if you have Project A to do something to system Y and project B to create system X, neither PM wants to pay for the work to integrate the two. So, to plug the gap, users run a report in A, bugger about with it in Excel and then upload the CSV to system B. PMs get their bonuses but the result is terrible.
More generally, spreadsheets get used to plug holes in functionality because they can be done quickly and with any cost hidden - unlike getting involved in the whole IT project process.
If it had been up to me, I would've asked the people promoting it to explain exactly what "Brexit" meant and how it would be accomplished before the referendum. I mean, whenever I have to present options to management, I have rarely been able to get away with "Dunno but it'll be great" as one of the options.
They are screwing over the blind and partially sighted with this. Not that they care. However, not caring may have legal ramifications.
I'm not an expert in radio comms, but why do they want a solution based upon mobile phone tech? How long do mobile networks keep going in a power outage? It's not hard to enviage some sort of emergency which takes out power and/or masts. Plus, if you have an emergency in West Wales, are you on your own?
If you nurture in-house talent then they might get ideas above their station. If you get rid of 1,000 civil servants and replace them with Capita people who know nothing and are 4x the cost, you can pretend you've saved money at the same time is putting fear into the minds of other civil servants
Efficiency of code is certainly a factor, but it's driven by higher expectations. The libraries and the languages enable "productivity" to be higher. Sure it's less efficient. I mean, look at microservices - we spending a ton of cycles on turning data into text, sending it over HTTP, and then parsing the text the other end. Compare with an in-process COM component back in the day where calling a method was basically the same as a (C++) virtual function call. But containers etc. are much easier to create and manage - and no DLL Hell.
A lot of modern systems could use a lot less hardware, but they would cost more and take longer to develop.
To a certain extent, it was.
They had the National Enterprise Board which played a part in getting the Cambridge companies like Sinclair and Acorn off the ground. Acorn got the massive boost from the BBC involvement which allowed them and people like the Legend Sophie Wilson to step up and produce the Acorn Risc Machine processor which became ARM and here we are.
I can't see it happening again as the country has long been run by arts graduates and/or people who work in The City - to whom the idea of investing in something that might pay off in 10 years' time is an anathema.
if you're designing an IT system that must support experts in any profession which is outside the development team's personal expertise, then YOU MUST INCLUDE AT LEAST ONE MEMBER OF THAT PROFESSION IN THE DESIGN TEAM
I'm with you on this. The best projects I have worked on, we have had the time of expert users to work with the dev team. By "best" I mean delivering something good and useful on time.
Other projects, well all the experts are far too busy/overloaded to spend time with IT. The budget constraints happen and features are cut and an MVP has been delivered - with "viable" being defined by the PMO. And then you end up with the holes being plugged by shadow IT/ "Dave's Spreadsheet".
I have worked in/led teams where we have had massive productivity and hit those deadlines. But that was over 20 years ago and working on a very profitable product with excellent and engaged expert users and management who were too scared to mess with it.
Now, well at least 95% of work on a typical project is meetings between people who aren't actually producing anything. And that includes me - I just do words and diagrams that nobody pays attention to.
I want to go back to developing commercial software. I was happy then. But my CV doesn't show any dev work (except PoCs) in the last couple of decades.
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