This isn't purely a resource allocation problem. There are real people finding themselves homeless or in bad living conditions because of the explosion in rents in Dublin. Families shouldn't have to live in hotel rooms. We need to remember that the change and disruption that companies like AirBnB bring are not always good for society as a whole.
There is a supply and demand tension in Dublin over accommodation. Building more apartments, i.e. increasing supply, will help alleviate this tension. That doesn't mean we can't also tackle the problem from the other direction by reducing demand. AirBnB is demand.
It's hard to tell how much any government would want to pull on a lever that might reduce demand. Those tourists bring valuable outside revenue into the city. We need them too. There's lots to balance here. Let's not optimise just revenue.
Interruptions still happen, of course. When one does, we suggest letting the person know upfront that you’re concentrating on something, and asking them if it’s urgent. And if you’re the person doing the interrupting, try not to get offended when you get asked if your needs are urgent.
OMG yes big fan of this. Setting expectations up front for this kind of behaviour is great. Without a 'culture' for allowing people to stay focused without an immediate interruption, I have always found it hard to explain to people interrupting me why they could have used an asynchronous communication tool, like Slack/HipChat/email, for non-urgent questions.
Trying to figure out how to tackle this issue right now as we just went to an open floor-plan. Wondering if getting all of the team using https://blink1.thingm.com/ with a standard set of color code conventions (red=Do Not Disturb) would work better. The headphones trick doesn't seem to be sending any message at all.
Can't you just have a card on everyone's desk. One side is green, one side is red. If you put the red side up, it means do not disturb? I don't mean this in any way as a personal attack on you, but tech culture in general sometimes gets too focused on using technology instead of just finding a solution that works. Sometimes it's good to take a step back and ask again what the goal is.
The headphones act can be unconscious, seeking silence, whereas a card is more abstract and could have stale state. My fave is putting in earbuds, then noise-cancelling headphones, and no music. The earbuds reduce subsonic cancelling pressure.
Sometimes people are just listening to music and could be interrupted. How do we distinguish this form?
Do you like the open floor plan? The company I work for is big on having everybody in an office with a door. A closed door indicates do-not-disturb. It also helps keep the noise down. After working this way for a couple of years, I don't think I'd want to go back to an open plan or even cubes.
There are pros and cons to both. At my previous job I had an office and felt that it took a lot of extra inertia to get a technical conversation going between people as you felt like you were invading their private space in order to talk. While this barrier to entry has been removed with the open floor plan I think it can easily swing too far in the other direction if safeguards are not added. I can no longer get 30 minutes to actually concentrate on coding without getting an interruption from others on my team.
There is a subtle irony in your comment. I think it is interesting to tease out because much of the arguments on diversity come from one's own perspective.
So, if you'll indulge me, your argument is essentially 'us vs them' is a bad thing. About right? If so, I agree. We're not going to solve an exclusionary tech culture by excluding people or creating two sides to a debating war.
But what strikes me is that your comment didn't even reference Nicole Sanchez by name once. Your comment was "she" and "her" time and time again. Did you even notice yourself do it? I somehow doubt it was intentional. But I'm an optimist.
I'm happy to indulge, although HN is not the most convenient forum for long discussions.
The reason that I didn't, and don't, want to make this about Nicole Sanchez is that, unfortunately, I don't think that she is unique in holding these views, or acting on them within a mainstream company. In fact, the original comment in this thread quotes an even more explicit statement by someone else in Github (about how you can't "teach empathy to white male middle managers). There is also the matter of the "open code of conduct", subscribed to by Github among others (apparently not so open, since they refused to change it) which up and says that "we will not act on complaints of reverse racism", which rather clearly means racism against white people.
So yes, avoiding mentioning Nicole Sanchez was intentional in the sense that I am not interested in arguing ad hominem. Her name and person don't hold any particular significance for the discussion or for me personally, and I hope that you are mature enough not to retort "well, that's because she is not a white male". I am absolutely certain down to the inner core of my soul that I wouldn't care to weave her name into my comments if it was "Dwight Higginbotham".
Who cares if he didn't mention her by name? I refer to my own mother using pronouns sometimes - it's a feature of the English language. What about using pronouns in place of a proper name is problematic to you?
There is a great clourflare article [1] that has talked about this before when they first suggested LV certs.
> The seemingly good news is that globally, SHA-2 is supported by at least 98.31% of browsers. Cutting 1.69% off the encrypted Internet may not seem like a lot, but it represents over 37 million people.
There is also an interesting discussion in Security Now #538 [2] there is also a transcript of the show [3]. Skip to page 2 of 39 just where Leo says "Yeah". Android 2.2 and Windows XP SP 2 are on the list of things that don't support SHA-2. These devices exist particularly in the developing world. It sends the wrong message, to the developing world in particular, if we don't support HTTPS for them. It encourages websites in areas where it isn't 1.69% of their users but maybe 5% of their users to just not enforce TLS. TLS with a SHA-1 signed LV cert is better than no security at all.
Facebook's also has a cool server add-on to dynamically serve LV certs to those who need them is very promising. If it is in-production at Facebook it is bound to be good.
My team added something four weeks ago that might be an idea to try - we're still trailing it ourselves. It started accidentally and became a tradition on our team though so your mileage may vary.
If the pull request is small, fixes a bug or is a blocking you, then you can spend you quick-code-review-chip for the week and ask the team to look at it at their first available opportunity. (Sometimes reviewed within 15 minutes, usually an hour tops)
It allows team members to ask the rest of the team to unblock them quickly. Limiting it to one a week prevents abuse of their team mates' time and encourages all team members to plan their work out ahead as to reduce blocking.
We also wrote a quick HipChat bot that keeps track of who's spent their quick-review-chip too.
I completely agree that how can you get blocked waiting for a code review? Some concurrency is wonderful for avoiding being blocked.
In work I currently have 3 pull requests open all touching different sections of the product. The 3 PRs are all at different stages of the review process. For example, I'll be closing one first thing tomorrow and deploying it out (don't like deploying in the evenings - its bad luck). Another I just opened as I left work today, so I doubt anyone's reviewed it yet.
I'm sure Quora has a big enough codebase and not enough developers (like most companies) that they always have a list of things a mile long that they would like to do or should do, be that new features or just refactoring.
2-3 days isn't long for a review and iteration cycle in itself. I have one PR that is currently open for 5 working days at this stage. We decided that it didn't quite fit the bill on the first draft . It is blocking progress on two other tasks in our backlog but we also have 14 things on our backlog of goals for this week. The team is working around it while we finish it off or create issues for things we think have fallen outside the scope of the initial job.
One thing we've noticed alot on my team is that we try and make our pull requests for review as small as possible. We all have a rough guide of about max 500 lines. Sometimes we do go over but its a rough guideline. Smaller PRs are just easier to review for everyone involved. Reviewers don't have walls of code to break through or need to keep tons of context in their head.
Post-commit reviews (or post-merge into master or whatever you process is) is an interesting idea. I'd be curious to see what my team think of the idea tomorrow for a small sub set of our codebase.
If you don't have that much time to write tests I'd recommend integration tests. Then at least you have some tests. Treat integration tests as smoke tests. If there is smoke then you can start looking for the fire. Integration tests are always better then no tests at all. At least they tell you there is a fire even if it is vague in telling you where it is.
As someone who always writes unit tests before any production code, I don't know how I would have the time to not write tests. It drives the design and reduces time debugging by a ridiculous amount. I work with information systems though, might be different for other fields.
Since I've switched to a language with a richer type system (Scala) I've found a lot of what I used to do with unit tests can go into the type level instead (see e.g. http://spin.atomicobject.com/2014/12/09/typed-language-tdd-p... - but in Scala the techniques are a lot less verbose to apply).
I am most familiar with Javascript & Python, but I think you're onto something having fiddled with Java for 6 months or so. Some logic obviously can't be replaced with only a rich type system, but a lot can.
Might as well keep all the bug reports in the same thread.
I noticed one more thing on the job posting text: the word-breaking is a little off. Here's a image with one example: http://i.imgur.com/Zuv1Zjc.png CSS's word-wrap: break-word is probably not want you want to be using for that container.
One other thing I noticed but that isn't a simple fix is postings like this one from HubSpot[1] list two locations Cambridge MA and Dublin Ireland but the ad only shows up in Dublin. I thought I'd point it out if you're looking for some more work :D
Have you seen the Acceptable Advertising manifesto [1]? Sites like reddit and stack exchange have signed up. Essentially AdblockPlus one of the big two adblocking plugins has this manifesto where ads are not garbage, animated, annoying etc. won't be blocked.
My guess is that so many users installed adblockers because of obnoxious ads on a few websites they visit without realising that it removes the non-annoying 'acceptable ads' that support the sites they love. Hopefully something like the acceptable ads manifesto will help stem the tide of quite frankly shitty ads .
> Essentially AdblockPlus one of the big two adblocking plugins has this manifesto where ads are not garbage, animated, annoying etc. won't be blocked.
AdBlockPlus also charges a fee for whitelisting, which I oppose on principle even though I think I'd probably qualify.
I have never and will never (ever!) click on any ad. So it doesn't matter that ad-block is removing non-annoying 'acceptable ads'. I never click them, so the sites I love will never get any revenue anyway...
There is a supply and demand tension in Dublin over accommodation. Building more apartments, i.e. increasing supply, will help alleviate this tension. That doesn't mean we can't also tackle the problem from the other direction by reducing demand. AirBnB is demand.
It's hard to tell how much any government would want to pull on a lever that might reduce demand. Those tourists bring valuable outside revenue into the city. We need them too. There's lots to balance here. Let's not optimise just revenue.