The last part is why you use an IDE.
Several of them will ingest prettier files to build code formatting rules
IDE support is normally a good way to work out what the wider community is using.
Python is unique in formatting forms part of the syntax, every language has linters but its far more common for orgs to tweak the default rules .
For example Java has Checkstyle. The default rules ‘sun checks’ give a line length of 80, tabs are 4 spaces and everything is placed on a new line.
Junior devs inevitably want to trash the line length (honestly on 1080p monitors, 120 makes sense,).
There is always a new line/same line discussion (everyone perfers same line but there is always one die hard new line person).
The tab width discussion always has one junior dev complain that “tabs are better”, as someone who started development on Visual Studio 6 where half the team double spaced, the other half used tabs. Those people get a lecture from me on how we can convert tabs to spaces but not the inverse so it will always be spaces if I am near.
With Checkstyle you upload the rule file as an artifact into your M2 repository. Then you can pull it down as a dependency when the checkstyle plugin runs.
I avoid any company that requires a software test before the interview.
I worked for a company that introduced them after I joined, I collected evidence all of the companies top performers wouldn’t have joined since we all had multiple offers and having to do the test would put people off applying. The scores from it didn’t correlate with interview results so it was being ignored by everyone. Still took 2 years to get rid of it.
The best place used STAR (Situation Task Action Result) based interviews. The goal was to ask questions until you got 2 stars.
I thought these were great because it was more varied and conversational but there was a comparable consistency accross interviewers.
You would inevitably get references to past work and you switch to asking a few questions about that. Since it was around a situation you would get more complete technical explanations (e.g. on that project I wrote an X and Y was really challenging because of Z).
I loved asking “Tell me about something your really proud off”. Even a nervous junior would start opening up after that question.
After an hour interview you would end up with enough information you could compare them against the company gradings (junior, senior, etc…).
This was important because it changed the attitude of the interview. It wasn’t a case of if the candidate would be a good senior dev for project X, but an assessment of the candidate. If they came out as a lead and we had a lead role, lets offer them that.
Using real world applications is changing the problem (what are you trying to solve).
My issue is teaching how you solve the problem.
As an example the indian method to teach multiplication is to draw lines equal to the first number, then perpendicular lines equal to the second and then count the points they bisect (e.g. draw 3 horizontal and 3 vertical lines and they cross 9 times).
Lastly I coach people in Agile (its a way of delivering stuff). An Agile team is brought together because a Product Owner has a problem and a vision on how to solve it.
The biggest factor in motivating a team and getting high performance is the product owners passion for their vision. You can have the most interesting problem in the world, if the product owner doesn’t care neither does the team.
I suspect the same is true of teaching
Not really.
There are multiple ways to approach and conceptualise multiplication, division, simultaneous equations, binomial distribution, probability, etc…
I have met a few maths geniuses and we teach Maths the way they think and conceptualise Maths.
In my last job I was viewed as a superstar because I could take the algorithms the data scientists produced and explain them to non data scientists.
I didn’t change the underlying maths, I tailored what to explain and examples to use based on my audience. This tended to get people really excited at what the data scientists had done.
Its the same with teaching, people need to understand and conceptualise a problem in a way that makes sense to them.
The issue is we only teach one method for approaching Maths so if you don’t get it, tough.
In primary and secondary school I always struggled with Maths. During university I spent most of my energy reverse engineering the maths lessons so I could understand them.
Years later my sister was struggling with her Maths GCSE, I spent one evening explaining how I solve each type of problem. She went from a projected D to getting an A.
I was explaining this to an ex maths teacher who started asking how I approached things. Apparently I used the Indian method for one type of problem, the asian for anouther, etc…
The idea a student was struggling with one way of solving the problem and teaching them alternative methods never occurred because it was “outside the curriculum”.
These days I quite like Maths puzzles.
This has to be THE dad joke meme format
This advice isn’t grounded in reality.
Management normally defines ways to track and judge itself, these are typically called Key Performance Indicators.
KPI’s are normally things like contract value growth, new contracts signed, profit margin, etc…
So if the project manager is meeting or exceeding their KPI’s and you walk up to their boss telling them the PM is failing as basic job functions, the boss won’t care.
The boss will only care if there is a KPI you can demonstrate the PM failing to meet.
Every person/group will have various incentives and motivations. To affect change you have to understand what they are.
Wikipedia lists all 12 subs as having Rolls Royce Pressured Water Reactors.
Your PWR reuse idea is is kind of where Rolls Royce is looking to go with Small Modular Reactors (https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx).
I suspect refurbishing decades old PWR reactors would be far more expensive than just building new ones, for example a SpaceX Merlin engine costs $1 million and a Blue Origin BE-4 costs $15 million. Nasa argued it would be ‘cheaper’ to reuse Shuttle components for the Space Launch System (SLS). Refurbishing Shuttle RS-25 engines has cost Nasa $50 million dollars per engine, restarting a production line is costing $100 million for each new RS-25 engine.
A project manager has responsibility for delivery of a project but they typically lack domain specific knowledge. As a result they can’t directly deliver something, merely ask subject matter experts for advice and facilitate a team to deliver.
Most PM’s cope with the stress of this position poorly.
This cartoon is an example of micro management (a common coping mechanisim), the manager has involved themselves in the low level decisions because that gives a sense of control. If a technical team then tell them its a bad decison the team are effectively attacking their coping mechanisim.
The solution isn’t to tell them their technical idea is terrible, when you’ve fallen down this rabbit hole you have to treat the PM as a stakeholder. They are someone you have to manage, so a common solution is to give them confidence there is a path to delivery, a way to track and understand it.
Tactic developed by Wagnar.
The create a plan with fixed waypoints for a squad to run. They plan for 5-8 squads to run the route at set intervals.
The idea is each squad exposes the Ukrainian position so the next squad knows where to attack. By sending so many squads in a short space of time the Ukrainian position is overwhelmed.
Wagner would plan to have the first 4-7 squads made up of convict units with minimal training, with a trained well equipped squad operating as a reserve. The idea being as soon as a Ukrainian position looked to be close to failure the reserve is dispatched.
Fundamentally everyone apart from the well trained reserve exists to soak up bullets and explosives. They are “meat”.
The Russian army has switched to these tactics using convict battlions but increasingly you get stories of mobilised groups being used in the same way.
SpaceX are launching 26-52 satellites at a time and have sustained 3 launches a week for most of the year.
The satellites are in a Low Earth Orbit, without constant thrust, atmospheric drag will force them to re enter earths atmosphere within a few months. This means they aren’t adding to junk in space.
Unlike Nasa, ULA, Arriannespace, RoscosMos, etc… SpaceX have always performed 2nd Stage Deorbit burns, so they aren’t adding to Space junk by launching either.
The Low Earth Orbit is to ensure low latency and the need for constant thrust means the satellites have a short life expectancy by design. That is why SpaceX fought to keep the satellites as cheap as possible (e.g. $250k)
First stage booster reuse and fairing reuse means the majority of the launch cost is the second stage ($15 million).
The whole lot is privately funded
I have always had 1 question.
In voyager we see the Borg have thousands of ships of varying sizes and control a vast area of space. Voyager is able to take down spheres and small cubes.
Yet in Wolf 359 a single cube attacks and destroys hundreds of star fleet vessels. If a single cube is able to have that level of effect why didn’t the borg commit a larger fleet?
You have the same issue in First Contact, they only commit 1 cube.
Considering how difficult the federation finds holding them back, attacking with 3-6 cubes would seemto assure victory
Similar to most navies.
Engineering’s workload won’t really change, they’ll do certain types of maintenance.
Most navies don’t have command staff on the bridge full time. There would be a watch officer who is fairly junior learning how to operate the ship so the down time is an opportunity for them to grow and learn.
Most navies seperate the captain and first officer, with the first officer involved in running the ship and the captain running the big picture.
So you would expect the first officer to spend the time checking on every department to ensure they are up to standard.
That would mean department heads would be running drills or bringing equipment down for maintenance so its ready.
The captain would likely be planning and thinking through the encounter.
For any free time senior officers have there is probably a mountain of reports (personnel, ship, intelligence, etc…) to read and keep tabs on.
Do not mix tabs and spaces.
Its impossible to automate checking that tabs were only used for indentation and spacing for precise alignment. So you then take on a burden of manually checking
You end up with the issue where someone didn’t realise and space idented or anouther person used tabs for precise alignment and people forget to check the whitespace characters in review and it ends up going inconsistent and becoming a huge pile of technical debt to fix.
Use only one, you can automate enforcement and ensure the code renders consistency.
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Years ago there was no way to share IDE settings between developers.
You ended up with some developers choosing a tab width of 2 spaces, some choosing 4 spaces and as there was no linting enforcement some people using 2-4 spaces depending on their IDE settings.
This resulted in an unreadable mess as stuff was idented to all sorts of random levels.
It doesn’t matter if you use tabs or spaces as long as only one type is consistently used within a project.
Spaces tends to win because inevitably there are times you need to use spaces and so its difficult to ensure a project only uses tabs for identation.
IDE’s support converting tabs into spaces based on tab width and code formatting will ensure correct indentation. You can now have centralised IDE settings so everyone gets the same setup.
Honestly 99% of people don’t care about formatting (they only care when consistency isn’t enforced and code is hard to read), there is always one person who wants a 60 charracter line width or only tabs or double new lined parathensis. Who then sucks up huge amounts of the team time arguing their thing is a must while they code in emacs, unlike the rest of the team using an actual ide.
I am actually arguing for a stable ABI.
The few times I have had to compile out of tree drivers for the linux kernel its usually failed because the ABI has changed.
Each time I have looked into it, I found code churn, e.g. changing an enum to a char (or the other way) or messing with the parameter order.
If I was empire of the world, the linux kernel would be built using conan.io, with device trees pulling down drivers as dependencies.
The Linux ABI Headers would move out into their own seperately managed project. Which is released and managed at its own rate. Subsystem maintainers would have to raise pull requests to change the ABI and changing a parameter from enum to char because you prefer chars wouldn’t be good enough.
Each subsystem would be its own “project” and with a logical repository structure (e.g. intel and amd gpu drivers don’t share code so why would they be in the same repo?) And built against the appropriate ABI version with each repository released at its own rate.
Unsupported drivers would then be forked into their own repositories. This simplifies depreciation since its external to the supported drivers and doesn’t need to be refactored or maintained. If distributions can build them and want to include the driver they can.
Linus job would be to maintain the core kernel, device trees and ABI projects and provide a bill of materials for a selection of linux kernel/abi/drivers version which are supported.
Lastly since every driver is a descrete buildable component, it would make it far easier for distributions to check if the driver is compatible (e.g. change a dependency version and build) with the kernel ABI they are using and provide new drivers with the build.
None of this will ever happen. C/C++ developers loath dependency management and people can ve stringly attached to mono repos for some reason.
The linux kernel is very old school in how it is run and originally a big part of the DevSecOps movement was removing a lot of manual overhead.
Moving on to something like Gitea (codeberg) would give you a better diff view and is quicker/easier than posting a patch to a mailing list.
The branching model of the kernel is something people write up on paper that looks great (much like Gitflow) but is really time consuming to manage. Moving to feature branch workflow and creating a release branches as part of the release process allows a ton of things to be automated and simplified.
Similarly file systems aren’t really device specific, so you could build system tests for them for benchmarking and standard use cases.
Setting up a CI to perform smoke testing and linting, is fairly standard.
Its really easy to setup a CI to trigger when a new branch/pr is created/updated, this means review becomes reduced to checking business logic which makes reviews really quick and easy.
Similarly moving on to a decent issue tracker, Jira’s support for Epic’s/stories/tasks/capabilities and its linking ability is a huge simplifier for long term planning.
You can do things like define OKR’s and then attach Epics to them and Stories/tasks to epics which lets you track progress to goals.
You can use issues the way the linux community currently uses mailing lists.
Combined with a Kanban board for tracking, progress of tickets. You remove a ton of pain.
Although open source issue trackers are missing the key productivity enablers of Jira, which makes these improvements hard to realise.
The issue is people, the linux kernel maintainers have been working one way for decades. Getting them to adopt new tools will be heavily resisted, same with changing how they work.
Its like everyone outside, knows a breaking the ABI definition from the sub system implementation would create a far more stable ABI which would solve a bunch of issues and allow change when needed, except no one in the kernel will entertain the idea.
This is about thew new starter cost.
When a developer joins a team, they will not be as productive as they have to learn the code, frameworks, libraries, the project purpose, the tooling, etc… Often this impacts other members of the team lowering the entire teams productivity.
When you use productivity tracking (e.g. things like capacity planning) you will see the teams performance drop and it will take time for it to exceed the previous measured performance. This is the cost of adding a new starter.
So if it takes 6 weeks for a new starter to increase overall team producitivty then planning someone on a project for 4 weeks is pointless since the team will have a higher delivery rate without the extra person. This is typically why an organsation loses its ability to migrate staff between projects.
Code formating affects the layout of the code and our brains do all sorts of tricks around pattern recognition, so if your code formatting rules are too different a someone migrating between projects has to spend time looking for code and retraining their brain.
Its an additional barrier and a one within an organisations skills to remove (by forcing a common code standard).