archevel's recent activity

  1. Comment on Looking for advice on a work related issue in ~life

    archevel
    Link Parent
    Maybe... They haven't expressed this sentiment though. They are a quite nice person when they do join lunches etc. There isn't a lot of opportunities for socialising as we are remote most of the...

    Maybe this person is too conscious of not being as knowledgeable / smart as the rest of the team? Do you speak during coffee breaks? How open / friendly is this person?

    Maybe... They haven't expressed this sentiment though. They are a quite nice person when they do join lunches etc. There isn't a lot of opportunities for socialising as we are remote most of the week.

    I've had bad experiences of groups of "pro" devs low-key reminding me how junior I was compared to them.

    Sorry to hear that you've had this experience! Hopefully my team mate doesn't share the same. Was there anything you or someone else did that made it better?

    3 votes

  2. Comment on Looking for advice on a work related issue in ~life

    archevel
    Link Parent
    Good questions! I think the feedback loop on their work is too long at the moment. Well, once they actually do push out a PR they inevitably need to rework it. That's not uncommon of course; there...

    Good questions! I think the feedback loop on their work is too long at the moment.

    What is the outcome when they post a PR? I would expect the comments/reviews/forced rework there to be the place where their deficiencies are most visible, but what consequences do they see?

    Well, once they actually do push out a PR they inevitably need to rework it. That's not uncommon of course; there are often things that get comments in PRs (less when the team pairs of things). However, there is little consequence for having to rework things. It just takes longer to complete, which is fine IMO. But, in my view they do not seem to learn (similar issues crop up over and over)... which causes me to become extra cautios about their contributions.

    the fact that the most junior dev person was made the scrum master suggests that it is seen as "make work" while the dev work is the "real work".

    I suppose that might be the case... but when they were hired they claimed to already have experience of being a scrum master and expressed interest in that (which since shifted as mentioned). A good scrum master can really benefit a team by proactively removing obstacles and steering meetings in a constructive direction.

    To expand a bit on how we work, we've moved a way from pure scrum to more of a kanban approach. We've retained the IMO most important bit; retrospectives. We also formally have sprints to align our cadence with the rest of the organization. Other than that we just continually prioritize the work to be done and ensure we have enough slack to handle emergencies. Kanvan is a more light-weight process, but I actually think it is harder to do well than scrum (easy to get overwhelmed by the non-stop nature of work coming in).

    4 votes

  3. Comment on Looking for advice on a work related issue in ~life

    archevel
    Link Parent
    This is good advice, thanks! I suspect they might feel like they are under performing (which does mess with ones self confidence etc etc)... I do try to lead by example, admit when I mess up (I go...

    confirm that your expectations are the same as theirs and their manager

    This is good advice, thanks! I suspect they might feel like they are under performing (which does mess with ones self confidence etc etc)... I do try to lead by example, admit when I mess up (I go out of my way with this and tend to post about it in our public team chanels as to destigmatize failure and spread the learnings from it), ask others for help and bounce ideas around etc... I don't have an expectation that they will reach an equal level of productivity. I do expect that they contribute in SOME meaningful way to the team (e.g. socially, niche expertise and/or contributions) OR at least that they show some growth in some area... meh... maybe I just need to vent a bit!

    3 votes

  4. Comment on Looking for advice on a work related issue in ~life

    archevel
    Link Parent
    Yeah... the dynamics of the situation is a bit weird to be honest.

    Yeah... the dynamics of the situation is a bit weird to be honest.

    2 votes

  5. Looking for advice on a work related issue

    ~life Ask (advice)
    I'm currently a software developer consultant working as a lead developer in the fintech industry. My team consist of me and 6 other developers of various levels of expertice. I started apx a year...

    I'm currently a software developer consultant working as a lead developer in the fintech industry. My team consist of me and 6 other developers of various levels of expertice. I started apx a year ago in this position and the project was to take over an system built by an external company and develop and maintain it going forward. We grew the team over time, so initially there was only me, but after 3 months we'd added a couple of other developers. The most junior developer with only a few years of experience took on the scrum master role at 50%, which allowed the other of us to focus moren on dev stuff. I wouldn't have said the scrum master was a junior level developer based on them having worked for several years. That was my expectation...

    After a few months we've continued to grow the team. All in all we are now 7 developers. The person that initially had the scrum master role has since opted to focus more on the dev side. We've accomodated them and since mid january they've focused soley on dev. However, the outcome of this hasn't met my expectations. Working 50% as a dev I understand (and expected) that they wouldn't pick up the domain/system as easily as simeone soley focused on the dev role. Given that they've now had a couple of months I don't really see any improvement however! And, to be clear, it isn't really about their level of output. I'd be content if they were able to show some increased understanding of the domain and/or had increased the quality of their work somewhat. I see none of this and a tendency to "hide" their work (postponing creating PRs so it's hard to judge their progress/need of help, not asking for support, dismissing offers for help when given, non participation in discussions/problem solving etc etc).

    Speculating, but to me it seems they are not comfortable in their dev role and I seem to have failed in this instance to establish enough trust (either in me or in the team as a whole). I don't see this issue in the other team members though (even with the more junior people). Complicating things is that I am not their manager. So, it is ultimately not my responsibillity.

    Any advice in addressing the issues? Ideally the outcome would be a situation where they have started to contribute to the team in some meaningful way. Should I be more patient? Should I impose help on them, e.g. comitt to pair with them on all work? What is a good and construcrive way to approach this (preferably without being a complete ass)?

    9 votes

  6. Comment on Terraform Industries converts electricity and air into synthetic natural gas for the first time in ~enviro

    archevel
    Link Parent
    Sure, as long as they don't use fossil fuel for the hydrogen I think this could be a good thing. Using fossil fuel would negate the benefits of this whole process I imagine! This could be used as...

    Sure, as long as they don't use fossil fuel for the hydrogen I think this could be a good thing. Using fossil fuel would negate the benefits of this whole process I imagine!

    This could be used as a way to produce fuel for gas powered combustion engines. Not sure, but the energy density of NG is probably better than a battery AND less need for rare earth minerals!

    3 votes

  7. Comment on Terraform Industries converts electricity and air into synthetic natural gas for the first time in ~enviro

    archevel
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Too bad they need hydrogen gas, which (as of now) is mostly obtained from fossil fuel. They stipulate that its "green" hydrogen, but I'm a bit skeptical... I guess they could get it from...

    Too bad they need hydrogen gas, which (as of now) is mostly obtained from fossil fuel. They stipulate that its "green" hydrogen, but I'm a bit skeptical... I guess they could get it from electrolysis of water, but then they'd need more energy.

    I like the idea of producing natural gas. We already have a lot of infrastructure for it and it is easier to store/transport than many other options! Hope they manage to figure out a viable business out of it.

    Edit: Replaced hydrolysis with electrolysis. Hydrolysis is a completly different process! Was a while since I took chemistry classes.

    11 votes

  8. Comment on What's a "house rule" that has made a game more fun for you? in ~games

    archevel
    (edited )
    Link
    Alchorally/Robohole is a drinking game variant on Roborally. Our main innovation is that you drink when you shoot and when you reach one of the goal posts. This has the added benefit of evening...

    Alchorally/Robohole is a drinking game variant on Roborally. Our main innovation is that you drink when you shoot and when you reach one of the goal posts. This has the added benefit of evening out the game. Good players becomes worse as the game progresses allowing the others to catch up.

    2 votes

  9. Comment on How to center a div in ~comp

    archevel
    Link Parent
    I mostly mention center in jest, but I'm fairly sure it affect block elements it encloses: https://jsfiddle.net/#&togetherjs=9stmUyLe3I

    I mostly mention center in jest, but I'm fairly sure it affect block elements it encloses: https://jsfiddle.net/#&togetherjs=9stmUyLe3I

    1 vote

  10. Comment on How to center a div in ~comp

    archevel
    Link
    <center><div>$$$ Profit!!! Should work fine in all browsers :)
    <center><div>$$$ Profit!!!

    Should work fine in all browsers :)

    2 votes

  11. Comment on Pew Research data on how many countries people have travelled to in ~travel

    archevel
    Link Parent
    I think it's fairly easy to rack up a bunch of countries in Europe. So growing up in Sweden most people will have at least visited the neighbouring Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway and...

    I think it's fairly easy to rack up a bunch of countries in Europe. So growing up in Sweden most people will have at least visited the neighbouring Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway and Finland). Then lots of schools arrange trips to some European country usually by bus. That let's you quickly rack up another 4-6 countries without much effort. In addition, historically Sweden has taken in immigrants and asylum seekers who by necessity have had to hop through a bunch of nations to just get here.

    7 votes

  12. Comment on It took divorce to make my marriage equal – I spent twelve years fighting for an equal partnership, when what I needed was a divorce [2020] in ~life

    archevel
    Link Parent
    I remeber when I took parental leave with my first born. My partner had stayed home for ~6 months and now it was my turn while she headed back to work. It was a major eye opener experiencing the...

    After six months of being a full time stay at home Dad, I now have a much different perspective on housework, sharing, and what the burden of being the primary parent and responsible for the house is really like.

    I remeber when I took parental leave with my first born. My partner had stayed home for ~6 months and now it was my turn while she headed back to work. It was a major eye opener experiencing the day to day struggles. Before this when I came home after a long day at work it was hard to imagine that my partner's day had been challenging. She had "just stayed home". I think the shift in domestic responsibility was revealing for us both. She had a good understanding of the challenges of taking care of the home, but now realized that after a day at work you could be wrung out too. I realized that staying home with a toddler isn't all roses (wouldn't trade that time for anything, but it could be exhausting). Super grateful that we have a generous social safety system here that enabled us to each take turns at home. If we hadn't I don't think we would appreciate each other as much.

    27 votes

  13. Comment on Scientists document first-ever transmitted Alzheimer’s cases, tied to no-longer-used medical procedure in ~health

    archevel
    Link Parent
    Not at all familliar with the subject but I vaguely recall reading fairly recently about fraudulent research related to Alzheimers. It might have been related to this:...

    Not at all familliar with the subject but I vaguely recall reading fairly recently about fraudulent research related to Alzheimers. It might have been related to this:

    https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease

    If this research is based on the above it could be just downright wrong.

    2 votes

  14. Comment on Any other developers also strongly resistant to adding secondary data stores to their software? in ~comp

    archevel
    (edited )
    Link
    While there is such a thing as preferring to use the right tool for the job, I don't think it's as simple as "I need a queue so I must use kafka/redis/rabbitmq". There is also the consideration of...

    While there is such a thing as preferring to use the right tool for the job, I don't think it's as simple as "I need a queue so I must use kafka/redis/rabbitmq". There is also the consideration of your competency with various tools. Maybe you know Postgres very well. You already have backups set up for it. You know how to tune it and scale it in case you need to. In comparison, bringing on a new technology has a bunch of costs that are not obvious at first glance. Onboarding new people will be harder. You'll have a more complex setup of your dev environment. The operational cost of managing the infrastructure is higher etc etc. Some of this can of course be mitigated, but complexity will increase (arguably more than when building on an already established tool). In addition you have to consider how reliable you need your queue to be. Does it need at least/at most/exactly once delivery guarantees?

    In the end my rule of thumb is tonmot introduce new tech until it is needed. Mostly these type of things can be fairly easily isolated so swapping it out later isn't such a big issue.

    9 votes

  15. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    archevel
    Link
    I am back home in a cabin by small lake. Outside it is about minus 20-15°C. Very cozy all in all. For a while now I've been playing around with pdf generation. I became interested in it because at...

    I am back home in a cabin by small lake. Outside it is about minus 20-15°C. Very cozy all in all. For a while now I've been playing around with pdf generation. I became interested in it because at work someone cobbled together what in my eyes seems lime a monster in order to generate a fairly simple receipt as a pdf. We have a react frontend. When someone wants a receipt the frontend asks the backend for it. The backend reads out some info (some json data) and saves it for five minutes in a cache with a UUID as a key for the lookup. Then it makes a request to another service running in a different container with the key as the sole parameter. In this "pdf" service playwright is installed so as a request comes in, a chromium instance is launched (possibly an instance is reused) and pointed to the frontend domain with a special document url containing the key. So now the whole frontend app is loaded in the chromium instance, then the special document route is navigated to. The component for the document route sends a request to the backend with the key which reads the json info out of the cache and returns it. The component then renders the content based on the json data. When the document is fully loaded playwright then invokes the browsers print capability and returns the binary stream. The stream comes back to the backend which passes it back to the original requestor the user in the frontend. Phew....

    Anyway, this all has prompted me to dig into the pdf spec to understand it a bit better and essentially find a nicer way of generating the desired content. So I first found the rust crate lopdf and have managed to use it to generate a simple pdf with some non-ascii text and some images. I then started looking at rolling my own layout handler (wrapping text inside some bounds, basic table layouts etc). The wrapping of text is particularly interesting since now I need to figure out the size of text strings (which may vary depending on font) and see if it needs to be split and where best to do that. However, I just now found a few additional crates like genpdf which seem capable of handling all that and much more! So it is a bit bitter sweet. I wanted to get more proficient in rust while building a clean library for handling pdf generation. But, since there already exists one I'm probably better off just building on that one. On the plus sid, this means I can probably get something nice working fairly quickly and slap it behind some webserver.

    4 votes

  16. Comment on Steam Winter Sale 2023: Hidden gems in ~games

    archevel
    Link Parent
    If you liked Chantd of Sennaar I'd recommend Return to Obra Dinn. It has a very distinct visual style and is about solving the mystery of what happened on the ship. Very enjoyable even if quite...

    If you liked Chantd of Sennaar I'd recommend Return to Obra Dinn. It has a very distinct visual style and is about solving the mystery of what happened on the ship. Very enjoyable even if quite difficult at times (eg. if you miss some clues). Only playable once though.

    1 vote

  17. Comment on How would you organize a global Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament? in ~talk

    archevel
    Link Parent
    Finally the killer app for blockchain technology!

    Finally the killer app for blockchain technology!

  18. Comment on How would you organize a global Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament? in ~talk

    archevel
    Link Parent
    Got me thinking about the old Highlander slogan "There can be only one".

    Got me thinking about the old Highlander slogan "There can be only one".

    1 vote

  19. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    archevel
    Link
    Been tinkering with the rust crate lopdf to construct a very basics pdf file with just a png image and some non-ascii encoded text. Super fun to get just a basic page with some content on, looking...

    Been tinkering with the rust crate lopdf to construct a very basics pdf file with just a png image and some non-ascii encoded text. Super fun to get just a basic page with some content on, looking at the raw file in vim to verify the representation is as expected. I want to build on this to make a basic library for creating pdfs compact pdfs based on some structured layout/content data.

  20. Comment on "Java is fast but in practice, PHP sites run faster as PHP coders take more straightforward approach to design and don't get lost trying to implement exotic design patterns and endless abstractions" in ~comp

    archevel
    Link Parent
    Not really on topic, but IMO Erlang really has the best concurrency story of all languages. The embracing of failure as inevitable in the erlang community is alo refreshing. It puts you in the...

    Not really on topic, but IMO Erlang really has the best concurrency story of all languages. The embracing of failure as inevitable in the erlang community is alo refreshing. It puts you in the mindset of ensuring there are recovery paths for when faults occur. This makes erlang systems very resilient over all.

    5 votes