beastcoast

Great short story. The premise reminds me of Simpsons treehouse of horror episode “Time and Punishment” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treehouse_of_Horror_V

(2025)

Lego used to encourage building new things by putting alternate builds on the back of the box, but intentionally not giving you the instructions. Now they do 3-in-1 for certain sets instead, which misses the point of that.

My therapist frames this as "family of origin" (FOO) vs "family of choice" (FOC).

TIL that Lombok and Java are islands in the same country…

I just did though - got lots of results about the massacre. Not sure what you’re alluding to.

I’ve been on teams that did generic names, and inevitably you end up with names like “work manager service” - whose work? Then it becomes an acronym, like WPS, and everyone ignores it anyways :)

Your site doesn’t explain your product very well. I know about GTD but I literally haven’t heard of any of the other products listed in the page. The screenshots are tiny and hard to parse on mobile. The descriptions of each feature include many paragraphs of philosophy before getting to what it actually _does_. I suggest “bottom line up front” and a clearer description of the product that better appeals to people who haven’t tried alternatives before.

Time to get a new TPM. Any TPM worth their salt should be doing everything in their power to catalog and mitigate those risks, and communicate them upwards. Lack of communication in both directions and adversarial conversations with engineers is a whole parade of red flags.

That said, Gantt charts absolutely have their place alongside Agile. Our budget and goals are set yearly so inevitably there’s going to be milestones and work back dates to meet, as well as cross-team/org dependencies to track.

The site doesn't do a good job of explaining what this is, precisely. It has several typos ("mailbox's", "corprate"). The "costco (sic) of helpdesk software" - what does that even mean? What's unique about this solution compared to other solutions on the market - why would I use this?

The "get started" button just takes to documentation about how to install it, but why would I click that without knowing what it is? The documentation is also broken, as mentioned.

Is Peppermint labs a business, or is this a community project? https://peppermint.sh - why the .sh TLD? Is this related to shell scripts? The GitHub page (https://github.com/Peppermint-Lab/peppermint) links to "buy me a coffee"

Amazon has decided the worst of all worlds: a return to office mandate (stick) and agile seating plans with no assigned seating (stick). No carrots…

Away teaming is definitely a last resort at Amazon, and has all the pitfalls mentioned here - much better to do a budgetary transfer so the host team is properly resourced to make the changes, assuming the feature doesn’t make it into the host teams operational plan.

Seems like Blind should get in on this game, since the premise of the app is that it requires a company email address. Use an LLM to extract insights from the comments and give them to prospective job hunters for a small fee, or even just run ads.

Even worse than that - Amazon spent dozens of engineer years migrating their wiki from PHP MediaWiki to Java XWiki, pretty much for that reason only, and for dubious customer benefit. There was a very epic post mortem at the end of it.

Amazon is actually better thought of as a collection of independent startups with their own software architectures, roadmaps and P&Ls. There’s commonly used infrastructure but very little is really mandated at the company level.

Any word on spot color support?

Click “raw” then it flows pretty well. Reader mode on Safari is fine.

I’m a big fan of AMZN’s approach:

- make an operational plan (OP) for the entire year, which sums up all the HC on your team

- figure out your goals for the year

- have some senior engineers estimate those goals in # of HC (usually 0.5 HC is the lowest granularity)

- add up the HC, prioritize the goals and figure out the cut line against your budget for the year

- when the new year rolls around, start execution. Launch dates are usually set by quarter, with the majority launching by Q3

- individual teams have complete leeway to use whatever project estimation techniques they want. It really doesn’t matter at all. Even waterfall is “fine”. All that matters is whether they can deliver the goals they signed up for in their OP.

- if a goal goes off the rails, report a “traffic light status” (red/yellow/green) and path to green, and engage leadership accordingly to reset expectations.

People accuse this process of being too waterfall / unagile, but it’s actually really helpful in centering the deliverables with business value, while giving teams extreme autonomy to achieve those goals. Mature businesses think in terms of quarters and bottom lines, not sprints and story points.

Video doesn’t play - is HN capable of breaking Twitter now?

1000 services, each with many APIs :)

Amazon's warehouses have incredible domain complexity which drives the complexity of the software architecture. It's also one of the oldest parts of the company with a direct lineage going back 20+ years. (for example, our inventory databases still have the same schema and are still using a RDBMS, albeit RDS Postgres instead of Oracle).

About five years ago we started rearchitecting to a centralized orchestration service which is being used to abstract this complexity from process teams. This is to avoid projects where 20+ service teams must be engaged just to launch a new solution.

Depends entirely on the org. My org actually broke SOA (thousands of services and some intense technical debt) and is now in a years long process of moving toward a centralized service orchestration model. This couldn’t have happened without PE, Sr PE and DE involvement.

Turns out Mastodon is “malware”? I can’t even read posts at work; it’s completely blocked…

I saw this happen personally. I was in the interview loop along with the hiring manager, HM was not inclined but the bar raiser and other people on the loop, myself included, were inclined but as a downlevel (L7 -> L6). Candidate is hired, I start mentoring him, he gets dev-listed (aka Focus) within two months, is pushed out by month six. I can only assume the HM had an axe to grind against this candidate, and saw a H2F opportunity.

I assume the name is a reference to Commander Keen?

Amazon is notorious for hiring MBAs in its senior most ranks.

Fresh warehouses are verrrry different than the robotic one you probably visited. I’m not surprised at all that a fresh building would have those problems.

OneNote (the older one bundled with MS office, windows) has a dock to desktop feature that keeps it always on top. Windows maximize around it. Truly an underrated feature, too bad it’s poorly supported.

One thing that is extremely useful IME is to learn how to read code, but don't worry about writing code. For example, check out the APIs of a service using its API explorer, and then read some of the code behind those APIs. Most code is very straightforward and the code that isn’t, is either a.) well documented, since SDEs also have to grok it, or b.) only understood by a few SDEs on the team, but those SDEs are willing to take the time to explain it to newcomers.

EDI Notepad was a great tool for this - unfortunately it looks like it was shut down a few years ago :( Old versions should work fine however, unless you're using a very recent standard. (We were using the 1996 X12 standard until 2015 or thereabouts)

AS2 is interesting because it includes a cryptographically signed Message Disposition Notification (MDN) - whenever there's a question if a document was delivered, just give the MDN information to the partner. This has led to some interesting troubleshooting sessions, where it turns out that the message failed somewhere in the partner's system, and the only way for them to dig it out and identify the issue was to check logs for the MDN message ID.

I've also heard that MDNs hold up in a court of law; no idea if that's been tested. But it's a great way to confirm delivery of the payload without having to worry about parsing errors.