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glmeece

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SDET, in the software industry for over 20 years.

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Ask HN: What's your residential Internet speed and cost? 3 years ago

AT&T Fiber in Round Rock, TX (Austin metro area) 940 down; 939 up - per Speednet's macOS app via Ethernet directly to AT&T's supplied router.

Unfortunately, I'm paying $80.42/mo. as I'm well past all the offers they're willing to give. Still - overall pretty reliable, except when we have a power outage (not AT&T's fault) and it takes (on average) 15-20 minutes to get back online.

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Ask HN: What would happen if we prioritised all bugs over all new features? 3 years ago

A tale of two companies (true story)...

I worked for a company a full year that always prioritized new features over bug fixes, or even QA. This was a sales-driven company. For various reasons, it was a toxic environment and I left.

The next company I worked for prioritized good engineering over shipping a product. This was an engineering-oriented company. It's funding was running low ('cause - well, no product!) and I got caught up in a layoff.

Company #1 - for 5 months of that year, I was the only QA person (with 13 devs). Literally no time to automate regression - there was always the "next feature we need to close a sale to customer 'X'". I told my boss that inevitably I (or my occasional comrades) would miss something and the company would be liable. Sure enough, within 18 months of my exit, they were hit with 3 different lawsuits.

Company #2 - absolutely delightful environment, except for the non-technical CEO. Understandably, he wanted to return value to the investors, but he kept making short-term decisions about direction that, while intending to make money, ended up accelerating the cash burn. I was promoted to be a technical lead of about 8 people on a side-project that was supposed to leverage technology from a company whose name is a homophone of 1 × 10¹⁰⁰. No surprise, mega-company changed the rules and our potential product was DOA. The entire team (including me) was let go.

TL;DR - quality is engineered in, and everyone owns quality. If a genuine defect exists, determine its severity and likelihood of emergence with customers to determine priority. Don't ship/push to production any code that will cause customers to lose data or their ability to run their businesses. If you have to make a choice, choose bug fixes over new features.

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Ask HN: What software do you miss that no longer runs on modern hardware? 4 years ago

I stuck to Mojave for essentially the same reason. Then I found out you could provision another volume, install Mojave on it, and treat the Mac like a dual-boot machine. When I need to run any of my 32-bit apps (mostly games, but there are others), I change the startup disk to that volume. I switch back to run in Monterey (still deciding on Ventura).

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Tell HN: My phone just told me to check for moisture in the USB port 4 years ago

My wife was at a meeting, and a friend's kid spilled water all over the table they were sitting at (her phone was sitting on the table). Same thing - Pixel 4a indicated it wouldn't use the USB-C port until water or debris was removed. I used a Q-tip a few hours after the fact (she had cleaned it to the best of her ability), and that seemed to do the trick.

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Tutors / tips to change your English accent 4 years ago

I grew up in SoCal (NW Orange County - in between Seal Beach & Los Alamitos), but my mom's family hailed from near Texarkana, TX. I can still recall one of my second cousins asking me, in a very Southern accent: "Gregory Lee - whaay dew yew tokk so fuunny?" It was the first time it occurred to me that I had an accent. I've reconnected with her on social media and talked to her a couple of times. Her accent has flattened out, but I still get a chuckle about that exchange.

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Ask HN: Do You Use RSS? 4 years ago

Absolutely! I found this post via my RSS feed for Hacker News.

I really like the https://feeder.co/ extension, and even pay for the Pro license. There are a few minor bugs, but overall it works extremely well for me. I don't often use the account Reader feature, but the extension has a nice way to organize various feeds into categories/folders. You can stay on the free tier forever if you'd like, but to sync across multiple machines you'll need to pay.

FWIW, the Chrome extension is named 'RSS Feed Reader' if you want to search for it. For Firefox, Edge, and iOS, it's just named 'Feeder'; Android - "Feeder.co"

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Ask HN: Would you be interested in POM generator for Selenium? 4 years ago

As an SDET, I'm always looking for quicker/easier ways to get selectors that are non-brittle. The trick is to analyze either the CSS or XPath selector and optimize it so it's neither brittle nor a mile long. This is something I've learned to do by hand, but optimizing as I've indicated doesn't seem to be a part of the tools I've seen.

Also of note: Selenium was really designed for "Web 1.x" and doesn't assume the dynamic DOMs of today. Modern frameworks like Playwright are built with the understanding that the DOM is dynamic and are more robust. So - consider Playwright (or something like it - although I think it's "best of breed") vs. Selenium.

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Ask HN: Should I get chickens? 4 years ago

We kept chickens at our last house (Austin, TX area) for about 5 years. That's the first time I had the "ah-ha!" experience of "omigosh - I've been eating plastic all these years!" I almost pulled the trigger several times to get a chicken tractor, but we just kept them in a coop I made.

You'll definitely experience attrition - whether through dogs, varmints or old age. Case in point - our dog at the time (a wonderful, sweet Lab) thought he was supposed to kill them. Our youngest son caught him in the act one day and "gave him a lecture" and he never killed again. Still, we had one taken by a hawk, another one mauled (and ultimately killed) by a 'possum. They also attracted other critters like racoons, although to my knowledge, they never killed any of our chickens.

TL;DR - IMO, it's actually great for the kids, and you'll never want to go back to eating industrial chicken farm eggs again.

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Ask HN: Has remote work made you procrastinate more? 4 years ago

I began WFH in October, 2018. At first it was a bit disorienting, and I found myself struggling with anxiety about my performance. Instead of "enjoying" and 8-hour day (minus a commute), I began working 10-12 hour days so I would feel productive. Even that wasn't enough - I kept slogging through, working on weekends, etc.

Eventually, I began to understand "remote culture" and that just because I was seeing others doing stuff, asking questions, committing to repos, etc. at all hours didn't mean I was expected to be "up and working at all times".

Once I made my peace with things, I began to see what advantages WFH brought. Once I understood what I really needed to be working on, I found that the quiet of my home office made me much more productive. I bought a standing desk (and, yes, YMMV) and it's been a great way for me to focus, especially early in the day.

There are still some advantages to going into an office. Two that stand out to me are: • Early planning meetings where it's much more productive to brainstorm/whiteboard together. • Water cooler conversations. Yes, you can still connect with your co-workers remotely, but it's a lot less organic.

TL;DR - Yes, there are times I find myself justifying running personal errands or other stuff that ends up deferring (procrastination of) the things I need to accomplish for my team/employer. However, I've learned that I'll feel much better about myself and work product if I'm "diligent enough" to do just that.

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Ask HN: How do you avoid video game addiction? 4 years ago

Kudos to you in sharing your story, and congrats on your 4-month "sobriety"!

My youngest son actually had to go to a detox program for video games (in the Seattle area). It didn't entirely remove the addictive behavior patterns, but he's much more self-aware in his struggles.

One positive thing did come out during his stay there - he was officially diagnosed with ASD (which we always suspected, but he had other learning challenges that seemed more pressing). I wish we had gotten him more accomodations when he was in school - which would have been easier with the official diagnoses.

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