jrobbins

Memories...

I made a cooperative team incremental game about software testing that has silly trivia questions. It won't waste your team's whole day because the story plays out in exactly 20 minutes.

https://greens-io.appspot.com

Even if California adds housing, how can it possibly add enough water, roads, schools, parks, etc? It's just trading one crisis for another.

The coastal regions are already over-crowded at current prices. The overall cost is just too high. It's wasteful compared to building in other regions. And, it's unnecessary because so much of modern work can be done remotely.

Instead of allowing 80% of housing at market rate to subsidize 20% low-income housing in an unsustainable growth pattern, California should mandate that large employers offer at least 20% of their office employees the opportunity to work remotely. Creating an escape valve for local demand would slow the growth of housing costs without adding new infrastructure requirements.

I wanted players to think about choosing the right option rather than just submitting every choice like trial-and-error. If you get it wrong, you can try again, it just burns a little of your time.

https://www.tabletopunglued.com/

This is a collection of original papercraft designs for helping people have fun playing D&D. It's a way for me to get some hobby time away from the screen and keyboard. All the designs are available as pay-what-you-want, most people pay zero, and anything that people do pay goes to me supporting other creators on DMsGuild.com.

Unlike most papercraft, these designs are meant to be pretty sturdy and useful rather than just decorative. Most are about as strong as an empty soda can, so you can handle them and toss them around or even stack a couple books on top without crushing them. And, the source diagrams are included, so you can customize the art.

If you check out the "About" page you will see that the purpose is to explore inclusive accessories for D&D that people can enjoy regardless of their disposable income, and with less environmental impact than typical plastic, wood, or leather accessories.

Also, each product page ends with a haiku.

After reading on Hacker News about Universal Paperclips and seeing someone post that their whole team wasted a day playing it, I thought I would try to create an idle game that was devops themed, collaborative, and time-limited.

Like other idle games, you basically try to make the big number get really, really big. But, unlike other idle games that I have found, mine mixes in silly devrel trivia questions. Set aside exactly 20 minutes to get your team working together to accumulate an absurdly huge number of successful unit test runs in a truly test-centric world:

https://greens-io.appspot.com

You'd be setting off a real firestorm

Nah, lot of Trump supporters have moved on already. Indict away.

TIL: I am 5 years ahead.

I see a lot of possible root causes being mentioned, e.g., blind bidding, zoning, foreign buyers, corporate buyers, and the vested interests of existing home owners.

Here's two more: income inequality, and the construction skills crisis.

Income inequality: You might think "prices are crazy, no one can afford this", but the fact is that some people are affording it, even repeatedly. Depending on your family and circle of friends, you may know someone who owns 2, 3 or 4 homes or one over-sized home. It is not uncommon, just not usually discussed openly. They buy or retain homes and then rent them rather than selling. Why horde houses? Some people just like to see a tangible asset. Most upper middle class people have most of their assets in stocks. But with stocks up significantly in 2020 and 2021, a lot of people are ready to diversify into real estate. And those who own homes can watch them appreciate even if the home sits empty.

Construction skills crisis: At least in the US, there just aren't enough construction workers to fill construction jobs. You could open up zoning rules, but that won't make housing starts instantly increase, because there are not enough workers. A generation of people has been taught that knowledge worker jobs are the best. I think that is a largely correct. Even with construction salaries up, I think that it is tough to have a long career doing physical labor in the trades.

Yeah, it's tempting to take a small bit of credit for the existence of the new generation of project hosting services. Google Code showed that there was room for new players, so it did open the door, but you have to give credit to GitHub for the concept of social coding. I never understood it and it goes against my personal OSS DNA, so I would never have made that leap.

Another way to (very charitably) count Google Code's success is to look at the role it played in Google. One of the largest users of Google Code has always been Google itself. In 2005, Google had released like 8 project tarballs on SF, kind of tentatively. Having Google Code as a home field endorsement allowed that to grow into the thousands. Now, OSS releases seem pretty routine for Google and feel more integrated with the community than ever.

TIP: If you enable "Developer options" in the settings app (by "About" tapping 7 times), there are options to eliminate, speed up, or slow down the transition animations. I set mine at 0.5x the normal duration.

The settings app requires some sort of double swipe down that's just plain awkward.

TIP: Pull down with two fingers to go straight to the quick settings shade.

I see it as basically Malthusian: people will keep driving until it is so unpleasant that they don't want to do it any more. The tipping point for most people is around 45 minutes. Here's a book with a footnote that mentions that the same 45-minute rule applies worldwide and though out history: http://books.google.com/books?id=uuqIA-ce1CoC&pg=PA408&lpg=P...

The thing that I found interesting is that this is much much easier than 2048. This algorithm does very well:

  while not game over:
    while these moves do anything:
      mash a, z, and x as fast as you can
    tap d

I have that issue, it's my favorite!

If you're going to be a pro athlete, you need to love to practice, drill, and train, not just play. If you're going to be a race car driver, you have to love to hear the sound of the engine and feel the vibration as you go down the road, not just the thrill of winning. If you're going to be a musician, you need to love the feel of the instrument in your hand. If you're going to be a writer, you need to love words, grammar, typing, and editing. If you're going to be a painter, you need to love working with paint, not just imagining great subjects.

If you're going to dedicate your life to programming, you have to love code: syntax, text editing, refactoring, commenting, testing, debugging, tuning. All of that low-level stuff. The problem-solving and learning-new-technology fun parts are just the icing on the cake.

John, it's great that you want to learn more about those topics. But, don't misunderstand. Earning a PhD is like 10% learning about the topic, and 90% learning the process of research and the business of research. Based on your blog post, it's going to take a while until that other 90% really hits you. Reading papers is easy compared to writing them.

Also, PhD studies and the academic life at a research institution are emotionally stressful and extremely time consuming. You have to consider the negative impact of that on your family, regardless of how supportive they are.

Trends come and go. Even the strongest software engineering trends seem to last about 10 years.

More than 10 years ago, I worked on a tool called ArgoUML. Years later, check out what I was surprised to find on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=argouml

Tons of fairly recent videos of how to use ArgoUML. Mostly in Spanish, Portuguese, or Vietnamese.

My CS PhD took 6 years. I liked it OK, despite the hardships and uncertainty. My main response to the article is that those people who are right for a PhD program will know it: they don't need to be told or warned or advised for or against. Even though academics are a rational pursuit, the decision to dedicate yourself so much to anything has got to be from the heart, otherwise just don't, and you probably wouldn't even be wondering in the first place.

My other reaction to the article is that it is just describing all the aspects almost any really difficult accomplishment: it takes too long, no one is there to help you on the hardest parts, you have to give up significant other things in life (including a real part of your time, relationships, and health), people may try to block you, you run the risk of it all being for nothing, and in the end no one is going to care about it as much as you had to care about it. Replace "PhD" with climbing a mountain, building a successful business, raising a child, writing a novel, etc. and it all still applies.

Earning a PhD is not supposed to be your last, biggest accomplishment in life any more than getting through high school is the biggest accomplishment for most people. Earning a PhD is your first official dent in the universe. It is practice for a life of taking on more hard and uncertain challenges. A lot of people do that, with or without the PhD as practice.

I would gladly pay more tax, it just has to be fair (meaning that people earning more then me also pay more).

The problem with most template sets is that they make the user still do a ton of work. Not just understanding the details of their own project, but a ton of writing work. And, to be honest, a lot of tech people don't like to write or always write well. Also, some templates just replace one big blank page with lots of smaller blanks, which can still stump you when it comes time to write.

A few years ago I attempted to solve the problem by creating ReadySET Pro. It's a different kind of template set that is faster/more agile to use. People who have used it say that it is like taking a multiple-choice test instead of an essay exam, so no stumpers. That's because I spent a year writing high-quality project document text that you can reuse and tweak to fit your project. It's almost feels like cheating. You can get four free templates at readysetpro.com.

This article is 1000% true! California is a terrible, horrible, no good state and it is getting worse with the passing of every perfect day. Everybody run for Texas (of all God forsaken places) and nobody new come in please. It's waaaay too expensive here, it would melt your wallets to even think about it. Traffic! Earthquakes! Smog! Ooooh, and the liberals with their ideas and whatnot, tisk, tisk, tisk.

(Meanwhile, I'll keep enjoying my wonderful life here in CA.)

You want tech, diversity, ideas, women? Come to LA! The startup culture in Southern California is very strong now.