justanotherbody

1 - based off of my experiences both using and maintaining various infra at the University of Washington the problem is not finding talent to write software, it's the part that comes after. Maintenance, updates, et al.

A common theme is limited or no budget for updating or expanding systems such that the go from "nice" to "acceptable" to "clunky" and then worse.

Politics also becomes an issue. That aged home rolled service might have a palpable price tag to fund a major update for, but once you do discovery and scope every specialized integration made for every department and reality sets in. Whatever path is chosen is going to burn a number of parties, and using a vendor provides a baseline for functionality and a convenient scapegoat

2 - see federated auth via shibboleth, or any number of incommon tech. Or even Kerberos

This stuff exists and often works well, but brings it's own operational maintenance challenges and required specialized skill sets.

3 - only a subset of these processes were handled on paper. expectations on both the timelines and breadth of services have gone up significantly since this was all on paper

Attrs would not replace your record array. IIRC you can supply slots so it might be useful for converting raw data into your numpy types, but I suspect you'd find the overhead in function calls problematic

If you want easier than recarray and almost as fast I think you're in pandas-ville

It's interesting to me that dataclasses seemed to be a slimmed down attrs but in practice I find it replaces namedtuple not attrs

For my use the key is how easily you can add simple conversion of values to attrs. IIRC this was intentionally omitted from dataclasses. For a 1-off using a factory with a dataclass is easy but repeated uses send me back to attrs

Not OP but my experience is

- R packages are much more likely to include compilation of C libraries, which can cause grief if you're not experienced enough to install specific libs that might be newer than eg what apt provides

- library(package) imports the full package into the global namespace (from package import *) which is fine for small projects but scales poorly

Anaconda largely handles the first problem if you can constrain you package use to its ecosystem though.

For my anecdata the worst R package wasn't any worse than a python package that needed gdal, but I had to deal with these problems easily 5 times more often

They're supposed to be tuned but often aren't, as many motorcyclists can attest to

Further the muni often lacks resources to fix this in a timely manner after reporting. In some cases you see states effectively throw up their hands and say "if it doesn't detect you can just run the red"

https://www.advrider.com/f/threads/dead-red-traffic-signal-l...

dhcp. Boring, simple, and insufficient for professional work imo. Not a problem for a largely static home network

At work "the ricoh guy" manages the printers. You can access them by name (wins) or ip. I think that's a good enough solution, but it focuses all the static ip work to one small team (possibly 1 person) and to everyone else it's some characters you effectively copy paste once per laptop refresh. No networking knowledge necessary

To be clear, it's not that I think these skills lack value or practical application in lots of professional settings, it's that I think their relative position to other things has gone down

know how to change their IP address

My first job was as a sys admin, and I was explicitly told that they hired me because my eyes didn't glaze over when the interview covered their static ip network

The thing is, that was then. Now suggesting a static ip immediately begs the question of what wouldn't you use dns to solve the problem instead.

Dns doesn't solve all cases but it does now cover a significant number. The industry has changed enough that I no longer expect anyone who doesn't have some background with networking specific concerns to know this stuff

I couldn't tell you if this is a net positive, but it definitely feels less relevant to my day-to-day than being competent with whatever DSL your CI pipeline uses

Certainly my cursive is harder to read.

Growing up in US public schools cursive was mandatory in ~5th grade in my district. Then shortly after (6th grade? 7th?) it became optional and the vast majority of my peers quit writing it

I persisted because I actually preferred it, only to be actively encouraged by teachers collecting longer written assignments to write _normally_ on account of my cursive being harder to read

It didn't end up mattering - computers and printed assignments were rapidly becoming the norm. I always thought teaching cursive was a strange choice

It may be worth noting that the legibility of my penmanship is generally poor. I wonder if perhaps emphasizing legibility has similar positive effects on developing brains...

For a long while I ran testing and had zero issues.

Warning: if you're used to PPA life in Ubuntu Debian doesn't offer an equivalent that I'm aware of. EDIT sibling comments indicate home brew might solve this.

The problem with Debian is you can't usually pick "a thing" from another channel, you mostly have to fully commit. Testing is great until it isn't and anecdotally sid/unstable never fixed that for me - I just had to learn to build the occasional package from source

Ultimately I'm a lot happier having gone on that journey but it can feel very arduous the first few times apt doesn't have a recent enough version of something available

mysql, psql etc. let you issue sql from the command line

I don't do much sql in bash scripts but I do keep some wrapper scripts that let me run queries from stdin to databases in my environment

Handoff if I can find takers documenting if I can't

If that runs dry I find 1-off things to fix or improve that either I personally care about or that a customer I will miss cares about

I use origin for the limited set of exclusives (sim city, mass effect3) and consider it the poster child of what not to do

Admittedly my usage is low. However twice I have encountered installer errors regarding permission issues

It turned out origin never created the root installation folder. Manually creating it yielded a successful install. WAT?!

I won't be buying anything further requiring origin until 2019 at the earliest.

A variety of workplaces have bureaucracy in place to require additional justification beyond manager and even manager + skip level approval.

Whatever your thoughts on the suitability of a workplace like this, know that the most time/effort efficient way to get a raise can legitimately be to show up with an offer which demonstrates a higher market value than current salary to justify an emergency retention pay adjustment

See "the high cost of free parking" for a complete answer

Heavily oversimplified, back when cars first became available to the middle class city politicians had a rude awakening when street parking became congested.

Minimum parking space requirements were decided on with an overly simplistic formula focusing on providing for peak demand.

And it never really got better from there

I use it, and have a mb with touch bar.

Using solely the laptop keyboard was fine. Transitioning between the laptop keyboard and an external was not.

I ended up adding a binding for "jk" to exit editing mode. Very pleased

Exactly this. Configure two log handlers - one sending data to ES and another to disk.

Alternatively, give the ops team what they want (more information) and then generate log files that please the devs from ES query output

Try raw cookie dough. Hardly healthy, but far less volume to consume

Keep in mind there are a LOT of apps deployed on systems with SELinux with few, if any, tests

Further, the divide between ops and developers in many cases leaves this as an unsolvable problem - it's not the dev's job to do sysadmin, and ops lacks the expertise (or time) to comprehensively analyze the code base

You're right that this makes the app poorly behaved, but if that can't be addressed then... permissive mode it is

Full quote

“Instead of scratching only your own itches, why not scratch your girlfriend’s itch? How about your coworkers? And people who work at your favorite restaurant? And what about your doctor? Don’t you want him to spend his time doctoring, not worrying about apt get this and grep that?”

I'm guessing the line was born from an attempt to share Linux with his SO.

For me it was getting enough experience with the various tools and tooling to learn the right tool for each job.

I started around '08 on a Django-based stack with really only university courses and prior Python programming experience. I was very active reading about the tech stacks which helped substantially.

When building mostly static content, I relied heavily on templating. When it came time to add interactivity, jQuery was right there waiting for me. When more complex behaviors were needed, I had to figure out how to write actual javascript rather than string callbacks together. Then learning to manage dependencies and assets became necessary, ... and so on.

A mentor would have been an enormous benefit. I was very lucky in that I got a wide berth to work in, and much opportunity for greenfield work.

The Seattle area already has decided bus lanes (with non - bus right turns). Basically, at-grade transportation that interacts with traffic fails during the peak periods of travel, particularly at turning points, because of other traffic. During the off peak it would work well, but then you've failed to solve the commute problem

If you operate dedicated routes that have limited interaction with traffic you found achieve higher efficienct, but now people are being dropped off at what is functionally a bus stop and have to walk to work. This could actually work really well, except choke points like highway ramps will wreak havoc.

Building an entire extra set of lanes everywhere is prohibitively expensive, and even then is only feasible in the outlying areas

It's a very challenging problem in terms of space utilization and management, even if the technology magically worked in the best possible way. AV only solves some of it

C and Python APIs of CPython are really just difference faces of the same thing. Due to the internal use of tuples some of the Python behavior is governed by related C behavior.

For example:

Another conflict between the Technical and the Cultural: there are places in Python itself where a tuple is used when a list makes more sense. When you define a function with args, args is passed to you as a tuple, even though the position of the values isn't significant, at least as far as Python knows

This is the C behavior of tuple usage being exposed to the Python side. If one explores the C API it becomes clear that an implementation detail of C is being exposed to Python.

The Cultural Difference is about how lists and tuples are actually used: lists are used where you have a homogenous sequence of unknown length; tuples are used where you know the number of elements in advance because the position of the element is semantically significant.

Here the Culture has moved away from the Technical roots of Python and now they're at odds. On the C side tuples are not* just used when the length is known ahead of time - tuples are not always immutable on the C side.

The context is important if you really want to understand.

The explanation is alright, but would have really benefited from a brief overview of tuple use in the C API.

It's much better to just know that your packages are either global or local and no in-betweens.

The database driver and scipy are installed globally. Everything else is local to the environment.

Not hell at all, especially compared to compiling numpy/scipy every time you want to spin up a venv that uses a single feature.

Examples other than DB drivers and scipy exist. Compiling software isn't really that hard, but it's an unnecessary hurdle in many cases - especially when you've already bought into an OS that does binary distributions specifically so you don't have to compile anything.

I'd be comfortable agreeing that any pure-python package should be venv only, but not that every package should be.

> Urban infrastructure is cheaper than suburban infrastructure. We're spending more money on infrastructure today than we would if we stopped excluding people

Replacing suburban infrastructure with something that can handle urban density is absurdly expensive. The usual solution is to force the developer to pay for improvements but subterranean improvements like wastewater must be upgraded all the way downstream to the treatment area

Depending on the area this can create quite a pickle because the areas people want to live are prohibitively expensive to put large buildings on.

Meanwhile demand for those areas with cheaply upgraded infrastructure fails to draw mixed income demographics

It's really a cluster to upgrade developed areas in a way they were never planned for. The traditional approaches in the US for paying the big costs need to change or the developers behaviour will not

I think the kind of php you'll be working on us critical here. Will this be modern php, or are you being asked to switch to an old framework entrenched in the company?

If there's a genuine opportunity for growth and learning with modern skills i think you will always be able to spin that positively

Carkeek is nearly 100 blocks from downtown...

I'm pretty weak at LaTeX but if you haven't used macros and rerender-on-write I'd strongly recommend it

The latter is something i achieved with sleep_until_modified.sh and a shell loop. Pretty rudimentary but functionally equivalent to modern webdev reload-on-write behavior. HUGELY beneficial to my learning latex syntax and behavior and formatting nuances

Hard to endorse - the following quote appears twice...

In more recent years, critics contend IBM has moved into the financial engineering business, generating profits with financial strategies such as buying back its stock.

Another question - how do we differentiate between suburbs?

I grew up near Kent, WA in a suburban area as described in the article (windy non-grid roads, houses with 2 or 3 car garages, no bus service except a single commute bus at a park and ride accessible only by car or walking on the shoulder)

Now i live North of Seattle in an area with single family homes, grid streets, public facilities, busses, bike trails. You know the... Suburbs

These two places are nothing alike to live in. They need different names...

Fwiw the article only spoke of tearing down the former to me, though with an overloaded term who knows for certain