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steverb

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I'm Steve Barbour. I first fell in love with computers when I read a 1978 article describing Alan Kayes' vision of the Dynabook. After going through a succession of the early consoles I finally got my hands on an almost real computer in 1983, a Timex Sinclair TS-1000, which had a whopping 1K of memory, and no usable software. I worked my way up from there, through C, VB (don't hate), Perl, Cold Fusion, the .NET stack (mostly C#), Javascript + JQuery, and most recently Ruby on Rails.

I'm also loving Ubuntu, if that means anything to you.

Feel free to check out my CV at http://careers.stackoverflow.com/steverb.

http://strictlydev.com/devs/steverb

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So you're saying that 20 years ago you were making what is equivalent to $94,000 today (adjusted for inflation) working in a diner.

According to this US News and World Reports site ( https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/waiter-and-waitre... ) the best paid 25% of waiters made $30,000.

I think you might be misremembering how much you made, or perhaps you weren't working in a run of the mill diner, because making 60K per year as a waiter 20 years ago puts you far on the right of that bell curve even without adjusting for inflation.

Thank you for this. As an amateur I knew the difference existed, but I was never sure how to tell them apart. And if I had ever actually thought about it I would have googled, but it's one of those things that never occurred to me until I was knee deep into a repair.

To summarize what I understood from the (too long IMO) article...

There might be something useful in the blockchain, specifically in how it seems to make a certain class of transaction easier/more reliable and there might be a good use case for NFTs in that space.

I really hate that the term crypto has come to mean 'crypto-currency' instead of cryptography in general.

Rather than regret minimization, I prefer to focus on try maximization. IE try as many new things as you can.

Obviously there are some things that you should never try. Things that you find morally objectionable. Things that have too high a risk of death or permanent disability. Things that will keep you from fulfilling your responsibilities (wife and kids will slow you down). You have to do your own maths on those, but beyond that you should try as many new things as you can manage.

You will fail. You will fail a lot. That's part of the fun.

As a 50 year old man, with four grown kids, in the middle of a divorce after 25 years of marriage, sitting at home with a leg I broke skateboarding last month I can honestly say that I have very few regrets so far. I travelled through a lot of Europe and most of the US before marriage, I've had interesting work, and I've learned how to do a lot of things just by being willing to try.

Remember, failure is always an option and is the expected outcome at least 50% of the time. If you're not failing, then you're probably not trying anything new.

Vaccination requirements were also litigated at USSC, over a century ago: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/09/08/vaccine-ma...

I am an independent software developer and like most business owners I contribute because it's required by law and failure to do so carries harsh penalties.

Are you telling me that you do not pay federal and or state income taxes? That you do not contribute to FICA? Are you under the impression that because you are not a federal employee that you are not required to pay federal income taxes?

If so, the IRS has plenty to say about it: https://www.irs.gov/privacy-disclosure/the-truth-about-frivo...

And as other others have pointed it out, you're much less likely to pass it along, get sick, be hospitalized if you have had the vaccination.

And you're comparing a very small risk for the youth (getting a vaccine) versus a very large risk for the elderly.

They're your grandparents though, so I guess that's your decision.

I mean you're correct, in that since > 80% of Americans got all their required vaccines in childhood there was no need to mandate it for adults, but it's a very oblique sort of correctness.

And yes, if everyone who was unvaccinated went out today and got the vaccine, the COVID infection rate would drop precipitously.

And yet they can have enough of a viral load to pass it along to any non-healthy people they come in contact with. Which is why this NOT a personal health issue, it's a public health issue.

As I have explained to several of my children's young friends "you are correct, COVID will probably not make you sick, but how will you feel when you find out you killed your grandmother by giving it to her".

I predict that by December of 2021 enough people will have gotten the vaccine or have had COVID that the hospitalization numbers will drop precipitously and then we can all go back to a normal life.

The OSHA requirement will hang around, but people won't be freaking out about it because it will be normal. Within two years there will be a childhood COVID vaccine that is safe and effective and it will be required for school attendance like all the other shots.

All the people freaking out about the vaccine/mask requirements will have matured out of it or will find something else to be outraged about.

If I'm wrong, I will come back and say I was wrong. :-) I may lose an internet point or two.

Am I misunderstanding the article, or is it basically just describing sprint planning?

I was set to be annoyed by the article, since it seems to me that a lot of PM practices put way more emphasis on planning to do things, versus actually doing them, but after reading it it just seemed like a slightly modified version of what most teams I have worked on do for sprint planning.

Which makes me feel like I missed something in the article. Perhaps it is geared towards PMs who don't have any experience or appreciation for "agile" methods?

Here's my beef with estimates.

I can give you a really really accurate estimate, but in order to do so we're going to have to spend a lot of time going through the request, building and verifying actual requirements, designing the solution and then validating it.

The process will require dev resources, business resources and probably people from the support team and will take a lot of time.

I'm happy to do it. It's actually my favorite part of the job. But the business invariably doesn't want to spend the time and money to do that.

They'd generally much rather start with a fairly vague description of what they need and let the devs keep throwing stuff against the wall and see what sticks.

Good and accurate estimation is not just a dev function. It requires buy in and input from the entire business stack.

Yes, I've found that a useful way around this is to go back to the non-technical user and ask them why. Why do you want to do this? Why do you want to do this in this manner?

That usually either gives the implementor enough information to wholeheartedly agree with the proposed solution, or to suggest something more appropriate.

Your labor and skills are not owed because they got lucky, they are owed because that is what you are exchanging with the owner for money.

They may tolerate (and even enjoy) your personal quirks and causes, but they are paying you to get things done that they don't have the time or skill to do themselves.

[Edit: Accidentally left ou a letter]