I use the phrase "drive-by review" frequently too. As a senior engineer, I worry about doing drive-bys myself. Sometimes my gut tells me something is not quite right about the project, but I just don't know enough about the problem domain or technology/architecture choices to advise definitively.
In this case, I try to question the project owners on their assumptions and whether they have validated them. Usually this line of questioning reveals whether they have "done their homework".
This article resonates with me a lot, but as a senior engineer I would not share it in a big team setting. Even though it's correct, it's too cynical for big team morale. I think it would be worth sharing with peers or managers when discussing whether and how to intervene on a bad project.
Yes, I think this is what seems to be missed by everything I've read about Gehry in the mainstream. As I said in another post, I worked in the Stata Center at MIT for five years. It was indeed a fun space to walk around in and explore, but it failed to satisfy as a workspace.
I worked in the Stata Center for the first five years and it was just a very poor office building to work in. Even setting aside the leaks and other construction defects, individual working spaces, traffic paths, and communal spaces were not well-separated leading to a lot of distraction. There was also various useless corners due to sharp angles.
I much preferred working in the previous building, CS and AI lab building, NE43. It looked like a punch card from the outside, but had a very nice design with small offices (with closing doors) ringing a common space. The primary downside is the square footage per worker was decadent by today's standard.
Oh wait, we were talking about Frank Gehry, right? His museums looks cool but he should never have been allowed to design an office building.
Two random anecdotes: when the concept drawing were first shown to the graduate students, someone asked what the swooping walkways above the main corridor were for. The answer they gave was "lightsaber battles".
When we first moved in, there was a seminar room that made some people physically nauseous due to its sloping walls. For a time, they were trying to use masking tape on the walls to make the effect less pronounced. Some of the grad students tried to name it the "vomitorium", but the name never stuck. Fortunately,, once the room had a full compliment of chairs, furniture, and a projector screen the effect seemed to be much less pronounced.
This is yet another very good critique, but it's long past time that we stop paying attention to Uncle Bob.
Not only are his ideas about how to write software patently bad, but he is willfully obtuse when asked to provide nuance or discuss trade-offs. John Ousterhout's dialog with him, published as "A Philosophy of Software Design vs Clean Code" gave him every opportunity to think critically about his own suggestions and he just doubles down.
Thanks for taking one for the team. I had zero expectations for Clean Code second edition after reading Uncle Bob's dialogs with John Ousterhout. I thought Ousterhout bent over backwards to give Uncle Bob the benefit of the doubt and discuss the tradeoffs and Bob just dug in on his bizarre dogmatic approaches.
- Archive: Anything you have a feeling might be useful
- Delete: Anything you’re pretty sure would be useless in the future
This has always been my strategy, though some might say I'm closer to "archive almost everything". I still do a lot of deleting, though. Deleted mail tends to fall into the following broad categories:
- security alerts and passcodes
- notifications for events happening in a different systems (e.g. Venmo payments, bank alerts, etc.)
- receipts for non-durable things like restaurants
I guess I could try to move these more forcefully from email versus phone notifications, but this still is really low priority and it's kind of better to just deal with it in a batch at the end of the day.
Yes! I just bought a dealer-certified three year old Kia Niro with 24k miles for $22k. The current new version of this car has an MSRP more than double that price. There is no world where the difference between these cars is worth $25k. In my head it's more like $10k-$15k max.
I bought my Kia EV6 at probably the worst time (fall 2022). EVs were in high demand, dealers were adding markups, and my credit was still reeling from just buying a house. As a result, I owe way more than I could buy it used lol. Not that I would (and ignoring the ramifications), but it would cost me less money to just let it get repossessed and go hunt it down and buy it from the used dealer that buys it at auction.
Lots of stories like this. I bought mine 2023 while subsidy was still there and Tesla just dropped prices. Yes it depreciated solid 25% but that equates to gas savings. Buying new would cost more now.
Agreed. Any complex mechanical device like a car can be "ridden rough", regardless of whether it is gas or electric. I feel like with gas cars there are a lot more moving parts to get stessed, while electric it's mostly about how the battery was treated. Having bought multiple used cars, including a used EV, it seems like a wash to me.
In this case, I try to question the project owners on their assumptions and whether they have validated them. Usually this line of questioning reveals whether they have "done their homework".
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