yinzer-solomon

I'll belatedly second the recommendation of the "City Watch" series. I found "Night Watch" to be particularly enjoyable.

Sometimes, people are asked to become managers because their managers think that they have the right combination of skills and attributes to be good at the job.

And sometimes, the people who were asked, due to a combination of stubbornness and a desire not to “sell out”, deny the request for 7-8 years. Eventually, a person might realize that the original requesters may have been correct and that’s how they become a manager.

Or so I’ve heard.

I actually thought this thread was going to be about CIRA’s amazing set of Canadian stock photos, which includes references to the strategic maple syrup reserve: https://petapixel.com/2020/01/23/canadian-internet-authority...

I’m posting this in case it helps someone:

I used to suffer fairly severe migraines with aura every month or two until I started taking a chelated magnesium supplement for an unrelated purpose. I found that my migraines dropped by 95% or more, and they are much less severe when they do occur.

I was in my early 30s when I started taking the magnesium, so it’s possible that I just aged out of migraine sensitivity, but the magnesium supplements are not terribly expensive and are probably worth some self-experimentation.

My understanding is that it’s not a technical issue, but rather a business and marketing one. Comcast doesn’t want the home service to compete with their costlier Business service, so they artificially limit the upload speeds to prevent home/consumer users from serving a high volume of content using their less-expensive service.

I would prefer not to estimate at all because estimates are, in the Lean sense, waste: i.e., something that your customers don’t value.

Unfortunately, that argument never worked with my managers at project budgeting time.

As a result, because I was really bad at estimating, I spent a day teaching myself function point (FP) estimation. I also found a chart detailing how many hours of effort an “average” organization required to build projects of varying FP sizes. This meant that it was easy to make a simple spreadsheet using the chart data and Excel’s FORECAST function to generate estimates.

With that approach, my subsequent projects were always within 10% of the estimate, which is much better than my pre-function-point estimates. Combining that approach with the Agile idea of working on the most important features first meant that my projects were largely free of drama come deadline time.

As Goldratt says in “Beyond the Goal”: Any project management methodology that doesn’t account for Murphy’s Law is not a realistic methodology.

Stereotypes aside, some of us were/are both.

My pleasure. As iainctduncan mentioned, the authors are wonderful teachers, and the book serves as a good warmup before diving into SICP.

IIRC, “Simply Scheme” describes several different recursion patterns, and it provides a number of exercises that match each pattern.