WORKING AROUND PROCESSES

One of the clearest signs, to me, that a business is in trouble, is when processes need to be worked around because they don’t align with what’s needed for product development. When I see teams which are loaded with enablers (managers, coaches, mentors, assistants) rather than do-ers (folk actually working on the delivering and improving the product), and it has become common knowledge how to work around processes to get what’s need, it’s a signal, to me, that the company is bogged down in processes.

LOOKING AT THE MASTODON SERVER CODE

I’ve spent a few hours over the last couple of nights looking at installing a Mastodon server, and unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be designed to scale, so I can understand why folk are having a rough ride atm. Here are some things I found… Firstly it doesn’t appear to allow for read-replicas databases to be configured during the setup process. Read replicas can take a lot of the load off the more critical (and lock prone) writeable servers, so not having RRs can cause pain as things scale.

TWITTERS LAX SECURITY

If you are wondering if the claims about Twitter security being lax is just one person complaining, you might be interested to know that, 18 months after being let go from the company, I had still not been removed from their employees GitHub committers group. My access was confirmed by a third party, and, during that 18 month period I had access to private repositories as well as the list of Twitter employees who were also part of that group, but had chosen not to make their membership public.

GUESSING THE ANSWER AT WORK AND SCHOOL

I had an interesting, and long, chat with someone who has as much experience with teaching as I have with computers. It focused what seems to be the toughest challenge I find with new grads; Getting them to realise they shouldn’t guess answers and say “I don’t know” instead. We agreed that the many countries schooling systems penalise students for not guessing. If a student says “I don’t know” they will never get a mark for the question. If, however, they guess the right answer, they will, so it encourages guessing over admitting lack of knowledge.

THE UK "APPLE TAX"

I was tempted by an m2 Mac Air to test the arm64 Apple Silicon emulators we’ve been building at Snapp Automotive. To make sure I was being charged a reasonable price I decided to do a little maths and found out the m2 MBA is 8% more expensive, after taxes and foreign exchange rates, in the UK than in the US. Here’s my calculation; USD MBA Starting Price: US$1199 USD/GBP Converstion Rate: 1.25 USD to 1 GBP GBP "Sales Tax" (VAT): 20% Total via conversion: (1199/1.25) * 1.20 = £1151 Apple GBP MBA Price: £1249 Apples UK Markup: ~8% For £1249 to map to a US$1199 price the exchange rate would need to be 1.15 USD/GBP. The only time it’s been at those levels were the first three months of 1985. Even during the pandemic it bottomed out just above 1.16.

AOSP CODE

This Android OS code looks, to me, like it’s been written by folk who absolutely believe Enums don’t have a place in code, but a 300+ line switch/case statement is just fine. Using Enums and .name() would remove the need for that horror. Even using reflection would have been nicer. Scanning the class’s static members and printing the name if there was a match in values would be less cognative load that this beast in my view. I wonder if there’s a typo in that code already.

700 MILES IN AN EV

So having spent last week doing a 700+ mile trip across the UK (east to west) with some stop offs, I can now understand why using a Tesla gives folk confidence in an EV-only future. Compared to my Leaf, the Tesla experience is like living in the future. Teslas charging infrastructure is miles ahead of the UK public infrastructure in terms of chargers per site, cars on the road per charge point, and distance between sites given the average range. With the Model 3 LR I was using, I didn’t feel stress from range anxiety.

WHAT IS "EQUAL PAY" FOR DEVELOPERS

I’ve seen another loop of the “all coders should be paid the same!” discussion. This viewpoint ignores a fundamental factor in deciding pay; The amount of money someone needs to feel it’s worth working for a company, which varies massively depending where the work is performed. Basically all business operate to achieve a task in the most cost effective way. This allows the company to build up cash reserves for unexpected issues or expansion. So the amount “paid the same” will actually be is likely to be the mid or low current salary rate.

WHY STOCK/SHARES ISN'T A SUBSTITUE FOR SALARY

There’s been an increasing trend in Stock/Share Options, RSUs, and employee share purchase schemes, some of which are hyped up to give the impression that they’re worth more than your base salary. While, in some cases, this is true, there are as many examples of where it definitely is not. When you join the companies who use these schemes as part of your compensation package you are usually given a monetary value of shares which gets converted into an actual number of shares around when you get your first pay packet. This means that the value, of, say £100,000 is only relevant for a month or two, and that, after that, the value of the shares is the thing which dictates how much the stock or share component of your compensation package is worth.

ANDROID T DEVELOPER PREVIEW 1 AND THE AOSP

Google recently release Android 13 (T) Developer Preview 1, and, while there are times when a lot of noise is made about Android being “Open Source”, what gets pushed to the Android Open Source Project for developer previews gives us some signals on how this is mostly an afterthought rather than a core part of Androids development. I’ve tried building the Developer Previews of 12 (S) and 13 (T) and both were pretty much unusable. Sometimes you can’t even get a list of build targets, as was the case for me for Android 13 DP1.