This is about thew new starter cost.

When a developer joins a team, they will not be as productive as they have to learn the code, frameworks, libraries, the project purpose, the tooling, etc… Often this impacts other members of the team lowering the entire teams productivity.

When you use productivity tracking (e.g. things like capacity planning) you will see the teams performance drop and it will take time for it to exceed the previous measured performance. This is the cost of adding a new starter.

So if it takes 6 weeks for a new starter to increase overall team producitivty then planning someone on a project for 4 weeks is pointless since the team will have a higher delivery rate without the extra person. This is typically why an organsation loses its ability to migrate staff between projects.

Code formating affects the layout of the code and our brains do all sorts of tricks around pattern recognition, so if your code formatting rules are too different a someone migrating between projects has to spend time looking for code and retraining their brain.

Its an additional barrier and a one within an organisations skills to remove (by forcing a common code standard).

The last part is why you use an IDE.

Several of them will ingest prettier files to build code formatting rules

• https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=esbenp.prettier-vscode
• https://www.jetbrains.com/help/webstorm/prettier.html
• https://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/prettier-formatter

IDE support is normally a good way to work out what the wider community is using.

Python is unique in formatting forms part of the syntax, every language has linters but its far more common for orgs to tweak the default rules .

For example Java has Checkstyle. The default rules ‘sun checks’ give a line length of 80, tabs are 4 spaces and everything is placed on a new line.

Junior devs inevitably want to trash the line length (honestly on 1080p monitors, 120 makes sense,).

There is always a new line/same line discussion (everyone perfers same line but there is always one die hard new line person).

The tab width discussion always has one junior dev complain that “tabs are better”, as someone who started development on Visual Studio 6 where half the team double spaced, the other half used tabs. Those people get a lecture from me on how we can convert tabs to spaces but not the inverse so it will always be spaces if I am near.

With Checkstyle you upload the rule file as an artifact into your M2 repository. Then you can pull it down as a dependency when the checkstyle plugin runs.

As someone who bought Half Life 2 when it was released …

I only remember people being excited about Steam, Web stores weren’t a thing back then and they were the future! (It was the following years of audio and ebook stores locking stuff down and evapourating that taught us to hate it).

Game/Audio CD DRM hacking the kernel and breaking/massively slowing down your PC was pretty common back then and Steam’ s DRM didn’t do that.

The HL2 disc installer didn’t require you to install Steam, once installed it asked you to setup Steam and there was a sticker under the DVD with the Steam code for you to enter.

You were then rewarded with a copy of HL2 Deathmatch and Counterstrike Source.

Steam wasn’t always on DRM, back then ADSL/DSL was relatively new and alot of people were still stuck on Dial Up modems.

Steam let you sign in and authorize your games for 30 days at which point you would need to log into Steam again. This was incredibly helpful feature for young me.

Basically Epic like every other publisher has created their own launcher/store.

They aren’t trying to compete on features and instead using profits from their franchise to buy market share (e.g. buying store exclusives).

The tone and strategy often comes off as aggressive and hostile.

For example Valve was concerned Microsoft were going to leverage their store to kill Steam. Valve has invested alot in adding windows operability to Linux and ensuring Linux is a good gaming platform. To them this is the hedge against agressive Microsoft business practices.

The Epic CEO thinks Windows is the only operating system and actively prevents Linux support and revoked Linux support from properties they bought.

As a linux user, Valve will keep getting my money and I literally can’t give it to Epic because they don’t want it.

I avoid any company that requires a software test before the interview.

I worked for a company that introduced them after I joined, I collected evidence all of the companies top performers wouldn’t have joined since we all had multiple offers and having to do the test would put people off applying. The scores from it didn’t correlate with interview results so it was being ignored by everyone. Still took 2 years to get rid of it.

The best place used STAR (Situation Task Action Result) based interviews. The goal was to ask questions until you got 2 stars.

I thought these were great because it was more varied and conversational but there was a comparable consistency accross interviewers.

You would inevitably get references to past work and you switch to asking a few questions about that. Since it was around a situation you would get more complete technical explanations (e.g. on that project I wrote an X and Y was really challenging because of Z).

I loved asking “Tell me about something your really proud off”. Even a nervous junior would start opening up after that question.

After an hour interview you would end up with enough information you could compare them against the company gradings (junior, senior, etc…).

This was important because it changed the attitude of the interview. It wasn’t a case of if the candidate would be a good senior dev for project X, but an assessment of the candidate. If they came out as a lead and we had a lead role, lets offer them that.

If you signup to social media it will pester you for your email contacts, location and hobbies/interests.

Building a signup wizard to use that information to select a instance would seemto be the best approach.

The contacts would let you know what instance most of your friends are located (e.g. look up email addresses).

Topic specific instance, can provide a hobby/interests selection section.

Lastly the location would let you choose a country specific general instance.

It would help push decentralisation but instead of providing choice your asking questions the user is used to being asked.

Basic rule if someone claims X magically solves a problem they don’t follow X and are a huge generator of the problem.

For example people who claim they don’t need to write comments because they write self documenting code are the people that use variable names x1,x2,y, etc…

Similarly anyone you meet claiming Test Driven Development means they have better tests will write code with appalling code coverage and epically bad tests.

Thats two hundred years and would cover the end of Plantagenet reign and the Tudor era.

Henry VIII reign happened during that period, at the beginning of your time period everyone would be catholic and at the end Queen Mary of Scotts was executed because the idea of a Catholic on the throne was unthinkable.

The UK is littered with castles and estates, normally they focus on specific historic events which happened at that location.

Nvidia drivers don’t tend to be as performant under linux.

With AMD instead of using the AMD VLK driver, you would use the RADV (developed largely by valve). Which petforms better.

Every AMD card under linux supports OpenCL (the driver is more based on graphics card architecture) and you install it very easily. Googling it with windows found pages of errors and missing support.

Blender supports OpenCL. I bet the 2x improvement is Blender being able to ofload rendering to the AMD graphics card.

Also this represents the biggest headache in Linux, lots of gamers insist they can only use Nvidia cards. Nvidia treats linux as an afterthought as best or deliberately sabotages things at worse.

AMD embraced open source and so Linux land is much nicer on AMD (and to a less extent Intel).

The results here will probably be a DxVK quirk, lots of “Nvidia optimised” games have game engines doing weird things and the Nvidia driver compensates. DxVK has been identifying that to produce “good” vulkan calls.

This advice isn’t grounded in reality.

Management normally defines ways to track and judge itself, these are typically called Key Performance Indicators.

KPI’s are normally things like contract value growth, new contracts signed, profit margin, etc…

So if the project manager is meeting or exceeding their KPI’s and you walk up to their boss telling them the PM is failing as basic job functions, the boss won’t care.

This is because the boss might have set the KPI’s or the boss might also be judged on them. In either situation its to the bosses advantage to ignore you.

The boss will only care if there is a KPI you can demonstrate the PM failing to meet.

Every person/group will have various incentives and motivations. To affect change you have to understand what they are.

Wikipedia lists all 12 subs as having Rolls Royce Pressured Water Reactors.

Your PWR reuse idea is is kind of where Rolls Royce is looking to go with Small Modular Reactors (https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx).

I suspect refurbishing decades old PWR reactors would be far more expensive than just building new ones, for example a SpaceX Merlin engine costs $1 million and a Blue Origin BE-4 costs $15 million. Nasa argued it would be ‘cheaper’ to reuse Shuttle components for the Space Launch System (SLS). Refurbishing Shuttle RS-25 engines has cost Nasa $50 million dollars per engine, restarting a production line is costing $100 million for each new RS-25 engine.

A project manager has responsibility for delivery of a project but they typically lack domain specific knowledge. As a result they can’t directly deliver something, merely ask subject matter experts for advice and facilitate a team to deliver.

Most PM’s cope with the stress of this position poorly.

This cartoon is an example of micro management (a common coping mechanisim), the manager has involved themselves in the low level decisions because that gives a sense of control. If a technical team then tell them its a bad decison the team are effectively attacking their coping mechanisim.

The solution isn’t to tell them their technical idea is terrible, when you’ve fallen down this rabbit hole you have to treat the PM as a stakeholder. They are someone you have to manage, so a common solution is to give them confidence there is a path to delivery, a way to track and understand it.

If you read the reports…

Normally JPL outsource their Mars mission hardware to Lockheed Martin. For some reason they have decided to do Mars Sample Return in house. The reports argue JPL hasn’t built the necessary in house experience and should have worked with LM.

Secondly JPL is suffering a staff shortage which is affecting other projects and the Mars Sample Return is making the problem worse.

Lastly if an organisation stops performing an action it “forgets” how to do it. You can rebuild the capability but it takes time.

A team arbitrary declaring they are experts and suddenly decideding they will do it is one that will have to relearn skills/knowledge on a big expensive high profile project. The project will either fail (and be declared a success) or masses of money will be spent to compensate for the teams learning.

Either situation is not ideal

The GAO has performed an annual review of the Space Launch System every year since 2014 and switched to reviewing the Artemis program in 2019.

Each year the GAO points out Nasa isn’t tracking any costs and Nasa argues with the GAO about the costs they assign. Then the GAO points out Nasa has no concrete plan to reduce costs, Nasa then goes nu’uh (see the articles cost reduction “objectives”).

The last two reports have focused on the RS-25 engine, last time the GAO was unhappy because an engine cost Nasa $100 million and Nasa had just granted a development contract to reduce the cost of the engine.

However if you took the headline cost of the contract and split it over planned engines it was greater than the desired cost savings. Nasa response was development costs don’t count.

Congress reviews GAO reports and decides to give SLS more money.

The other person was just wrong.

Large scale Hydrogen generation isn’t generated in a fossil free way, Hydrogen can be generated is a green way but the infrastructure isn’t there to support SLS.

Hydrogen is high ISP (miles per gallon) by rubbish thrust (engine torque).

This means SLS only works with Solid Rocket Boosters, these are highly toxic and release green house contributing material into the upper atmosphere. I suspect you would find Falcon 9/Starship are less polluting as a result.

Lastly the person implies SLS could be fueled by space sources (e.g. the moon).

SLS is a 2.5 stage rocket, the boosters are ditched in Earths Atmosphere and the first stage ditched at the edge of space. The current second stage doesn’t quite make low earth orbit.

So someone would have to mine materials on the moon and ship them back. This would be far more expensive than producing hydrogen on Earth.

Hydrogen on the moon makes sense if your in lunar orbit, not from Earth.

Do not mix tabs and spaces.

Its impossible to automate checking that tabs were only used for indentation and spacing for precise alignment. So you then take on a burden of manually checking

You end up with the issue where someone didn’t realise and space idented or anouther person used tabs for precise alignment and people forget to check the whitespace characters in review and it ends up going inconsistent and becoming a huge pile of technical debt to fix.

Use only one, you can automate enforcement and ensure the code renders consistency.

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Years ago there was no way to share IDE settings between developers.

You ended up with some developers choosing a tab width of 2 spaces, some choosing 4 spaces and as there was no linting enforcement some people using 2-4 spaces depending on their IDE settings.

This resulted in an unreadable mess as stuff was idented to all sorts of random levels.

It doesn’t matter if you use tabs or spaces as long as only one type is consistently used within a project.

Spaces tends to win because inevitably there are times you need to use spaces and so its difficult to ensure a project only uses tabs for identation.

IDE’s support converting tabs into spaces based on tab width and code formatting will ensure correct indentation. You can now have centralised IDE settings so everyone gets the same setup.

Honestly 99% of people don’t care about formatting (they only care when consistency isn’t enforced and code is hard to read), there is always one person who wants a 60 charracter line width or only tabs or double new lined parathensis. Who then sucks up huge amounts of the team time arguing their thing is a must while they code in emacs, unlike the rest of the team using an actual ide.

I am actually arguing for a stable ABI.

The few times I have had to compile out of tree drivers for the linux kernel its usually failed because the ABI has changed.

Each time I have looked into it, I found code churn, e.g. changing an enum to a char (or the other way) or messing with the parameter order.

If I was empire of the world, the linux kernel would be built using conan.io, with device trees pulling down drivers as dependencies.

The Linux ABI Headers would move out into their own seperately managed project. Which is released and managed at its own rate. Subsystem maintainers would have to raise pull requests to change the ABI and changing a parameter from enum to char because you prefer chars wouldn’t be good enough.

Each subsystem would be its own “project” and with a logical repository structure (e.g. intel and amd gpu drivers don’t share code so why would they be in the same repo?) And built against the appropriate ABI version with each repository released at its own rate.

Unsupported drivers would then be forked into their own repositories. This simplifies depreciation since its external to the supported drivers and doesn’t need to be refactored or maintained. If distributions can build them and want to include the driver they can.

Linus job would be to maintain the core kernel, device trees and ABI projects and provide a bill of materials for a selection of linux kernel/abi/drivers version which are supported.

Lastly since every driver is a descrete buildable component, it would make it far easier for distributions to check if the driver is compatible (e.g. change a dependency version and build) with the kernel ABI they are using and provide new drivers with the build.

None of this will ever happen. C/C++ developers loath dependency management and people can ve stringly attached to mono repos for some reason.