> Most of my friends that work at larger public tech companies — it just feels like they're constantly doing unimportant things, going to conferences just for the sake of it
Working at a BigCorp(tm) right now, this is somewhat of a false statement imo, at least for us.
Being in such a standardised place, it is very hard a lot of times to find new inspiration for technologies to adopt and things like conferences or meetups are the perfect opportunity to network and hear about how people make use of new things. Usually, we don't really get much time to explore new technologies as capacity is always planned for our current workloads. That's why I love being able to go to a conference every few months (this year it'll be 4 for me) to be able to bring some things back into my team that might be interesting to us.
We get the time approved for conferences, but not to explore things "while at work".
This obviously differs from company to company but that's my experience at my current one so far.
Yeah, and I didn't mean to slam conferences. I enjoy going to conferences and find the well regarded ones beneficial (especially ones offering workshops and certifications).
My point was more about the token conference goer.
I have an acquaintance that has given the same talk at 13 different conferences over the last 12 months. I don't know how that benefits him or the company. He's also on twitter literally all day. I just don't get it (as I hypocritically type this out on HN).
Are you really saying that you don't get how presenting to multiple conferences benefits the presenter, or the company he works for? Or am I misunderstanding your point?
From my perspective it seems that there's tremendous benefit in becoming known by thousands as an expert in a particular topic and in having the skill to present that material to others.
Did you ever have the pleasure of working with Siemens' SCL? I found it very frustrating to use but overall a better experience than just using the lego blocks programming you usually see. Combined with your data blocks you could at least get some structure into your programs.
The problem is- as with all state-charts fast grows in complexity to a level where nobody has a overview. Are we the first industry to encounter this. No- chip designers have this all the time, game industry has this all the time, every fucking industry using state-charts has this - all the time. So how comes, we are the only industry taking a lot of overtime all the time?
<chirpin ciccadas since decadas>
I have people whos VMs literally collapse under page-long state-charts. So how about breaking them up, just have small state-charts in FBs and small state charts in FBs marshalling them.
Not happening. And they use assembler, not for a final tweak but as base language.
And usually, when the whole mess is collapsing in on itself, like a black hole of bad design, the project manager call in some external consultants, who should be happy to work a project that is "that far along -its allmost done".
I think the big problem in us being that slow is that you can't properly test changes. The initial programs get written under immense time pressure to put it productive and what after that? Do you want to touch your productive system and refactor it and risk causing hundreds of thousands in damages for production loss? You pretty much need to nail your initial design and can't afford to do the usual "we will take care of our technical debt later".
I hear you saying "but you have debuggers/simulators!", for anyone actually having worked in the field you will know they are pretty much useless for big changes in machines that speak to hundreds of other systems, sensors, motors, etc. At least that's what my experience was and nobody has a backup factory to test changes on. In the tight schedules we had during production stops (Sunday nights, mainly) we were busy enough maintaining everything else than having fun on a PLC.
I completely agree that this is all a big mess and people don't tend to write maintainable programs, they just want their machines running and this is where everyone needs to be trained and improve.
Don't know why the downvotes. I was once asked to work on the original Gears of War. After talking to the developers at Microsoft game studios, I noped on out of there. Most game devs I've met have horror stories of death marches followed by massive layoffs. It's... not a great sector of the tech industry, if you value work-life balance.
I would hope that the cycle of crunch -> ship -> layoffs is in the past now. From memory it used to be that way because the studio needed to crunch to get the product out the door to sell. Then once that happened they had no need for all of the people since there wasn't another product to work on.
These days there are a lot of studios working on so called perpetual games (MMORPG, etc) which have constant maintenance and improvements so they don't need to let go of people. Also the other AAA game companies are bigger and can shift people between projects as needed.
It honestly doesn't surprise me that so many PLCs are exposed directly and are not up to date. Having worked in maintenance at a large factory where we directly worked with Siemens PLCs, nobody is really prepared to make their PLC secure. Most people handling and programming those PLCs do not have a deep understanding of "Internet of things" (in Germany, the term "Industrie 4.0" is used a lot) but management is happy to jump on that topic.
You usually don't worry about anything other than the task your PLC is supposed to perform (we're in a factory after all and need to make money, so better do it quick). I don't think I can remember ever updating the firmware of any of our PLCs, most of them even rot in a storage room for a couple of years before even being put in use.
Everything is connected to the local network for monitoring purposes and if it weren't for another department strictly managing our network I reckon there would be a lot more of them accessible directly from the internet.
I personally like the idea and will try it out for my private projects but this would probably not be possible to be used by the company I work for because we'd give everything to a third party.
Maybe you should think about a self-hosted solution in the future, that might increase the audience.
Yes, that's understandable. To be clear, all config is end-to-end encrypted, so EnvKey's servers cannot see any configuration in plaintext. The native app and the client libraries go to great lengths to avoid trusting the server on anything crypto-related.
That said, a self-hosted version is in the works--the backend is based on Kubernetes has been designed with portability in mind. It won't be a difficult process to set it up on-premises or in a private cloud. For anyone who would be interested in self-hosting, definitely reach out and we can figure out a setup that will work for you: dane@envkey.com
we have a git repository that uses git-crypt for that. in there I can find all the credentials we need as developers and only someone whose key was added can unlock it. you still need to pull changes of course but it has made our lifes a lot easier for development.
I have a G Suite account mainly to have email addresses across different domains using the routing google provides. Is this possible with Fastmail too? If not, is there any other service out there that would provide this?
Some of them did not match perfectly with their counterparts in other Emoji sets. I wouldn't call that "completely incompatible" though, and it doesn't imply that one or the other is wrong.
If the purpose of this was to bring them in line with other emoji sets, they could have just redone the few that show somewhat different expressions.
just registered and installed the extension. do I always need to go to the website manually to view my bookmarks or is there a navigation point i'm missing in the extension?
Working at a BigCorp(tm) right now, this is somewhat of a false statement imo, at least for us. Being in such a standardised place, it is very hard a lot of times to find new inspiration for technologies to adopt and things like conferences or meetups are the perfect opportunity to network and hear about how people make use of new things. Usually, we don't really get much time to explore new technologies as capacity is always planned for our current workloads. That's why I love being able to go to a conference every few months (this year it'll be 4 for me) to be able to bring some things back into my team that might be interesting to us.
We get the time approved for conferences, but not to explore things "while at work".
This obviously differs from company to company but that's my experience at my current one so far.