Exactly!

Well when you say warm all year round I think of something like Florida - which can still be pretty miserable in the summer.

yeah i totally get people hating florida summers, even though i don't mind them. LA weather is what i'd be thinking for the purposes of this discussion, or maybe something like LA but even more steadfast, not sure what that'd be.

incidentally, florida night weather ****s all over LA's chilliness. there is something awesome about stepping outside at 3am in your boxers into air that's like a warm bath.

I meant "I recall you live in Florida for some stupid reason. Do you live in Florida?"

I vividly remember when I moved to Miami. I had a tan I was working on for 21 years of cold sun and even colder winters. I think I was about the color of light toast at the time.

I went to the ocean for the first time in my life, waddled around in the warm waters, and then laid out on the beach. This was tail-end of summer.

For those who never had a fire red sunburn over a tan, let me inform you that you don't want to know what that means, but if you are interested look up "second degree sunburn" and feast your eyes. I was popping golf ball sized blisters for a month.

I found it amusing how, if you compared Miami to a wintery place, you would find that Miami has a much larger and varied supply of chap stick and Halls. I never quite got that, but then again, I didn't stick around for real summer.

dave, i love that post for some reason, i guess it's hard to go wrong after describing yourself as the color of light toast.

If I have a loop that does 7 operations and it loops 150 billion times, that's 1.05 trillion operations, right? Not some crazy code thing I don't understand going on here? I assume each assignment or calculation counts as an operation?

It depends if any of the operations can be optimized by the compiler.

Plus, divide, increment, assignment, equality check

Yes pretty much. That is why optimizing loops is a primary focus in reducing execution times.

I'm currently a software engineer on the financial engineering team at my company. That basically means I build tools that our internal finance team uses. I love being a programmer and I love what I do, but I have zero passion for finance. In fact, I pretty much hate finance. However, my job requires that I have business domain knowledge which means I have to learn and understand all the financial systems.

I really want to transfer to a different department because I do like the company, I just don't like the domain that I'm in. Obviously it's hard to give advice when you don't know anything about the company culture, but has anyone had experience switching departments? My manager and I have 1-1 meetings every 2 weeks to discuss anything that's on my mind. He's told me to let him know if I'm ever dissatisfied with my job, but I don't know if I should tell him what I'm thinking. Should I just reach out to some other teams to see if there are openings? Should I tell my manager?

definitely tell him. if you want to keep your current job if transferring doesn't turn out to be an option, just be careful how you phrase it. that is, don't say "i pretty much hate finance." start off by telling him how much you like the company and like programming, and mention that you like him as a manager. then say something like, "the problem is that i'm much more interested in department X or department Y, and think i'd be more valuable there," where X and Y are departments you've researched and think you'd like better.

that is, you're going to be much better off presenting yourself as a positive, ambitious person who really wants to do this other thing, instead of as a dissatisfied employee, who just wants to be doing anything other than finance. ofc, the result for you is the same.

Yea I mean knowing your company (and having several friends from college there) I think there is definitely horizontal movement possible. One of my roommates from college has been there like 3-4 years now and has moved around a couple times.

If he has told you to tell him that, that is a slam dunk to tell him imo.

I did find it strange that I was the only red head in Miami. Found out pretty quick why that was the case.

California is really a collection of micro-climates. San Diego is south of LA, but somehow cold all year round. I hear San Jose is an oven. San Francisco wasn't as cold and rainy as people make it out to be, but I was only there for 2 weeks total, so sample size. When I was in SF during New Years, it was about 65 while L.A. was in the 30s.

Even in the sames city, the climate is significantly different. Venice beach is pretty chilli. I'm still surprised at how different it is between Hollywood and Studio City. Hollywood could be 80 degrees and Studio City is at 95 degrees. They aren't but 3 miles apart.

Regardless, I don't have the desire to walk out at 3am wearing boxers.

That, for me at least, is one of the highest desires. Primarily having the temps to do that, but also to have the liberty of not needing to be in bed at that time to face the next day early.

Yeah, I'm a need-my-sleep-wuss.

yes, the micro-climates in LA can be striking. fwiw, i lived in SF for 2 years and it's definitely more gray and clammy than LA. i recall the winters being somewhat rainy, but always foggy and gray, especially the mornings. often to beautiful effect, but it grew tiresome.

Yes I'd hate it. I already hate heat more than the cold (25-30C is about the max I enjoy depending on humidity).
I love snow in the winter etc.

I've never experienced it but no seasons would make me feel pretty bad ~the second winter I'd guess. I kind of need the quarterly change. Keeps me sane/makes time feel more real.

Also...and this may be superodd...breathing cold air feels cleaner/nicer to me.

I have a laser pointer/slide clicker thingy with an integrated timer. I usually read the slides out loud once and time it to get a feel for how fast I'd be if I pace through. Then I just practice run them once and roughly split it in quarters and note at what time I should be in what quarter. I usually set my timer to the halftime mark and adjust on the fly.

You get better at this really quickly with practice imo

First lecture I gave I was way too fast as well (and had only prepared the next lecture in advance so I was kind of close to running out of slides at the end).

Did one in-front of like 600 people in London, and another in a smaller but more intimidating crowd in Canary Wharf. 600 people is brutally scary if you're not used to it!

RE rushing through, is a product of fear usually. Takes a concerted effort to pace yourself properly. Speak slowly, just to the point where you feel it sounds unnaturally slow and that's about right in my experience.

Question time is a good way to make up time if you've gone through too quickly, but #1 rule I see people messing up on is make sure you repeat the question before answering it!

Also, been to lots of talks where I've been sitting there thinking "wtf" is this actually about. And it's on something I should be interested in or know something about! But just get to the end and am still wondering what I just heard. Even if it's dumb, just a minute or two on an overview of what exactly you're talking about can turn a "wtf is this guy on about" talk into an actually interesting one.

Definitely this. And its not just about an overview, its about having a clear progression through the presentation. And the progression can't rely on a bunch of context/background information that your audience doesn't necessarily know about.

For example, up until a few years ago it seemed like almost all presentations involving Hadoop at major conferences had a minute or two on the basics of the map reduce algorithm and what Hadoop was. Even though the majority of a technical audience might have known that - it was still really important that everyone understood or they'd have been lost for the rest of the presentation.

Corporations are so much FUN!

Must be important to be fast tracked like that.

Nobody ****s with the Deliverables Matrix.

Well except the ADM I guess. I have no idea who or what ADM is btw. Nor have I heard of Deliverables Matrix. Not sure what KTLO is either. SDP means something something Problem.

FYI this is about a bug I fixed today about an hour after receiving an email with about 100 ppl on it and this subject: "RE: Critical: WEBSITE, Alert: WEBSITE GLB Transactions Fail (Single Transaction)". So I fix the bug and let them know it's in the next branch to go to production, and now everyone is like. HOLD ON YOU CAN'T SEND THAT TO PRODUCTION W/O JUMPING THROUGH HOOPS!!!

What's the absolute worst is if as a developer you find a bug yourself and want to fix it. You can spend 5 minutes fixing the bug, then weeks or months starting processes, filling out forms, prodding people, cajoling, and just generally championing it through the system just to get it fixed in production.

Go through that once and you're like "never again, the bug can rot" - unless it's something that can get your whole department in hot water like a security hole of course. Bottom line is if a customer or the business doesn't find it, we don't care about it. Not the best for morale imo. We're like alligator parents. We nurse our code very carefully in development and dote over even the tiniest ultra-edge-case/1-pixel defects. Then upon launch we just send the app out into the wild to fend for itself.

Yeah I'm never working in that kind of environment again. 1 year in a fortune 100 was enough for me.

slashdot story icons just get way huge for anyone else? can't read the last bit of text in story titles

probably no big loss, as /. is always like 3 days behind every other news site

Enterprises build their processes to avoid risk, and forget the goal is to create great products.

The way enterprises buy software is a great example.

They try and over-engineer the process to fit their exact processes and they craft massive RFPs, and then they end up using SharePoint as their CMS with nested tables.

If you hire a new engineer on Monday suzzer, when is his/her first commit to prod?