Category: Software development

This is something I felt we were doing sometimes in the agile software development. It goes like this, we analyze a problem, and we come up with some sort of solution / architecture / design. But during implementation we realized we missed something, especially on the consideration of things like performance. We know we cannot work on the stories forever, so what do we do? We create a new “performance” story and put it in the backlog, meanwhile pushing the existing story forward. This is okay for one time but not every time, in my opinion.

Also, recall a code section in which sometimes people tend to overlook.

Those are scenarios are different

if(condition 1) { // do something 1

if(condition 2) { // do something 2

}

}

vs

if(if(condition 1) {) { // do something 1

}

if(if(condition 2) {) { // do something 2

}

PS: came across this tweet – “coding is 95% copying and pasting”. I think the author may said it in a joking tone. For me seriously I am guilty of this quite a bit in my career. Once I cloned (copied) the javascript code (framework) for a tree structure, and later I started to regret it. One reason I copied was I didn’t know how to properly use an Object Oriented approach there. Also during re-rewrite projects (hope you don’t have to work on those), sometimes there are quite a bit copy/paste as well. I understand sometimes there are valid reasons, e..g., if we just do a “life and shift” without intension to change any business logic. In practice though, there are usually room for improvement during rewrite.

Also, once a business analyst shot me an email shortly after I asked doing a DB update for a month end job. And that person quickly realized the reason for that update and retracted the email or the question. It still shows the sign of a not well organized place though. Believe me that’s not the most disorganized place I worked so far 🙂

(Update 01-07-2024) Was doing some hashtag#productionSupport this past week, for the most part. At one time, it reminded me once at the credit card company, we let the one (out of 6) node (server) running for 8+ hours during the maintenance window, before we brought the other 5 nodes back online. hashtag#theFun hashtag#withProduction hashtag#SRE

(Original 11-16-2022) Had a production incident recently after production deployment. I was not intimately familiar with the oracle index charge (drop) and impact on other apps (lack of visibility and lack of perf testing environment). It’s hard to prevent this sort of thing from happening but I think as developers we should learn from those mistakes and try to avoid similar mistakes in the future.

For production incidents, it’s best for the dev team (or production support team) to know before the customers call in: especially in the case of external customers. I recall at my immediate previous employer, during pandemic we had this “Screen and go” web app. One morning the app went down: it turns out to be the auto scaler issue. Another time the Twilio SMS were blocked by the carriers. We found out both via the customer service desk.

Technical Assessments

At the credit card company I worked at a while ago, we have this thing called technical assessments for Change. Change is usually a production deployment of code / infrastructure change. The author of the Change need to add the technical assessments of the impacted team, I recall in one change I had to include 16 external teams tech assessments. It took some time and effort for me to get their blessing. But the plus side of all this, if we did this for the mentioned incident above, the incident may not happen (if the impacted team did seriously evaluate potential impact to their apps).

Btw, I just realized I did not write a lot on production, other than this one.

Community night, open house, curriculum night,… the bottomline is, they are all “meet the teachers” night. It’s not as hard as “meet the parents” (I recall there was a movie with that name).

Because of pandemic, last few years, meet the teachers have mostly virtual or drive through, to avoid large crowd etc. And I certainly understand that. Now that it seems things are gradually back to normal, meet the teachers are in person again, which is cool or dare I say, better than the virtual or a few minutes “hey bye” at the parking lot etc.

I noticed Serenity 7th grade Spanish teacher’s new approach, she said instead of the kids memorizing the vocabulary: she removed as much constraints as possible and encourage kids to use the Spanish as much in the classroom as possible. In other words she allows the kids to make tense (past tense etc.) or grammar mistakes. I am familiar with the previous approach she mentioned, because that’s essentially how we learned English in our middle school when I was in China (1980s). In my middle school we wrote the English words everyday, as our counselor said that’s the only way we can remember the spelling. He said this is like a snowball, because on the 1st day we wrote the new words encountered during the 1st day, and then on the 2nd day we need to write both the 1st and 2nd day’s words, and so on. Pretty soon we will have a large sheet of paper. But sometimes we cheated, because we know the counselor wouldn’t examine each page carefully, and one crazy way I learned is one kid wrote via two pens at the same time, in other words, he wrote twice as much if we assume he could wrote as fast.

I think the social studies class is also fun. So instead of memorizing, she asked a lot questions, and encourage kids to research and discover knowledge. The most unusual class, at least I never had when I was in middle or high school, is the industrial technology class, it looks almost like a carpenter shop and it has lots of useful tools, for kids to make things like a wooden clock (I am guessing they buy the electrical quartz clock and battery and put it inside the frame). I also like the leniency policy in Math in which the kids got to retake tests to improve their scores.

The definition of core and elective sort of reminds me of similar categorization in my middle school. I like it here in general. In China during my days English was important course, in recent years, partially due to politics, English was downgraded in terms of importance. Time changes.

I noticed by walking back and forth the classrooms Serenity goes daily, I got half circle of my movement and exercise rings done 🙂

Last but not least, when we are done, I took bus again back to the high school parking lot. Our hard working bus drivers were still waiting and driving. Then I also realized it’s evening time and the teachers and administrators sacrificed their leisure and family time too.

First let me get the Cryptos out of the way.

Oil:

also

Btw, I sense the current market probably wiped out a lot of new retail investors (home gamers in Jim Cramer’s words), or many new Robinhood app users.

Last but not least, is this transitory?

Link to all videos; course overview page.

I saw the first video (Introduction, Financial Terms and Concepts) a while ago. Some background on instructor Dr. Jake Xia.

Portfolio Management (also by Jake Xia)

The stock market continued its downward trend this past week, and on Friday, S&P 500 went down 20% from the beginning of the year, and it officially tested the bear market (20% down is a measurement of bear market). But, per other measures, such as Schiller PE, it’s 36 as of 04-01-2022 (may down a bit since then), and historically this PE is still quite high. Some people are expecting the giants such as Apple $APPL (I heard it’s 7% of S&P 500, and 13% of Nasdaq 100), and Microsoft $MSFT to fall, before the capitulation.

I don’t know. Predicting market is a fool’s game. Predicting individual stock’s near term performance is hard too. For Apple, in particular, it will experience some fall out from the manufacturing / logistics challenges in China (mainly around Shanghai zero covid extended lockdown), as well as weakened demand from Europe (war in Ukraine), China (again Covid policy and economy slowdown), and the US (rising gas price, and we saw the fallout from Target $TGT and Walmart $WMT earnings last week).

Apple Fitness+

I tried Apple Fitness+ the second time. As the old saying goes, second time is a charm. Plus this time I got Apple Music from the Apple One subscription as well. It works better for me when I tried “Time to Run”, and I picked the Charleston themed music and picture. I cancelled the Peloton sub recently, and I think I will likely stick to the Apple Fitness+: start with walk and run, and maybe expand to meditation and Yoga later on. Btw, talking about Yoga, I recall JCC (the J) will restart pool side Yoga on Saturday morning again: after 3 years due to pandemic in last 2 years.

Youtube Videos

I watched quite a bit of those last few weeks. Topic varies from Warren Buffett Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meetings over the years, to travel or city vlogs, and other business / investing related topics as well. I listened to some old pop songs I listened when I was in college too (陳淑樺 Sarah Chen; 梁靜茹 Fish Leong): sometimes YouTube will reminds me try YouTube music if the same playlist is available there, and potentially it could save me some data if I am on the cell phone data plan.

老范讲故事: I like this channel. Interestingly enough: first time I saw his video, he was talking about why Coca-Cola is more popular than Pepsi Cola during Shanghai lockdown. He is former developer (Borland), development relationship, investor relations (Cheetah Mobile), and VC. He is about my age.