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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I got my first programming job in 1996. I still have days like this.

    Today, I had a conversation with my boss about an apprentice in our team. Our senior front-end dev left a few months ago, and the apprentice has had to take on a lot of work with little guidance. Our team is very full of back-end devs with no front-end experience. During this conversation, we described our apprentice as “extremely capable but lacking experience”, and discussed the best way of getting him more experience. The conclusion we came to is that there is no shortcut here, but having good guidance from senior devs can help somewhat.

    What I’m trying say here is that what you’re describing is absolutely normal, and based on what you’ve said, you’re doing fine. You have a little imposter syndrome, which seems worse than it is because of your genuine lack of experience… that experience will come with time, and days like today are the days where you learn a load from your mistakes. You’ll probably not hard-code things like that in future, and today you gained a tiny bit of that experience that you need - well done!


  • This depends massively on the abilities of the person you’re mentoring.

    If they’re brand new to programming, they’re probably not going to be working on production systems. They might be given tasks to create tools and utilities that might be used by the team, rather than the customer, or they might be given exercises to help them understand programming. The most important thing is to get the right mix of training and programming. Following online tutorials alone is not enough to get someone up to speed - they need to be given software to create without following a guide. They need to have someone they can come to when they’re stuck, and they will get stuck. They need frequent code reviews to check they’re on the right track. It will take a fair amount of mentoring, and you can’t expect them to be able to contribute positively to the team for a while - but when they do get up to speed, they will be extremely familiar with the team’s tools, technologies and products.

    If they’ve done some programming before, then maybe they can be let loose on production code. But they will still need frequent detailed code reviews, they will still get stuck and need someone to come to for helpl

    When they need help, they do not need someone to show them the answer - that doesn’t help them. They need someone to point them in the right direction. To do that, you need to understand why they’ve failed so far. Which part of the process have they got stuck on. Is it that they haven’t understood the problem? They haven’t understood the solution? There’s a piece of code or a library function they’re not familiar with? Work out where they’re stuck, and then put them right on the specific thing they’re stuck on. Then, ask them what they plan on doing with the new information you’ve given them, and make sure they know what to do next.





  • My belief is that no, it wouldn’t - because the posts don’t contain identifiable information about people. I’m not an expert, though, and I’d love for someone to come and correct me if I’m wrong.

    Edit: I just saw that @S4nvers gave a more detailed answer than me a bit lower down, essentially agreeing with me but quoting the relevant part of GDPR to explain why.







  • In the linked discussion, the sub and the mod are both named - so I’m assuming I’m ok to re-post that here - it is r/tumblr and u/taytay_is_god

    Please post this in as many places as you can, including /r/ModCoord, /r/RedditAlternatives and /r/Save3rdPartyApps (hate to say it, but it’ll probably get more visibility there than on here). It would be great if we could find a way of getting this story into the press, too, but I’m not sure how to go about doing that.




  • “To honour these peerages it was not necessary to overrule HOLAC - but simply to ask them to renew their vetting, which was a mere formality,” Mr Johnson said.

    Even if this were true (and the following few sentences of the article quote multiple people saying it’s not, and explaining why) - is there any practical difference between Rishi “overruling” HOLAC and “asking them to renew their vetting”? Both would be equally distasteful. I’m not really sure what point Boris is trying to make here. I don’t see him coming out of this looking anything other than even worse than he did going into it.