This is so wonderfully done! Great icon choices & use of fill to indicate active devices. I love how you grouped accessories by category, and included temperature/humidity sensor readings next to thermostat controls. I instantly upgraded to Pro for the additional features!
"A manager actively avoids creating situations where their coding is necessary for the success of the project."
I agree with Aditya's article. A CTO must be technical for all the reasons stated. I would add another reason to his list: a CTO must be able to challenge the assumptions, plans, and estimates presented to him/her by the engineering team. Doing so requires technical acumen.
The reason USA Today's coverage is best is because the real reporting is coming from the local newspaper, Louisville Courier-Journal. They're a Gannett property so it ends up getting published through USA Today as well.
They may not be dumb, but culturally, the companies are miles apart. Disney is incredibly bureaucratic and is does a very poor job of developing and deploy technology. Most of the impressive displays of tech you associate with Disney were licensed or acquired, with a Disney label slapped on them. There is a permanent cold war between VP-level execs who seek to undercut each other.
Source: former mid-level technology manager in IT at Disney Parks and Resorts who had a weekly audience with VPs and SVPs.
I've heard similar stories from other Disney IT employees. It does seem like the tech coming out of the Research divisions continues to be extremely impressive though. Curious to get your thoughts on that.
Tech isn't really their core business, their core business is making movies and theme parks. It may be true that they don't develop or use innovative technology (it may not be true as well, I've truly got no idea). If that doesn't translate into negative impacts on their core business, then it doesn't translate to any legitimate criticisms of their executives.
This looks great and I'm inclined to give it a try. But do you have a privacy policy? I try to avoid services that sit between me and my financial institutions, as I worry they're building analytics off my spending patterns and selling it to third parties.
A promise we make from the beginning is we're definitely not ever going to be selling any of your data. We don't have an incentive to since we're selling the service directly to the user as a subscription.
I felt the same way, and it's part of why I made spendweek.com (a privacy-first, easy-to-use competitor to Lunch Money, YNAB with a single focus on saving money instead of keeping track of all your accounts). I am sort of proud of my privacy policy, so it's a link right at the top of the home page.
Nice domain and nice concept. I too am among those with a home-grown approach to managing the budget. Mine is more of a spending journal than it is about planning or reconciling the entire budget, with motivations similar to those who would have a meal journal. I focus on the decision making process and self-evaluate spending according to my budget and my overall values.
We're on the same page regarding privacy. Except for taking money for the subscription, I keep my hands off bank accounts. And for those wanting a complete air gap, there's always the printable paper version:
https://www.spendlight.com/download/paper-spending-journal
Yes! This is awesome. Looking at all the budget software that uses monthly time frames, I was wondering why no one uses weekly. This quote is a great way to say it, "Even though most bills are paid monthly, discretionary spending is more naturally tracked on a weekly basis."
Ages ago, my tool tried to do both weekly and monthly but then I had the realization out that almost all of the monthly items were not ones I was having trouble with in the budget. The fixed expenses were (obviously) fixed. And consumption-based utilities would vary month to month, and that was easy enough to track and reconcile every so often.
In other words, the budget would get "broken" more often in the week-to-week habits than the monthly ones... hence, the resulting focus of my tool.
This could theoretically happen but you can also choose to stay passive/appear offline with a touch a button and if you are online/sharing you can see a faint glowing border & hint around the specific display. We've already considered to use other clues to help and will look into this, great feedback!
http://two.sentenc.es/ conveys a similar idea but did so long before this story, and more succinctly:
"Treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response. Since it’s too hard to count letters, we count sentences instead."
I once read a statement attributed to Steve Ballmer that every six months, he tears his todo list in half and throws the bottom half away. If anything far down that list was actually a priority, it will naturally get re-added (by thinking of it again, in response to a customer, etc.).
My implementation of that approach is to do the following each month:
1. Export all my unfinished todo items older than 6 months.
2. Place that export alongside my other backups.
3. Then delete those items from my todo app.
I deliberately do not look at any of those items during this process, lest I be tempted to dive back into them.
That way, I limit my total mental clutter while retaining some peace of mind, since I know that I can get back to those items (I sometimes attach photos, notes, etc. to tasks) if needed. I never do.
That's an interesting idea. I picked up this book, Principles of Product Development Flow, based on some recommendations I think I came across here on HN:
Reinertsen really helps you appreciate the costs associated with queues (of which the TODO list would be a common form) and this seems consistent with the principles he advocates.
One key quote related to this that I am still trying to wrap my head around:
Few product developers are aware of the causal links between high capacity-utilization, queues, and poor economic performance. Instead, developers assume that their cycle times will be faster when resources are fully utilized. In reality, as we shall see later, high levels of capacity utilization are actually a primary cause of long cycle time.
> In reality, as we shall see later, high levels of capacity utilization are actually a primary cause of long cycle time.
So what's the reason explained by the book?
(My guess would be something along the lines of: high level of utilization lead to sudden peaks in load exceeding available capacity, and thus throwing a wrench in the process as you scramble to add capacity.)
At a previous job we practiced aggressive, automated ticket de-prioritization. Every N days of inactivity, a ticket would drop one priority point (and I think higher priority tickets were de-prioritized at a higher rate). The theory was that anything that was truly high priority would have been done. In other words, things that we left on the queue were actually lower priority than marked. Given our extremely limited developer-hours, it was important to stay focused on the things that actually mattered.
Backing up - and looking at it years later gives you a perspective on your thinking process in the past years
Delete - leaves lean set of Todos to focus on, without blogging down by laundry list of old things.
> I once read a statement attributed to Steve Ballmer that every six months, he tears his todo list in half and throws the bottom half away. If anything far down that list was actually a priority, it will naturally get re-added (by thinking of it again, in response to a customer, etc.).
"Knowing when to quit is as important as knowing when not to quit. Hard work does not always pay off."
This is the entire subject of Seth Godin's _The Dip_. I'm not a huge fan of this breed of books, but if someone is looking for a lesson on this topic, I would having a look at that book. It's very short -- you can read it in under an hour. It provides a decent mental framework for thinking through the question of whether you should continue on your current path, or quit and switch gears.
Is that the correct phrasing? It would imply that a fool that never wins and never quits should quit... but if quitters never win this fool would be sure to not win once they've quit.
Interesting, I'm going have to look into this book. I think the hardest part for me personally when I'm making my "quitting" decision is that my emotional attachment tends to supersede my logical thinking.
