Dustin Kirkland here, Product Manager for Ubuntu as an OS platform (long time listener, first time caller).
I'm interested in HackerNews feedback and feature requests for the Ubuntu 17.10 development cycle, which opens up at the end of April, and culminates in the 17.10 release in October 2017. This is the first time we've ever posed this question to the garrulous HN crowd, so I'm excited about it, and I'm sure this will be interesting!
Please include in your replies the following bullets:
- DESCRIPTION: A lengthier description of the feature. Bonus points for constructive criticism ;-)
- ROLE/AFFILIATION: (Optional, your job role and affiliation)
We're super interested in your feedback! Everything is fair game -- Kernel, Security, Desktop apps, Unity/Mir/Wayland/Gnome, Snap packages, Kubernetes, Docker, OpenStack, Juju, MAAS, Landscape, default installed packages (add or remove), cloud images, and many more I'm sure I've forgotten...
17.10 will be our 3rd and final "developer" release, before we open the 18.04 LTS (long term support, enterprise release) after October 2017 (and release in April 2018), so this is our last chance to pull in any big, substantive changes.
Going anonymous for this. I am just an average project manager who happened to be at the right tech company at the right time. They had a big exit and suddenly my stocks are worth $8M (the money came in my account last week).
I am just an average guy. I am 43 and middle level tech manager.I know coding (but nothing superb). I know business (but nothing much). I am not particularly very hardworking or particularly super intelligent. Not dumb or lazy - just average.
The point is I can probably find another similar job but probably nothing much higher.
I have two kids and a nice wife. I have a nice, small house and two small cars. Everything paid for. I have no debts or “vices”. I do not like smoking, drinking or going out. I do not think I have any real hobbies.
Just a simple guy with simple life and then this happens. What should I do? Should I donate it? Should I hire a personal wealth manager? Should I retire?
I live in a "Top 10 most dangerous cities in the U.S." What can I do to help? It seems like the most common solution for people who are educated and well off is to move. To get out of the situation, which is understandable. However, this causes a brain drain and leave the city in a worse place.
I don't want to do that, I want to uplift if I can. What is the micro thing I can do today, that can have a chance of a macro change tomorrow?
I work at a startup with ~50 employees (and have always worked at startups). Love the work and the people. Recently we were acquired by $LARGE_CORPORATION and the experience has been a living hell for all of us. Things that should take a few days take a few weeks. Things that should take a few weeks take a few quarters. It's slowly driving me insane.
The experience is best shared as a story.
I'm working on migrating our apps to the parent company's VM launching and deploy platform. Should be fairly straightforward, I think. Unfortunately, the deploy tooling isn't entirely compatible with our app so I ask the team if they can implement $X feature to support our app.
The first engineer I talk to doesn't even attempt to answer my question but redirects me to their manager. Ok, that's odd, I think, but whatever.
Manager says sure, just fill out this feature request doc. It's a Google Docs template with 4 (!) pages of required documentation to just explain why I want this feature implemented. It asks for my team name, the motivation, why I can't solve the problem some other way, yada yada...ok, I guess it's good to document your work, so sure. I fill it out and submit it.
No response after two days. Then I get an automated email that their skip level manager has approved the work. Huh? This is followed by an email that the team's eng manager approved the work. Why do two layers of management need to approve work on something they have no knowledge about?
Finally, after many rounds of arguing about why this needs to be done in the first place (ahem: you told us to migrate to your platform, and it literally does not work for our app), they quote us a delivery timeline of end of Q1 in 2022.
At this point I am in absolute shock. This should take no more than a few days to implement.
So I reach out to the manager and ask what is going on. This is a simple task, I said. Why does it take an entire quarter for your team to deliver? He doesn't have an answer.
I tell him I'm happy to fix the issue myself, if they link me to the relevant codebase. "It shouldn't be too hard to dig in and submit a patch," I think to myself. He says he cannot give me access to the codebase for compliance reasons, and that only members of his team have R/W on that repo. What???
This is insane. And this entire time I was only alllowed to interact with managers and have not spoken to a single engineer about the actual technical details. It is impossible to get anything done here now.
Is this how it's like at all large companies? What should I do?
If you were to quit your developer job today and move away from the tech world for a little while, what job would you do? Or what domain would interest you?
I was having trouble accessing my account, so I gave a call to customer service. The service rep proceeded to (accurately) describe my own password to me. Should I report this somewhere? I'm not really sure what to do.
I recently came into some money and now I have $450K in cash burning a hole in my pocket.
I have about $50K in an index fund, own land worth $150K (paid off) and another $200K in industrial real estate investments.
Given this spread, what should I do with the cash? I'm not comfortable investing the entirety into an index fund, given the current socio-political climate.
My company had some lateral movement which, somewhat surprisingly, resulted in me being promoted to "Lead Architect". It's just a fancy title because we don't have any other designated software architects. There was, in any case, technical responsibility that needed to be redistributed, so that's what happened, and titles shifted accordingly.
In the past, I had used my training budget for software architecture certifications, which was met positively by my team lead and management.
While I _wanted_ to take on that role _eventually_, I was surprised to have it happen so early. What are the things I need to learn ASAP? What things do I need to do? What should I study/read?
Chris Lamb here, Debian Project Leader. As a bit of background, I've been around the "startup" scene on and off, even participating in YCombinator during S12. I have a few side projects here and there and I also do a lot of full-stack web development using Python/Django.
I'm very much interested in soliciting your feedback and feature requests for the Debian 10 ("buster") development cycle which opens up tomorrow after the release of "stretch" today. This is obviously a shameless appropriation of Ubuntu's post a few months ago and some requests would definitely overlap but I feel we could get some interesting replies nonetheless.
Please include in your replies the following bullets:
- HEADLINE: 1-line description of the request
- DESCRIPTION: A lengthier description of the feature. Bonus points for constructive criticism...
- DISTRIBUTION: (Optional) [stable, testing, unstable, or even a Debian deriviative]
- ROLE/AFFILIATION: (Optional, your job role and affiliation)
We would be exteremely interested in your feedback! Everything is fair game -- kernel, security, community, default settings, architectures, init systems (!), desktop, Docker, documentation, default packages, cloud images, etc. etc.. Feel free to comment even if you are using a Debian derivative such as Ubuntu, Mint, etc. too.
I’m curious as to the tools or techniques people use to keep track of things like bookmarks, snippets of code or text, etc.?
I’ve used a variety of tools (simple browser bookmarks, Pinboard, Evernote, a text file, etc) but have never been very happy with any of the solutions.
Anyone have great tools or methods of storing bits of info for later access?
I’m thinking something that at a minimum has:
- Search
- Tagging
- Support for different content types (links, text, video embeds, photos, etc)
- Also would be nice to have mobile app, browser extension, API, Zappier integration, etc
Dustin Kirkland here, Product Manager for Ubuntu as an OS platform (long time listener, first time caller).
I'm interested in HackerNews feedback and feature requests for the Ubuntu 17.10 development cycle, which opens up at the end of April, and culminates in the 17.10 release in October 2017. This is the first time we've ever posed this question to the garrulous HN crowd, so I'm excited about it, and I'm sure this will be interesting!
Please include in your replies the following bullets:
- FLAVOR: [Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core]
- HEADLINE: 1-line description of the request
- DESCRIPTION: A lengthier description of the feature. Bonus points for constructive criticism ;-)
- ROLE/AFFILIATION: (Optional, your job role and affiliation)
We're super interested in your feedback! Everything is fair game -- Kernel, Security, Desktop apps, Unity/Mir/Wayland/Gnome, Snap packages, Kubernetes, Docker, OpenStack, Juju, MAAS, Landscape, default installed packages (add or remove), cloud images, and many more I'm sure I've forgotten...
17.10 will be our 3rd and final "developer" release, before we open the 18.04 LTS (long term support, enterprise release) after October 2017 (and release in April 2018), so this is our last chance to pull in any big, substantive changes.
Thanks, HN!
:-Dustin
https://twitter.com/dustinkirkland