On the contrary, the best products are typically built by the users of the products. If you are building a product you don't use, it will be worse than if you used it.
Users should be everywhere, in and out of engineering.
There are many leaders that use information as a tool that serves their own needs.
They may have the context, but they are either too focused on their own job to share it, or actively manage dissemination so they can manipulate the organization.
In my experience, this is the typical operating mode, though I do not think it is sinister or malicious - just natural.
The whole point of micro-services is to manage dependencies independently across service boundaries, using the API as the contract, not the internal libraries.
Then you can implement a service in Java, Python, Rust, C++, etc, and it doesn't matter.
Coupling your postgres db to your elasticsearch cluster via a hard library dependency impossibly heavy. The same insight applies to your bespoke services.
In practice, there are a number of factors which make using Kelly more difficult than in toy examples.
What is your bankroll? Cash on hand? Total net worth? Liquid net work? Future earned income?
Depending on the size of your bankroll, a number of factors come in to play. For example, if your bankroll is $100 and you lose it all it's typically not a big deal. If you have a $1 million bankroll, then you are likely more adverse to risking it.
What is the expected value? Is it known? Is it stationary? Is the game honest?
Depending on the statistical profile of your expected value, you are going to have to make significant adjustments to how you approach bet sizing. In domains where you can only estimate your EV, and which are rife with cheats (e.g. poker), you need to size your wagers under significant uncertainty.
What bet sizes are available?
In practice, you won't have a continuous range of bet sizes you can make. You will typically have discrete bet sizes within a fixed range, say $5-$500 in increments of $5 or $25. If your bankroll falls to low you will be shut out of the game. If your bankroll gets too high, you will no longer be able to maximize your returns.
At the end of the day, professional gamblers are often wagering at half-kelly, or even at quarter-kelly, due in large part to all these complexities and others.
Run valgrind on any large successful code base and you will find tons of memory corruption. It just happens to occur in places where it does not matter.
If you pay a lot for parking or don't use the car much this tracks. But if you have the volume, then owning a car is cheaper.
An affordable mid size car costs roughly $6k per year total cost for a new car, and about 2/3 that for a used car.
If you commute daily to work, that is 500 trips per year. Two weekend trips adds another 100 per year. Now we are talking about ~$10/trip if you own your car.
When you add the premium value you get from flexibility, then it's an even better deal. If you only drive 50x a year then yeah, just use services.
Really? do you want to see every little receipt from the GP?
I'll give a rough cost with my small sedan pre-pandemic
- Gas every 2 weeks (30 mile commute to work), fillin up the car is about $60. so $120 for gas. 120/month is 1440/year
- DMV costs are $150 a year
- car wash every few months. Let's make it monthly and more expensive than my actual washes. $50/month, 600 a year
- oil change every 3 months or so (probably less, but let's be conservative here). $70/quarter, 280/year.
- occasional repairs due to being an old car. sporadic, but let's throw in maybe $300 a year total.
- Finally, $100/month for insurance. $1200/Year.
so, ~4000/year. Given that that was a daily commute along with other short travel, it's cheaper than the idea of relying on taxis. Even if it was as cheap as $10/ride, it'd cost $4800/year to get to work alone. For my commute, it'd be more like $40-50/ride. Not even close.
ofc the rub here is that these are the costs for a paid off car, so if you don't own a car you need to factor in car payments, or the one time cost grabbing a used car. I grabbed my car for $5k before the car market (and every other market) went to hell, so it still very quickly paid for itself.
It's all down to miles per year, a new car should last 100k miles "without major repairs" and if you drive 10k miles a year (whatever, if it's more it's more in favor of the owner) a car should last at least 10 years.
A new car is $40k, a 10 year old car seems to go for about $10k, so say $3k a year. So with a brand new car, still getting "around" that $6-7k a year.
Or to put it another way - at some point it HAS to be cheaper to own, because someone owns the car that is driving you around!
How is an oil change every 3 months stupid? Every 3000 miles I get a change, and I had to commute a minimum of 70 miles a day. Comes out to 42 days per milestone, or 8-9 weeks if only counting weekdays. I felt like I always put it off and the math checks out.
My driving went way down during the pandemic, but it's probably a better normal metric to measure my routine before a global anamloly.
>600 a year on car washes?
I was being very generous there to prove a point. I don't do a car wash monthly and I don't get the highest tier of car wash either.
Even the "stupidest" spending on my car for daily travel and I don't come within a stone's throw of justifying taxis, financially speaking save on.
I think I last got an oil change early on during the pandemic.
Sometime around then.
I do think my car needs a car wash. Not necessarily this month, but definitely within the next year or so. It costs $5 in quarters at the car wash. Maybe $10. Not $600 a year.
If you are spending $600 a year on car washes, I want to start a business, and I want you, specifically you, as my customer.
I don’t like analogies to concepts from economics for this reason; it seems like they are often more complicated than the programming thing that is being described, and economics is a whole ‘nother specialty.
The code to produce those runnable programs is a liability.
It's a necessary liability for a sustainable software business, as without the code fixing bugs is nigh-impossible (though not theoretically impossible - long-ago programmers wrote and read raw machine code).
But, the code itself is not what produces value. That's the code's output.
(Yes, you could be clever and say "but what about interpreted languages?"
I'd respond by pointing out that it's pretty rare to distribute a pile of executable code files to end users. Front-end JS only producing UX if delivered as part of a website, and similar principles hold for other interpreted languages - they're effectively object files once deployed, as in any deployment they're being run by the interpreter, not read by a human.)
> The code to produce those runnable programs is a liability.
That is total nonsense. So you throw away all your code after you built the program binary to avoid the liability? Don't think so, that code is a massive asset and throwing it away would make continuing the project unfeasible most of the time.
> It's a necessary liability for a sustainable software business, as without the code fixing bugs is nigh-impossible
Ok, so you agree with me, the code is a massive asset since it is the code that lets you change the program. Code is there to help programmers do their work, that is valuable as you say.
> But, the code itself is not what produces value. That's the code's output.
Both produces value. The code is valuable since it makes it easier to inspect and change the program. That is value. It isn't uncommon to sell source code access for products, why would anyone pay for that if seeing the source code is a liability? No, of course it is an asset, people arguing otherwise have just gotten too hooked on the "code is bad" mantra and try to argue all code is bad even though code obviously is very valuable.
Edit: And to be even more clear, throwing away the code and trying to work directly with a program binary creates technical debt, that is way worse debt than keeping the source code around. Code isn't inherently technical debt.
Code produces value for programmers, but none for end users. Software businesses can thus usually only charge end users for access to the runnable programs (or running programs, in an SaaS business's case).
You're certainly right that when a business's customers include programmers who want to extend or modify the programs, the source code can be an asset. I was mistaken to say categorically that code's never an asset.
On average, though, I think it's still more often a liability on the balance sheet.
It's why we lionize programmers who cut out thousands of lines without removing any features - they reduced the liabilities while retaining all the assets.
You don’t know that. The responses in the video don’t line up. That blog post is just an alternative text prompt based version of what they showed on video.
Users should be everywhere, in and out of engineering.