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#clojure-uk
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2016-05-09
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agile_geek05:05:53

Morning from a sunny Newcastle Central Station.

agile_geek07:05:00

Lucky station is nice and sunny today as all trains south have been cancelled or delayed so I may be spending some time here!

agile_geek07:05:16

They're putting buses on but I really don't fancy 7 hours on a coach!

agile_geek08:05:39

Yep! It's looking like track is clear but delays until 12pm. Faced with choice of standing up whole way to London or going this afternoon I may just write the day off and travel later. Good chance to learn some stuff. I have decamped to Starbucks across road as, much as I love Victorian train stations, they aren't well supplied with power points!

glenjamin08:05:04

no remote work capabilities then?

agile_geek08:05:19

Nope. I am not allowed to work on my laptop and I don't lug both my machine and works 'brick' (sorry laptop) home with me.

agile_geek08:05:59

Also my VPN hasn't worked for weeks (usual wait of 3 weeks for an IT ticket to be looked at!)

agile_geek08:05:19

I am having coffee with the CIO of Digital (one of the 500 CIO's in the bank!) on Wednesday so may add this to the incredibly long list of 'stuff to fix'

mccraigmccraig08:05:57

i think someone somewhere might have misunderstood the word 'chief'

glenjamin08:05:28

I’ve seen the problem were you want to promote senior engineers, and have to start making up qualifiers

glenjamin08:05:41

chief, principal, principle

glenjamin08:05:01

which have an implied singular

thomas09:05:16

CIO of Digital? So he/she is either on or off? Zero or one?

agile_geek09:05:46

I think he is zero!

agile_geek09:05:21

@glenjamin: oh , in no way shape or form is he a developer!

glenjamin09:05:46

i meant the pattern more generally where you have a large org and want to denote hierarchy, it leads to lots of made up seniority qualifiers in the middle

agile_geek09:05:07

He runs a dept of 1000+ ppl (there are over 600 devs on just the desktop Internet banking app!) but you can't help but trip over 'C' of somethings around the bank. You're nobody if you don't have hundreds of ppl in the pyramid below u to step on

agile_geek09:05:37

He does actually have some really good ideas and is driving some (for the bank) radical cultural disruption (for the better)

agile_geek09:05:23

@glenjamin: how do u think I got CTO as a job title! (only developer in the org!)

gjnoonan09:05:58

Your Day sounds eventful @agile_geek

gjnoonan09:05:58

My daugher"dropped" both my personal and work phone in the toilet first thing .. which is amazeballs when I'm on call (or even when not)

agile_geek09:05:05

@gjnoonan: oh dear. Neither of us having good day!

thomas09:05:03

@gjnoonan: you are !@#$ed…

thomas09:05:07

@agile_geek: 600 people? that is an awful lot… I never quite understand why some projects need that many people.

thomas09:05:11

reminds me of a question Fred Brooks got asked 15 years ago… if a project is late and instead of adding people you remove people. will it go faster? and the answer was ye, as long as you remove the right people.

mccraigmccraig09:05:42

@agile_geek: clearly level-of-levels+function is the sensible way of describing people. "i'm a L1/4 scrobbler" "he's the 6/6 CEO", "the 5/6 CIO"

agile_geek09:05:46

@thomas: they just don't! If you know anything about Conway's law imagine the architecture of a single app with an amorphous blob of that many devs working on it!

agile_geek09:05:02

Ball of mud just doesn't convey even close to the mess

agile_geek10:05:46

@thomas talking of Fred, I lost my temper with a programme manager who I OH on phone saying "How many ppl do I need to add to get this delivered on time". I said "What you've just suggested is like me giving u and 3 other PMs The Mythical Man Month but u get pages 1,5,9, other PM gets pages 2, 6, 10 and so on then I'll ask u collectively to explain the book to me". He still didn't get it.

thomas10:05:34

@agile_geek: you should have told him minus X people.

thomas10:05:16

@mccraigmccraig: I am a 1/9 code monkey 🐵

mccraigmccraig10:05:55

@thomas: i'm a 2/2 CCM 🐵

gjnoonan10:05:51

CCM, I like it

thomas10:05:51

I suspect only the military has more levels than my employer

mccraigmccraig10:05:59

@thomas: 9 !!! i wonder what the deepest org tree is

thomas10:05:54

wow… my employer is doing really well here…

thomas10:05:24

maybe some other government department can do better

thomas10:05:58

in my previous role it even included 3 countries as well! (UK, FR, US)

agile_geek10:05:19

When will they learn that 32 way branching persistent tries are the way to go?

thomas10:05:55

that will take a long time…. unfortunately.

agile_geek11:05:40

Does that mean if you add a leaf node CM you structurally share the existing team?

dharrigan13:05:46

what does the #' mean in front of something like #'foo where foo is a def?

mccraigmccraig13:05:54

@dharrigan: you get the var foo rather than whatever it refers to... you can then deref it to get what it refers to

dharrigan13:05:20

so if the def was "(def foo (something))" then instead of (something) being passed into a function, it would be the entirety of (def foo (something))?

dharrigan13:05:41

Something like quoting a list as in '(1 2 3) to pass in the list rather than it trying to eval the list?