vtbassmatt

قبل 9 أيامdiscuss

What vehicle did Mazda screw this up so badly in? Neither of my Mazdas with CarPlay disable the touchscreen in CarPlay. The ‘21 Miata disables it while in motion (which sucks badly, and I just learned there’s a hack to fix). The ‘24 CX-5 doesn’t ever disable the touchscreen.

vtbassmatt

الشهر الماضيdiscuss

Heads up, most of the community migrated off Fandom a little while ago. https://mtg.wiki/page/Judge_Tower

vtbassmatt

الشهر الماضيdiscuss

Oops, I forgot this one wasn't public. Sorry! Auth was implemented using a library I don't know much about, so I figured better safe than sorry.

vtbassmatt

الشهر الماضيdiscuss

Mostly games-adjacent hobby tools, it turns out.

(Edit: forgotten in first edition) A cookbook to store the recipes my family likes to cook so I can eventually break up with Pinterest: https://github.com/vtbassmatt/Cookbook

A data extraction pipeline and search engine for a new card game called Mood Swings: https://moodswingsdata.github.io and https://moodswingsdata.github.io/feelings.

An app to let my friends and me build a Magic: the Gathering cube iteratively together: https://github.com/vtbassmatt/popcorn-cube

A custom wiki engine for a family of podcasts I enjoy: https://github.com/vtbassmatt/totalus-wikium

A systemd log viewer for the web: https://github.com/vtbassmatt/djournal

vtbassmatt

قبل شهرينdiscuss

There’s a community keeping it alive with fresh content: https://nullsignal.games/

I sadly haven’t convinced my MtG playgroup (or family or other friends) to try it with me.

vtbassmatt

قبل شهرينdiscuss

Wait, is this Azure or GitHub who had the booth? If it was GitHub, I’m super confused and there must have been some serious missing context. I was at GitHub from 2020-2023 and am not aware of _any_ Windows usage in the service. The only meaningful Windows footprint was for client dev (`gh`, GitHub Desktop, etc.) and even there, Windows was the exception. Service side is all Linux; most engineers worked from a Mac.

If the context was an Azure booth, I’m still mildly surprised (they’ve long been invested in beyond-Windows) but not shocked.

(Edit: I forgot about the Actions stack. Some of that was on Windows. I was pretty far removed from that world and much closer to the classic Ruby monolith side.)

vtbassmatt

قبل شهرينdiscuss

It feels wrong to say something nice about Ticketmaster, but you don't need their app to add concert tickets to Apple Wallet (at least at all the venues where I live). I strictly use their website because I don't trust them.

I've never tried to pay with Apple Pay on ticketmaster.com, but I assume I could do that as well.

vtbassmatt

قبل شهرينdiscuss

If you ever find yourself in Raleigh, Videri Chocolate offers tours! https://viderichocolatefactory.com/

vtbassmatt

قبل 4 أشهرdiscuss

The opposite is also true: Apple’s parental controls fail closed in inscrutable and impossible to debug ways. Yesterday, in order to share an iPad’s location with my iPhone, I had to totally disable managing Screen Time on the device. Every time I would click “share with <my name>”, the damn thing would tell me “Location settings can’t be updated right now, try again later”. No other combination of “solutions” on the Apple support forum, the random blogspam links, or the oh-so-helpful search-AI-summary thing even made a dent. I suspect something in the underlying data model was out of sync with the UI or something. Incredibly frustrating experience from the “it just works” vendor.

vtbassmatt

قبل 6 أشهرdiscuss

None of this matches my experience as a board member and officer at a nonprofit, nor what I observe with my partner who has worked at multiple nonprofits.

I don’t understand the distinction you’re drawing between “charity” and “nonprofit”. iNaturalist is a 501c3, so it’s a charity [1]. One of my partner’s previous 501c3 employers produced an app to aid with their mission.

Let me reframe your first bullet to reflect my lived experience (both in the nonprofit world and building software at a for-profit):

> Decisions at a charity feeding the poor are high-stakes and often controversial compared with decisions for a product focused app organization. If people are making a lot of decisions bottom-up at the charity, the scarce budget won’t stretch to cover the needs of the mission. In a product-focused organization, decisions are much lower stakes. Through the magic of version control, A/B testing, and vendor app stores, you rarely need to commit deeply to decisions, so the individual developer can make the initial call: will we use this app icon design or that one? Will we have one app for professionals and one for laypeople or a unified app? Will we use SVM or a neural network? Ship, learn, iterate.

My for-profit employer explicitly hires for (or at least used to) “passion” and intrinsic motivation. And there are several corporations I’m not willing to work for despite their reputation for high compensation. I think it’s pretty tenuous to connect org structure with motivation so directly and concretely.

The third bullet is uninformed. 501c3s answer to the people they derive funding from, their customers/clients/served population, their board, and the government (tax authority) whether they’re putting spaghetti on plates or pixels on screens. The IRS has a pretty readable intro to the requirements [2].

This kind of first-principles reasoning from vibes about what it must be like is seductive but often misleading. I encourage everyone I can to serve on a nonprofit board. The organizations can usually benefit from the perspective and different type of thinking that computer people bring, and it’ll open your eyes to new perspectives about your own work and life!

[1] https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/921296468

[2] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...

vtbassmatt

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

This was exactly my experience trying to buy an Apple Watch from the Apple Store just before the pandemic. I had done all the research ahead of time and knew exactly what I needed. “Do you have an appointment?” No. “Oh, it’ll be about 45 minutes before someone can help you.” But I know what I want and just need you to ring me up. “I’m sorry, 45 minutes.”

Hands down the strangest retail interaction I’ve ever had. Frustrated, I went to the Best Buy literally in the mall’s parking lot and was on my way in under 10 minutes with the watch I wanted. I guess Apple still won here since I bought the product anyhow?

vtbassmatt

قبل 6 سنواتdiscuss

Small nitpick: Kindergarteners are expected to count to 100. At least, that's the case in my county (Wake) in a state not known for K-12 excellence (North Carolina).

vtbassmatt

قبل 9 سنواتdiscuss

Extension to VSTS [1], sorry. We're working with them on making the extension available to the public. It's possible we could open source it as well; I'll poke around.

[1] https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/integrate/extensions...

vtbassmatt

قبل 9 سنواتdiscuss

SD was based on a very old Perforce as well.

vtbassmatt

قبل 9 سنواتdiscuss

Lots and lots of external customers, and a handful of internal folks. FWIW Windows was never on TFVC (at least not the main development group).

vtbassmatt

قبل 9 سنواتdiscuss

Windows developed an extension that lets them do conflict resolution in the web. We have a server-side API that it calls into, but the extension isn't fundamentally different from using BeyondCompare or $YOUR_FAVORTE_MERGETOOL.

vtbassmatt

قبل 9 سنواتdiscuss

edit: forgot, no Markdown here

Do you mean across all of Microsoft? Different teams have different structures. Speaking only for TFS and VSTS, we have a single repo containing the code for both, a handful of "adjunct" repos containing tools like GVFS, a repo for the documentation [1], and a bunch of open source repos for the build and release agent [2], agent tasks [3], API samples [4], and probably more I don't know about.

[1] https://www.visualstudio.com/docs

[2] https://github.com/microsoft/vsts-agent

[3] https://github.com/Microsoft/vsts-tasks

[4] https://github.com/Microsoft/vsts-dotnet-samples

vtbassmatt

قبل 9 سنواتdiscuss

Different divisions have had different stances on open source code for a long time. Somewhere I still have the t-shirt from our first "Open Source Day" event back in 2008 (and it's not like that was the first time any MS employee had ever considered using open source). Things are a lot more standardized now, with a big push from both the top and the bottom to use open source wherever it makes sense. Why reinvent the wheel?

vtbassmatt

قبل 9 سنواتdiscuss

No, we'll keep the SD servers around for a while for servicing older products. We also have a "breadcrumbing" system that lets an engineer follow a file's history back from Git to the old system.

vtbassmatt

قبل 9 سنواتdiscuss

As the linked article says, modularizing and living in separate repos was the plan of record for a while. But after evaluating the tradeoffs, we decided that Windows needs to optimize for big, rapid refactors at this stage in its development. "Easy to make sweeping changes" also means "easy to clean up architecture and refactor for cleaner boundaries".

The Windows build system is where component boundaries get enforced. Having version control introduce additional arbitrary boundaries makes the problem of good modularity harder to solve.

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