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Comment Re:Project Management or Business Analyst (Score 3, Interesting) 250

+1

Not to be sexist, but most women prefer jobs that include more interaction with people and less time spent in solo problem solving, so it's not terribly surprising that she does't love coding. This isn't to say there aren't women who really like coding, or even introverted women who find working with people all day to be unpleasant. There are all kinds... but on average my observation is that women prefer more human interaction.

So, assuming that your wife falls into that category, there are lots of roles in and around software development that are more people-focused. Project management requires an additional set of skills, both people skills and management skills, but it's eminently learnable, and having a technical background is very valuable -- as long as it doesn't cause her to second-guess what the developers are telling her (always a risk with PMs, and even more with those whose technical background is shallower than they think it is. There's a tendency to assume that everything they don't know how to do is easy.)

Business Analyst is another good one. It, again, requires some additional skills she probably doesn't have but can learn. Industry knowledge tends to be important, but most companies are okay with analysts learning that context on the job. She also needs to learn how to gather and document requirements. A technical background is useful there because good requirements need quite a bit more precision than most non-technical people are used to. There's also a risk; formerly-technical BAs have a tendency to overspecify. An important skill for this role which isn't so easy to learn is writing. Good BAs are excellent writers, able to concisely and accurately boil complex issues down to simple statements.

Another option that might be excellent if she can swing it is Systems or Application Architect. Companies generally want experienced, senior developers to move into these roles, but smart but less-experienced people can do it as well. Architects take the business requirements and convert them into high-level technical plans/architectures. Architects tend to spend less time interacting with people than PMs or BAs, but still quite a bit since they provide the primary interface between the technical and business teams. Architects need to have good technical skills and good "taste", meaning a good feel for what sorts of structures are easy to build, easy to maintain and flexible, and for how to intelligently trade those issues off. They also need to be good at translating technical issues into language the business people can understand. Honestly I expect that your wife probably doesn't have the depth of experience needed to make a good architect, but I thought I'd throw it out.

Another that might be good if she's a good writer and enjoys writing is technical writing. Good tech writers have greater need for writing skill than they do technical skill, but the latter is very valuable because it enables them to more quickly and accurately understand the information that needs to be documented.

In smaller companies a lot of these roles get mixed and combined with other business roles, so another good option is to look for a position that isn't necessarily directly related to software development, but could benefit from having a deeply IT-literate person.

Finally, the option that I've long thought I'd take if I ever got tired of writing code is the law. It's a lot of additional training, but I think there is a deep and growing need for attorneys who understand technology. This is especially true in the areas of patent and copyright law, but I think it applies in many areas. Of course, the law may not have any attraction whatsoever for your wife.

Whatever, I'd really encourage her to take the time to figure out what she wants to do, and do that, rather than settling for something she doesn't really like. We so much of our lives working that it's really a waste to spend it doing something we don't like.

Comment Re:The founding documents present a path... (Score 1) 161

The electorate fully agrees with him.

This is completely untrue. The electorate is pretty divided, and whether you can find a majority depends which poll you look at, and which week. The fact is that there is a significant part of the electorate that thinks bulk surveillance is fine because they have nothing to hide and it keeps us safe. That they're wrong on both counts doesn't change their opinion, or their votes

Congress mostly agrees with him.

And yet they passed the USA Freedom Act which, although better than the PATRIOT Act, still authorizes way too much surveillance. And in the process they failed to do anything to curtail article 702 of the FISA, which is the basis for the FISA court's ruling -- as was completely predictable before passage of USA Freedom. The argument is that while article 702 authorizes only surveillance of foreign people, the court considers it perfectly reasonable for the NSA to hoover up ALL the data and then figure out later what they can and cannot look at. This all comes back to the NSA's choice to define "collect" as "look at", since the law hadn't defined the term.

Congress had a perfect opportunity to define "collect" as "collect", and chose not to.

Yeah, we have a problem here. And the "democratically elected government" ain't it.

The problem is fundamentally the electorate, which isn't sufficiently convinced that bulk data collection is a bad thing. If 80% of the voters wanted it shut down, enough to make it a major election issue, it would be shut down. But as is Congress knows that with a slim majority (at best) concerned about data collection, if they shut it down and then Something Bad happened the voters would turn on them like a rabid dog.

The system isn't perfect, but it is basically working as intended. We just need to convince more of our fellow Americans that surveillance is bad.

Comment Re:Apples and oranges (Score 2) 107

... it's just a little more than 1% the size of OpenSSL...Notably, s2n does not provide all the additional cryptographic functions that OpenSSL provides in libcrypto, it only provides the SSL/TLS functions....

So then, aren't size comparisons between OpenSSL and s2n at best useless, and at worst intentionally misleading?

No, but this particular comparison is. Besides all of the stuff s2n doesn't provide, s2n actually uses OpenSSL's libcrypto to provide the implementations of all of its crypto algorithm. A useful comparison could be made between OpenSSL's TLS layer and s2n, with some caveats listing the TLS features s2n doesn't provide.

Note that none of this means that s2n doesn't have value. If you don't need the other OpenSSL features, it's a lot less code to audit.

Comment Re:Stores (Score 2) 266

I have made practical, durable, every day objects.
From small things like keychains to maxing out the envelope of a usual 3d printer. Hell, i even have 3d printed parts under the hood of my race car :D Yes, i actually race it, and have used those parts for a year now and they are holding up just fine and the car is rather quick actually, thanks for asking.

Comment Re:plastic is for junk (Score 2) 266

lol. Quite to the contrary.
True - ABS has limited heat cycles, and lowish glass transition temperature, but it's not immediately liquid @ 105C.

I've been using velocity stacks made from ABS on a race car for almost a year now - no issues what-so-ever, even tho it's the cheapest kind of ABS and isn't chemical resistant. They work brilliantly.

Nylon parts i've been using as well, harder to print due to the prep tho, but from Nylon which has even lower glass transition temperature car manufacturers make intake manifolds these days - even for turbocharged. Glass transition of 85C.
http://www.matbase.com/materia...

Comment Re:Soooo... (Score 5, Informative) 44

Like most of the up-voted posters here, I think you're missing the point. This new service isn't a Google Code replacement or a Github competitor. It's an add-on for cloud-based hosting, so people who are hosting systems on Google App Engine or Compute Engine can keep their source there as well, with nice tools for working with the code online, managing releases and even live debugging... if there's a problem with your running app you can debug it instantly. The system snapshots the live system so it's not interrupted and then gives you an online debugger so you can examine the state, step through the code, etc.

It's a value-added feature on a paid cloud hosting service, not a place to host your latest open source project. That's what Github is for.

Comment Re:Google's IPv6 SMTP servers (Score 3, Interesting) 287

I know our servers won't accept it either since they don't even listen on it, are you saying Google is unusual in not accepting IPv6 only email? 'cause I reckon that's "standard".

Yes, Google is unusual - they do listen on IPv6 SMTP, but they reject the incoming mail as possible spam way more often than when it is being sent to them over IPv4. I had the same problem, and I had to explicitly force IPv4 for outgoing SMTP to Google in my Postfix configuration.

Comment Re:Less suspect than the others (Score 5, Interesting) 78

But one of the vulnerabilities I've pointed out recently to proxy maintainers is that it's become quite commonplace to host SSL based traffic on an external router or load balancer, and carry it entirely unencrypted between that load balancer and the local server. It often eases maintenance of SSL keys and allows far less expensive, small servers to handle the actual traffic and allows the cost of robust SSL services to be shared more effectively.

Google's encryption is end-to-end. It's also not SSL-based, but instead much simpler and more robust (and more efficient), though there's nothing proprietary or custom about the encryption ciphers or protocols used (Google employs lots of cryptographers who would quickly stomp on any questionable designs). I work for Google and used to do stuff related to internal network encryption though I worked on a different aspect of it, focused on securing payments data (credit card numbers, etc.).

I think it would be awesome if Google were to publish the details of its security infrastructure, which is dramatically better than anything I saw in my 15 years as a security consultant, but AFAIK that hasn't been done so I have to keep my comments vague and high-level.

I'll also point out, since I know it has been mentioned publicly, that Google didn't actually start doing all of the link encryption in response to Snowden's revelations. It was a project that was already well under way. Snowden's information did cause the project to be accelerated, though.

From what I saw, the main effect was that the tolerance for exceptions to the encryption requirement dropped basically to zero. In an enormous and complex infrastructure like Google's there are always dozens of corner cases where anything you'd like to do is really hard for one reason or another, and so big infrastructure changes tend to take years to fully deploy, to avoid requiring project teams to drop all their productive work in order to avoid breakage from the change. Snowden's data changed the encryption mandate from "You need to get this done as soon as you can" to "Encryption will be on 100% by date X, no exceptions. If you can't see how to make it work, come talk to us and we'll help." (X was single-digit weeks away).

I know one team who had to deploy a spit-and-baling-wire construction to enable their protocol to be encrypted, and then had to fight with serious performance degradation until they got a well-designed and tested replacement in place. They begged for permission to turn off encryption for a while so they could focus on building the solid replacement rather than spending their time fighting production fires caused by the interim solution... and they were denied. This was for an important production service related to financial systems, too, which gives you a good idea of how serious Google was about the encryption mandate.

Thank you, Edward Snowden!

(I want to be sure no one thinks that last line is sarcastic. It's not. At all. I think Edward Snowden is one of the great American heroes, and I think that history will eventually give him his considerable due. I don't know anyone on the team I mentioned who would disagree, either, even though it caused them some weeks of long hours and stress.)

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