So true. My fantasy company (please anyone start it) is "reverse-Amazon-prime"-- Remove anything from your house in 2 days. Then you have all the connections to a) sell and share the money back with me, b) donate it, or c) dispose of it responsibly. This would be so awesome done right with solid research into the best ways to do all of the above for a huge variety of stuff.
The last time I moved house, I paid a removalist to get rid of a bunch of my stuff. Paid them by volume of removed material; they did all the work to take the stuff away. (I basically said "take everything in that room over there"). Took a couple hours, and it was done.
They disposed of everything responsibly, and would try to sell things which were reusable or salvageable. The cost to me was dead cheap, because most of their profit (I assume) came from reselling the stuff that could be salvaged.
This was a thing about 10 years ago, maybe longer. Lots of stores started up that would list your stuff on eBay for a percentage of the price. That lasted for a year or so and all those stores closed up shop.
It's too bad because that seemed like a reasonable system: people would get to be proficient at pricing, describing and listing items on eBay and the sales price at a public auction seemed like a pretty accurate value for what something was "really worth".
My wife used to take things that our kids outgrew to resale shops. She still is able to take some things that we no longer use but was easier with kid stuff.
I assume it didn't really work for more or less the same reason it doesn't work for you or me to do it personally--the transaction cost in time and money is more than you can get for the item. Someone who specializes in that sort of thing can be better at it but it's still hard to make money selling a $10 item.
Mostly I just donate things these days to the Salvation Army or whatever. Unfortunately, not everything is really amenable to that. I have some items that I'm sure are worth something to someone but they're not worth my effort to sell on ebay and Craigslist is pretty thin out where I live.
I so wish it was easier to sell stuff :( ebay is a PITA, feels like everybody is trying to scam you. Wish there was ebay with like minded technical customers so I could drop battery cycles and hard drive smart status along with detailed product images (while running) and not have to deal with the "MY DAUGHTER IS GOING TO COLLEGE AND I'M PREPARED TO GIVE YOU 200% THE VALUE OF THING IF YOU SEND ME INVOICE AND MAIL TO A DIFFERENT ADDRESS"
...and it funds journalism by sending drones to the Waffle House to workshop my ephemeral stuff while doing some mending and meeting other drones to trade, to share litecoin, or to fix up their rides; sometimes even tell whether a carrot is seeding true. They do mad backbeats and end up with tips.
The general amount of bs can be very high dealing on CL, even giving stuff away. From scammers and spammers, to the usual suspect who no shows after you rushed home from work to meet them in your free hour that day.
I like the mainframe PC analogy but I think in this case we are running up against ergonomics. People's hands are not shrinking and our eyes aren't getting any better. More interface may get offloaded to audio/voice, but we are such visual creatures. Until we are beaming data directly into our eyes, I don't think we will abandon the palm-sized display-- maybe foldable one like paper, or a tattoo, or my shirt sleave, but something.
Thank you for that link! I am starting in react and there is a blend of ES6 and ES5 in the tutorials (maybe even within the official react tutorials?). This hits the spot in clearing up some confusion for me.
Yes. Some people do not know how to write extensible software. They solve the issue at hand without any regard to big picture, so when something needs to be added (like test) the code needs to be heavily refactored to accommodate the change. As others have stated, this usually(!) isn't a big deal when the project is small with a single contributor. However, writing the tests last without any forethought to what the tests are or how they might be implemented will incur debt when the code needs to be refactored.
Conversely, extensible code can have the tests written before or after without much change to the amount of technical debt. The code is written to adapt to change, so tacking on robust tests wouldn't require too much technical debt.
Note that there is a balance. If you know your goals and have no reasonable expectation for them to change, then making everything extensible is unnecessary overhead. You can also have a mix of abstract functions that are extensible alongside immutable functions that handle something specific. It's all about what works best for your project.
I don't do 100% TDD, but do write code to be testable, and a lot of that mindset and experience came from trying TDD.
Forcing myself to think "how would this be tested?" helped, but doing some of the tests first got me in that frame of mind.
And by practicing that, you're writing code that - by definition - is reusable - you're using it in the tests, and in your production code. The 'reuse' thing doesn't have to mean 'reuse on 8 other projects' (a common rebuttal I've heard). Reusing the functionality in another part of your project 3 months from now is reuse too.
This is trivial compared to lots of good advice here, but I've benefited in stuck times by cutting my hair. Of course, alone, this doesn't do much, but sometimes that moment in the mirror with someone looking slightly different-- it helps me lock-in a course correction just a bit.
