Chat about Novel Coronavirus - 2019-nCoV - COVID-19

Just to back up my wild statement about excel being used in other outbreaks
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4976087/

When you have a sudden requirement, Excel is normally the thing your people have the most expertise in and that you own enough licenses for. Rightly or wrongly. You can see how it ends up being so ubiquitous.

Yes, the right tool for something urgent can often be whatever is at hand.

But that's unlikely to be the right tool for the same thing months later.

The problem with rapid prototyping is that unless you're very careful, the prototype is then something that becomes the temporary platform which never gets removed. I've worked recently with a couple of companies whose "temporary" system is 5 years in and not likely to be replaced for several more.

That's a problem with weak, inexperienced or just outwardly shit technical leadership or management.

I've been dev lead on projects like that. Sometimes we've got our way and got to do it properly, but occasionally we've been blocked from doing the right thing - each time we've made it very clear that the technical leadership disagrees and that it was a management decision to keep it that way. The inevitable (eventual, some years down the line) "oh" is worth it.

All you cost centre code monkeys. Pls. Just get it to work, yeah? Oh, and we're clawing back budget, as it's now q3. So no more of those continuous improvement changes or bug fixes that have been crippling is for the past year.

Haven't watched Office Space for years.

That's a problem with weak, inexperienced or just outwardly shit technical leadership or management.

When I first started as an Information Analyst at the NHS (2006-ish) I made a pivot table. My boss was so stunned by my capabilities that she sent an email to the board talking about my skills being a "beacon for technological innovation in the NHS". I ended up presenting the concept of pivot tables to the board later that month. For a brief period of my career, I felt like a superstar. :D

Pivot tables....invented in 1986.

Similarly, the concept of slicers controlling multiple pivot/charts on a single page.
2015.

Ha!

Amazing

https://www.instagram.com/p/CGARztPAtrO/

My phone is too old for the app.

I suspect this is an Apple thing rather than an NHS thing.

bum, I leapt into class war mode too early! thanks for the modification/mollification

Ha, I think the class war thing is fine. I just don't think it's the NHS we should be fighting. Instead its the billionaires.

I thought it was a BLE (5?) hardware support issue

Probably. But who sold the hardware?

Burn the rich!

(The point I was trying to make was the limitation is probably built into the phone, not a decision being made by the NHS)

It needs iOS 13.5, which means the hardware requirement is just "any model that supports iOS 13", and Apple chose which models that is pre-Covid. I don't think there's any relevant hardware difference.

Apple could have backported the feature to 12 if they were feeling generous.

And I'm reasonably sure the NHS could have made the app installable for barcode scanning on older phones without the auto contact tracing stuff, rather than making 13.5 a hard requirement.

As someone who worked on that product, you can fuck right off. All the Psion apps were extremely well written because the software leadership was superb.

A quarter as good as XLS I'm afraid.

(and the backlight doesn't even last 23 years)

1 Attachment

The backlight is a hardware issue, not software.

and the backlight doesn't even last 23 years

Planned obsolescence?

hardware issue

Bloody 3a hinge.

https://www.dovepress.com/three-quarters-of-people-with-sars-cov-2-infection-are-asymptomatic-an-peer-reviewed-article-CLEP#
About to read this but is a bit concerning.