Author here. I appreciate your points. I started the business as a learning experience without any thought of the end game. Now that I am wiser and with some money a GmbH is the way to go for the next business.
This article hit me hard. I work in a non Silicon Valley-like company. I became a developer because I thought I love coding. But I found out that, in fact, I love problem solving. Tightly defined Scrum tasks make me sad and I would love to have more autonomy.
I strongly encourage you to go out and find such a job then! You certainly don't have to move to SV to find one, and we spend too much of our lives at work to forego the opportunity of having work we're passionate about.
I'm the same way. I spend a good amount of my time being pulled into production issues or debugging a particularly difficult issue with the product. In both of those cases, the "code" changes often take only a few minutes, the problem solving can take hours.
I get a lot of satisfaction from that. Of course that means that as a team lead/manager, I have to have a lot of self discipline to allow my team members to do the same and not try to solve every problem.
I have thought about your and other peoples comments. It could well be just rounded to the nearest integer, making my +500ms assumption wrong. However, this would result in 59.51s being displayed as 0:60, though it should be 1:00. Rounding up has the same problem.
I went through the same assumptions coding my own timer. Let's just round everything. But this resulted in 51.0s being displayed as 1:51 on the timer, with rounding up it's even worse resulting in 1:01:51. So at least hours and minutes have to be rounded down. But that makes it even more confusing that seconds are NOT Math.floor().
So in the end I "gave up" and used the date-fns package (works great) but it also rounds everything down. That's why I believe that iOS adds 500ms so the minutes and hours work properly.
> with rounding up it's even worse resulting in 1:01:51
Huh?
If you are making some kind of timer, you first should convert the time to pure seconds, or in whatever the smallest unit is that you care to deal with (milliseconds?). It is only at that point that the data is ready for any kind of arithmetic (for example, to subtract 1 second). Then, when you wish to display it, you first convert it.
For example, if the user sets your timer to 2 minutes, you would convert "2:00" to 120 seconds. Then you subtract 1 second. Now the internal value is 119. Then you convert back to the display format: "1:59". But be sure to keep "119" in some internal variable, for the next change.
<form name=f>
<input type=number name=h min=0 max=99 value=0>
<input type=number name=m min=0 max=59 value=00>
<input type=number name=s min=0 max=59 value=00>
<input type=submit value=Start>
<output name=r></output>
</form>
<script>
document.forms.f.addEventListener('submit', function (ev) {
ev.preventDefault();
let f = ev.target,
s = Number(f.h.value * 60 * 60) +
Number(f.m.value * 60) +
Number(f.s.value);
function show(f, s) {
let h = Math.floor(s / 60 / 60);
s -= (h * 60 * 60);
let m = Math.floor(s / 60);
s -= (m * 60);
m = String(m).padStart(2, '0');
s = String(s).padStart(2, '0');
f.elements.r.value = [h, m, s].join(':');
}
show(f, s);
if (f.timer) { clearInterval(f.timer); }
f.timer = setInterval(function () {
if (0 === s) { clearInterval(f.timer); return; }
s -= 1;
show(f, s);
}, 1000);
});
</script>
> However, this would result in 59.51s being displayed as 0:60, though it should be 1:00. Rounding up has the same problem.
Surely one shouldn't round _after_ splitting the time into minutes and seconds.
You floor() or ceil() the time, depending on if you're counting up or down, to the lowest unit your timer is showing, then you display it and in the process split it into hours, minutes etc.
So ceil(59.51s) = 60s, which is then converted to 0h 1m 0s for display.
