adamconroy

Yes, also it takes a pro to know one I would suggest.

Reminds me of an amusing email I saw recently, where a recent grad, wanna be business analyst, was evaluating a vendor and declared after meeting some of their team that they were 'technically excellent'. Maybe they are, but how on earth that guy thought he was qualified to judge was beyond me.

I guess its a subjective thing, depending on where you have worked and with whom. I'm pretty picky where I work these days, so maybe I haven't witnessed what you are talking about.

However I think these days, at the higher end of the spectrum, the general awareness of good programming practices is better than it was 25 years ago. Back then, unit testing frameworks weren't a thing, I didn't see any CI, often code repositories were zips on a file share..., patterns were barely a thing....

Quietly unfolding? This has been going on for decades. In fact I think it's prevalence is less these days. Not that I think the avg quality is constantly improving.

no, often you don't have to pay for technical debt. the code may never be refactored, and / or the whole system / module replaced before lots of code is touched.

i agree and on top of that I've always thought 'technical debt' was a bad analogy (like most analogies).

my reasoning is that real world debt is inescapable, whereas if someone writes some crap code, which is hard to read/maintain/extend, then the debt is only called in if someone has to maintain it. My intuition is that a fair percentage of code that once it works and is tested, never has changes made, or the whole system is replaced without the code ever changing.

if you buy a house with a mortgage, but never live in it, you still have to pay the debt. if you write some code and don't ever touch it again, there is no debt to pay.

I was about to say the same thing as your parent. I recently had a nice feature toggle experience using a strategy pattern with DI.

Basically there was one 'if' statement in the DI container configuration code that looked up a config. Basically

if (newPricingStrategy) bind IPricingStrategy to NewPricingStrategyImplementation else bind IPricingStrategy to OldPricingStrategyImplementation

Is that code?

2000. VB6. Manufacturing workflow / management system, BOM..... I did some consulting work at the same company a year ago and that system was still chugging along. They had pretty much rewritten / replaced everything else around the place but apparently didn't see a need to change my module. I was amused to have a couple of guys come and ask me questions/advice, and all I could do was sympathize.

I guess my ideal alternative would be simple diversity. But if everyone is going to wear the same thing then I would prefer it if the fabric was more aesthetically pleasing.

But of course its none of my business, everyone can do what they like.

It sort of feels like a feature of 'Brave New World', where everyone is apathetically conditioned to wear the same thing.

Jeans are a weird phenomenon. Ugly, heavy, unflattering fabric. They only look good on people who would look good no matter what they wore.

Worse still, they are like a disease. I was in a bar/restaurant recently, and I couldn't help but notice how many people were wearing jeans. So I did a visual survey, and as far as I could tell, out of about 40 people, only myself and one other lady were not wearing them. Even my wife was in a pair.

Interesting article for me as I just rolled out an app for a client and a lot of this feels familiar.

Firstly I was lucky I didn't have a PSD driven design, but my client demanded a fixed price quote, so I insisted they pay me to do fairly comprehensive spec, including a clickable wireframe prototype, bdd behaviour spec, architecture design, background, requirements, objectives....

I went with lo-fi hand drawn pages which I scanned and wired up as a clickable prototype via https://marvelapp.com/

In the end it was fairly successful for me, as the comprehensive spec allowed me to estimate fairly accurately.

However I don't think it was the most cost effective outcome for the client. Because of their rigid nature, instead of collaborating through the process (aside from the specification phase of course), I built them exactly what we agree and invoiced them and was paid. However, within a week of the first pilot they had come up with about 100 hours worth of changes they wanted.

In the end I spent about 100 hours in the spec / design phase (which I was paid by the hour), 300 hours building the app (which was a fixed price) and now I have about 100 hours of changes to make.

If we had worked to a budget rather than a fixed price, then by my estimate I would have spent about 400 hours collaborating and iterating (basically removing about 90% of the time creating and writing a spec) and they would have had an app which they were involved in crafting the whole way through. Basically I think they have blown about 100hours and they have to live with lots of little nuances that they would have otherwise been able to decide upon.

Microsoft's WCF Data Services is HATEOAS, and works beautifully from that point of view. Unfortunately it is a little slow and verbose because your payload becomes bloated, and has fallen out of favor with both MS and developers much like most dev frameworks from MS.

It depends what you are trying to achieve, but acquiring a cms of some variety, then hacking on that is not a bad way to learn.

I'm not a web UI programmer, although have been at times over the years and still do some professional work in that space, but a little while ago I created a website for a friend's business as a hobby project for me.

I chose to use Drupal, which is a php based cms, and used a paas called pantheon. https://pantheon.io/docs/articles/getting-started/

The good thing about this approach was that I had a fully functional site to start with, built with reasonably good practices (progressive enhancement etc), and I was able to hack away on it and taught myself some php as I needed to achieve certain things that weren't available out of the box. I found it quite interesting to dig around and see how they structured the site, particularly the css strategies.

Welcome to life. The only thing that matters is what is perceived.

On the other hand, getting a perfect soft boiled egg so that the whites are cooked but the yolk is completely runny is something I struggle with. I probably get about 1 in 3 perfect. I use a timer of course, but then the size of the egg seems matter and goodness knows what else.

Strange. Maybe I don't do it that often, but I don't recall having much trouble peeling hard boiled eggs. My method is to boil them for desired time, run cold water over them for a bit, then drop them gently on the bench probably 3-5 times per egg so that the shell is consistently shattered, then peel. Maybe the problem is that I can't get fresh eggs.

Some people simply lack the capability to challenge their own opinions and beliefs. I find it very unattractive. On the other hand other people like myself are too objective and open minded, and as a result never form a strong opinion on anything, which is probably equally unattractive.

Its the expectation / perspective he had. He is talking like someone who had to report the problem, who had to have his issue resolved and was really pleased with the service.

Its not like he just bought an iPhone which had a flaw and he was happy with the customer service that resolved the issue, but it reads like that.

To be more blunt, he is using rhetoric in his article, probably acquired through osmosis from reading other articles, without actually realizing that the rhetoric doesn't apply to his situation.

Interesting.

As an aside, I find this phrase strange, given the context:

"The SO team was absolutely incredible to deal with during this. They were fast, responsive and reasonable."

Junk article. The important vendors are ACID. Just because the default isolation level isn't serializable doesn't warrant the conclusion.

One amusing thing is that every now and then there is an article stating that certain relational dbs aren't webscale because the default isolation level is too high.

I agree totally. I almost fell over laughing recently when I saw a new headline about Dropbox and business customers.

It might have changed, but the one thing that summed up how useless it is for business is that you can't effectively run it on a server.

I said he should ignore his boss's interactions with others. Do you really think it is healthy for op to be stressing over the fact his boss flirts and is married? I repeat, he should mind his own business.

Sounds like you need to laugh at his jokes and follow his orders. Ignore anything relating to others, its not your business and not something to stress about. Think about the adage "keep your friends close and your enemies closer". Flatter him, make him feel good about himself, then down the road when you start biting back a bit it will hurt.

I've been contracting since 1997 and I haven't had a single day without employment. Except when I've chosen to have a holiday.

My secret has been to do such a good job that the client finds me indispensable and then leave on my terms, always with another gig lined up. Sometimes I've had to stay with clients for many months when I'd rather move on. Once I was working for a client that had a smell like they were going broke so I had to ruthlessly extract myself before my contract was due to expire, but that proved to be a good decision as a few months later nobody was being paid and were suddenly out of work.

I worked in a permanent role for 6 years before contracting, and I doubt it would be a good idea to do it with no experience. My first contract was acquired through an agency, and probably 50% of my work is through an agency, the rest is word of mouth and doing more work for former clients.

What about a design that uses kinect energy accumulated when you are going downhill?

I don't agree with the term anti-pattern in this case, but I find standups boring and a chore. I also think standups drive a culture of velocity instead of progress, which can be a little maddening.

Shouldn't Elon be concerned that the car might decide the human is superfluous, open a door and swerve wildly until the body is ejected

A smart, meticulous, better than other people person like myself can't get past the hubris, sorry.

Hawkings and Musk should stick to making comments on topics they understand.

For me it should be careful not to forget about reading books. From ages 10 to 24 I would have averaged at least one book a week. Then my internet addiction surfaced. Since then I have probably averaged 2 books a year, but at the same time I have probably read more words on average per week than before. The problem is that 80% of what I read on the internet is piffle or at best mental chewing gum. I've recently started reading books again and I cant believe I had forgotten how rewarding it is. No time to read anyone else's comments sorry, I'm going back to the engaging story of Karl Ove.