cs02rm0

It is an argument I've lost with managers more times than I've won though.

Shame really, I find compose simple and neat and k8s+terraform an unsettling mess.

If it's that serious, have them ask an intelligence agency to investigate and report - as they do anyway today. They don't need direct access.

But yes, crazy that the Food Standards Agency always end up on this list. Must be someone who knows someone.

A small company I was working with had heard that IBM, who had a customer in common, were operating some sort of "garage" thing that the customer really liked. Rumours were flying around, someone had heard it was a video conferencing app, they were desperate to know more about this secret sauce.

Eventually I got to speak to an opposite number from them on a piece of work that joined with our own. They were calling any team of people a garage (because of the Amazon, Apple, etc stories). That's all it was, just a different word for team, like toddlers playing let's pretend.

https://twitter.com/JeremyC64/status/1355156181753475073?s=1...

Awkwardly it seems Pfizer might shift to supplying the UK from the US and the UK seem content that they have no contractual need to share the AZ doses from the UK facility. So the EU don't seem to have any leverage on this issue.

Some have tried to say this debate is EU vs AZ but this map suggests otherwise.

https://thumbsnap.com/sc/JtrAXvhv.jpg

This is a whole other ball game if it's malice/incompetence.

There's safety, exhaust emissions, tyre and brake particles, noise, etc. I'm sure some of them don't have a linear relationship either.

One of the biggest upsides to taxing vehicle weight could be to counter purchasing decisions that have shifted to larger vehicles that no longer comfortably fit in parking spaces but ride better over ridiculous speed bumps and give drivers literally the opportunity to look down on others.

Taxing vehicle weight also doesn't have the privacy implications that taxing miles driven beyond fuel consumption does. It's always struck me as one of the more sensible aspects to tax.

Add lightness, as I believe Colin Chapman put it.

The scripts always seem broken, the UI was a mess for a while on a Mac. The multi windowed system was great if the windowing manager expected that sort of thing and terrible otherwise.

Ufraw integration seems an awful way of getting to edit raw files and I go years at a time without being able to get it working on a Mac.

But it's still my first choice.

I'm not sure it is, depending on which majority we're talking about.

We size in complexity because that's where the time goes, the extra testing, the rework, the long reviews, the risk.

If there are cookie cutter lessons to be learned software tends to abstract those problems away to the point they're no longer problems.

I'm in a weird situation where I'm contracting into one organisation and they've contracted me out to another. The first organisation know me as a senior dev/architect with 15 years experience in a niche domain. The second organisation see me as brand new to them and despite paying an embarrassing day rate are giving me noddy UI tweaks to do. Extracting myself is proving to be slow somehow.

Anyway, they wanted a webapp with a couple of APIs and nothing on the page than a button, the authenticated username and a line of text. Clicking the button opts you in/out of a service and the text changes depending on the state. The sort of thing people go to once, maybe twice.

I used a mustache template on the server side to populate the values and I didn't even bother with any javascript, just did an old school form submission to the API when the button was clicked and a redirect back to the page.

It was tiny but, obviously it was decided "we should be using a more modern framework" - code for React. It was the more word that got to me, as if there was an equivalent, dated framework I'd used. I didn't put up a fight partly because I was new to the team and figured they were hot on React and I wasn't. Somehow, they made a complete hash of it, they couldn't even figure out how to get all their inline styles (the only styles they used) working without help.

I guess it's just those classics; people want to learn the hot new thing as they see it, their managers are happy that they've heard a buzzword they recognise and then everything becomes a nail for their new hammer.

A large government department requiring niche technical skills on public sector pay and bureaucracy levels in a rural part of the country?

There are probably some difficulties.

Dependencies are painful to pull in and only pulled in when a dev needs a specific version. The internal repos end up being a missing version nightmare where people cobble together whatever works with what's available. Where feature and security upgrades go ignored, left to rot like the brains of the devs who struggle to keep up with what's available in the real world.

Many of those networks I've worked on are becoming more permeable at the edges because the cost of the air gap outweighs any benefits.

Quite a contrast from my memories of being a kid sliding about on the back seat of a Mini without so much as a seatbelt.

I was pretty shocked turning up with car seats at a Mercedes dealership to find we couldn't get three of them across an E class even without using ISOFIX. IIRC it was slightly exacerbated by two of them being seats for babies.

FWIW we went with a Volvo V70. We didn't want an MPV or SUV.

For instance, it's common for Europeans not to wear bicycle helmets.

That doesn't hold for the UK. Maybe it's spreading.

I already knew about them, but there will be a stack of other stuff I don't know about. Just get Googling when you hit different problem areas.

I found out about CRDTs because I was working in a niche where a security device was used that breaks TCP between two hosting regions for an application. So I searched for issues to do with that and refreshed myself on the two general's problem, Byzantine fault tolerance, 2 and 3 phase commits and at some point OTs and CRDTs popped up. You'll find this stuff if you keep looking at a problem for long enough.

That was a while ago though and despite still working in that area I've still not implemented anything with them because I'm a contractor and I'm under the direction of people who don't have CRDTs in their toolbelt and don't want ideas from others! I guess my cheerful message is keep at it but know you can only do so much and there's plenty of other pits of despair to fall into even when you're out of the current one. Yay!

I've no idea what the engagement was like, but it was Redrow so I doubt they just slapped the 50 or so houses up and then thought about it.

I'm forever calling out engineers because the line crackles to the point it's difficult to take a call and my internet speed drops from ~65Mbps to ~10. Maybe I should start looking for old TVs.

Somehow, being on a road where the houses were only built 5 years ago we have copper lines and on my side of the street the houses on both sides of mine are able to sign up for g.fast but I'm not. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised it was the UK at all.

Me too. And all I can do is point at Javascript in webpages. Which, as a Java dev (if I can still call myself that 15 years into doing all sorts of other stuff too), I want nothing to do with but somehow get dragged into all the time.

I can really relate with the idea that we're feeding the beast we built rather than the one borne of necessity. Unfortunately, which I'm sure the latter still exists, it's the former that always seems to pay the bills.

The censors with their felt tip pens clearly had a variety of artistic talent. I found myself choosing from various censorings of Nirvana's Nevermind which had the cover with the naked baby.

Some had a blocked out rectangle, some were scribbled on, some just blocked out the silhouette of the baby. I settled on one which had neatly drawn on a pair of swimming trunks!

Seems like another life now.

Not sure if I'm just not getting the full quality somehow or if the image quality just isn't there for OCR to ever work?

We went with redis for the "PoC". I'd tried explaining that if a query is only made once every 24 hours and the data can't be cached longer than that because it's considered too out of date then a cache is pointless extra complexity.

He wasn't having it though, so he made us build it and demo it to a room full of people. Fortunately the room understood the simple explanation and he listened to them where he wouldn't listen to the dev team, so a few weeks of work was scrapped there and then.