drunkpotato

Deleted my Facebook account years ago, and no regrets.

The irony here is that if you use the log4j equivalent of parameterized queries, parameterized logging strings, you're still vulnerable to this CVE, even if you did everything right.

Please don't use Python package management as a baseline. Aim higher.

I love Python, but I cringe whenever someone asks me why a Python program isn't running properly on their machine. Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1987/

Seems that people don’t like it when you point out the con!

Take a vacation! The company will be okay without you for a while.

Disclaimer: I’m about to say stuff that are just my impressions, without a lot of “I think” or “I believe.” Take those as implied.

Generally the stress of management is in coordinating various personalities and balancing competing priorities, while being on the hook for delivering results without having any direct impact on whether a project gets done to a high degree of quality. They rely on others’ expertise, some of whine may not be that reliable, and it’s stressful!

Directors and VPs have that stress plus they are more directly accountable to financial results. However, they have to be cheerful and optimistic and never show weakness or worry to an almost psychopathic degree. This may look like a good work/life balance externally but internally “work brain” and the weight of stress are relentless. The bad ones sublimate stress and occasionally explode and yell at their subordinates.

To engineers none of this looks like “work” because none of it produces concrete results. (I haven’t mentioned the endless word docs to read and write, and the spreadsheets, oh god the endless spreadsheets.) But it does accumulate a lot of stress and anxiety.

On the vacation side of things, seriously, take a vacation! It will be okay!

I didn’t get a sense of arrogance at all. It feels like a gentle poking with love!

It’s important to keep a sense of humor and humility about working with logic machines from our squishy salt water meat brains.

There are only two kinds of programmers in this world. Those who don’t make anything, and those who create sev 10 global security nightmares.

I think this is half of it. From my experience, the other half is that "agile" is a wonderful excuse for managers and product managers not to have to plan anything or commit to any priorities, and for software companies not to hire project managers. I don't think this is particularly agile's fault; no process can fix broken organizations, and most tech organizations are broken. Luckily the magic money machine papers over grotesque inefficiencies so we can all be gainfully employed without having to become real professionals!

Yes, that is the marketing brochure pitch for microservices.

In the real world, poorly designed microservices make the ball of mud problem much, much worse, and whatever pain you had in deployments in a monolith are now magnified ten-fold. I have not been fortunate enough to see well-designed microservices, so I suspect the ball of mud is the default. Can this be rectified through discipline? Probably, but I haven't seen it.

Asynchronous? Doesn't save you, when an upstream service changes event definitions and emits events with unexpected structure, and a downstream service starts failing. Can this be rectified through Async OpenAPI and rigorous contract testing? Probably, but I haven't seen this happen in a way that helps.

I have seen large companies survive perfectly well on a monolithic ball of mud, and small companies get lost in a mud pit of microservices.

My point is not that microservices are bad, they're not, they're just a tool, but they are a tool that is a poor fit for most companies, in my opinion. I can't speak to the few giant companies that need them and use them effectively; there is a good reason the tool exists.

"A fraction?" How much less do you think they can pay? This sounds suspiciously like the myth of off-shoring, get the same work for a fraction of the cost, but from what I've heard the competent ones quickly command more pay and are certainly not "a fraction" of a SF salary.

In addition to python version issues, I was also running into JVM and gradle version compatibility issues, which I was handling with jenv and some aliases that would swap JAVAHOME environment variable as needed. asdf-vm cleaned all that up in a very clean way, and I like the way you can set .tool-versions file for a project and share with other asdf-vm users.

pyenv is pretty good for working around this problem. I've recently switched to asdf-vm which I like even more, since it handles versions for multiple languages and tools.

I think this is spot-on. No-code solutions allow non-technical folks in marketing and sales to build some amazing things that would have required teams of software engineers: marketing, shopping cart, and email integrations; email onboarding workflows; complex ad campaigns; better inventory and wholesale sales management; and a lot of other things I'm not creative enough to think of. I've seen an entire application prototype built by a product manager by duct taping Google Sheets, Mailchimp, and a database together with Zapier.

However, their wants always grow just beyond the no-code capabilities, and there's still a need for software engineers for things that haven't been fully solved yet.

It's possible, but I'm skeptical, because the hard part of coding isn't "typing words into a text editor/IDE." It's thinking algorithmically in enough detail, with edge cases, fallbacks, error handling, etc, that most people struggle with.

Squarespace is actually a good example; someone still has to write all the nifty widgets and figure out how they'll work together for a pleasing experience. If putting an attractive visual layer on top of code was all it took, then Smalltalk would have won decades ago and everyone would program.

The main barrier to "no code" and "everyone can program" is still the mode of thought, not the mode of representation.

This has parallels in artificial intelligence, where as soon as a problem is solvable by a computer, solving the problem no longer counts as "AI" (chess, natural language processing, even sentiment analysis!). Similarly, as soon as a problem is made easy and accessible to non-algorithmic thinks, programmer move on to the next thing that requires that mode of thought. Maybe we'll exhaust the problem space of potential programs someday, but I don't see any evidence for it.

It's a neat game! I dig the art style and the music. I think my kids are going to have a blast with it too!

I agree that's bad, but what does it have to do with the current conversation? It seems like a non sequitur.

The IRS did nothing wrong here, and it certainly is not an example of the IRS penalizing people for social infractions. As with any movement with lots of money and momentum and rapidly gaining popularity, there were a lot of fraudsters capitalizing on the Tea Party movement's name and engaging in shady tax dodging practices. The IRS was correct to subject them to increased scrutiny.

In terms of the facts involved, this has nothing to do with China's social credit score. Note that I am strictly talking about the facts involved, not the political fallout and usual bloviating.

WARNING: This site has an obscenely obnoxious terms & conditions blocking modal. I would prefer this link to be removed, it is so egregious.

Post something, or don't. Don't put up a blocking modal to force me to read some terms & conditions before reading the actual content.

There's no reason we can't blame both.

Tantrums are a normal part of development. Too many might be a behavioral problem, but it is flatly not true and flies in the face of all childhood development studies to say they should never happen.

I have observed, as many other parents have as well, that if the kids spend too much time in front of the screen (> 20 minutes, give or take), they become resistant, moodier, and worse behaved. This is not true if we're playing a board game or having reading time. So, I think a bit of moderation is important.

Incidentally, since having kids, I've also noticed that I am short-tempered if I spend too much time in front of the screen, a good reminder to take a walk a few times during the day.

I’d never played Minecraft until my son introduced it to me, and now I love it! I made a big farmstead and greenhouse and it was quite satisfying!

This reads very much like a “kids these days!” Complaint lodged against the next generation since time immemorial. Sure, some parasocial relationships can be harmful, and video game addiction is something to watch out for (though I’m not sure why you singled out Minecraft and Roblox specifically, they’re just fun creative games), but there’s nothing preventing a healthy balance of screen time, activities, and outdoor time with a bit of parental guidance.

Hmm, it may be that shopify blocked some bot traffic automatically.

What we found at a previous employer through extensive testing: advertising on Facebook works pretty well, but the highest return on ad spend was to not use any of the demographic tools at all. Also, weirdly, having an attractive product and displaying it well in photo and video ads did very well. Almost as if there is no real magic trick of effectiveness at all.

Has this changed recently? My offer from AWS came with 2 weeks of vacation, non-negotiable, and was part of why I rejected it.

You think billionaires go to jail for avoiding taxes? Are you sure you have any cynic in you whatsoever?

That income tax statistic is misleading. Most Americans do pay social security payroll taxes, which are income taxes, they’re just not called “income tax.”

Chrome's tab groups are pretty good. Not quite as useful to me as tree style tabs, but better than nothing. I use Firefox as my primary browser, Chrome for some things, and Safari for others. It's good to have the variety, I think.

Not a direct response to this piece, but the two things keeping me on Firefox these days, besides it being a decent browser generally, are container tabs and tree style tabs. They’re both very convenient for my workflow. I think all the browsers are pretty good, but those two features are great.

I love this analogy, and it's definitely a perspective to take seriously. "It's always okay, until it isn't" is something to consider, as is the idea that civilization is living on borrowed time, or borrowing from the future to pay the present.

I don't know if it's true, or if it's even something we can falsify at any moment in history, but stable civilizations have collapsed, and it's worth understanding that it could happen to ours too.