eksemplar

Yes, but I suspect it’s a European truth.

There is a fundamental difference between America and Europe, in that Americans distrust their government but trust corporations and the free market. Europe is the exact opposite.

You can agree or disagree our world view, but that doesn’t change the fact that in average, more than 70% of Europeans trust the EU to have their best interests in mind, mich higher for GDPR.

I don’t think it’s really start-up hostile either. I think there is a huge potential for disruption for privacy centric companies.

We mainly do DB construction ourselves, and for C# use LinqToSql and our own repos to integrate with it.

This is mainly because entity framework is terrible. It’s slow enough that the lack of speed which is worse in Linq gets negligible. It’s unproductive in that it’s really verbose and unintuitive in how it works, especially code first. And worst of all, it’s migrations often break, leading to a lot of time fixing it.

So if you’re doing C# I’d probably keep doing raw sql if I were you.

Django by contrast has an excellent ORM, and with node you have stuff like prisma (though it doesn’t have a mssql driver.

So really, I’d suggest you looked into python for your services.

Why do you want WPF or windows forms for your application? Especially if you’re doing a web based backend any way.

I know it’s a tad silly to use web uis for everything, but the truth is, that it’s where almost all of the ui innovations lie right now.

It’s not just for design either, it’s also automation. Like if you use Django, a lot of the basic forms for inputs will actually write themselves based on you’d datamodel.

Why wouldn’t you?

C# is so unproductive compared to python. Everything is so low level and verbose, nuget packages are mostly undocumented and unsupported, entity framework is terrible, no graphql tools.

I mean, we still do a lot of c# at our place, but every chance we get, we use either python or JavaScript with an end goal of completely leaving c# behind.

It’s not something I’ve looked into, but being from Denmark, one of the most digitised public sectors of Europe, I do hear about our competitors.

I think you should look into Estonia, they offer digital citizenship and a range of other services. It’s not a full citizenship, but it allows you to do banking and create companies and such.

Not sure how commonly accepted it is in other parts of Europe though. But I think it might be worth a look.

I think Facebook is wrong to blame the EU or the GDPR on its faltering status in Europe.

The GDPR is certainly making people more aware of what privacy means, and I think that’s a good thing, but it’s also came into existence because the people asked for it. It’s not really a new thing, in the public sector we’ve had stricter regulations for many years, but we’ve had them individually, and we’ve had the because people voted for them. The EU simply gathered all these things as a centralised ruleset, that also happens to apply to the private sector.

Slowly more and more people are waking up to find that they have and want the power to make demands on how their data flows. And I think a lot of American tech companies are having a hard time to adapt.

There is an old saying, that the US typically has good governments that are not trusted by its people and terrible companies which are trusted. Well, the EU is the exact opposite of that, and I think it’s hard to be Facebook in a world where people genuinely don’t want their photos used for facial recognition software that will eventually be used for evil, have their feeds flooded by probaganda or see their data used to overturn democracy itself.

Facebook isn’t really struggling yet though. But they’ve basically become like climate change, everyone knows they have to quit eating social media to save the planet, but knowing is easier than doing.

Facebook hasn’t done a single thing to help themselves though, so the comparison to Augustus, who did indeed build an empire and who was so popular that many historians consider him the root of the emperor cult, is a little ridiculous.

.net core 3.0 will be .net core only. Which may not be much of a problem if you were already running it in a non-windows environment, but it’ll make it useless for those of us who also have hundreds legacy systems, and those legacy systems are the main reason we still use .net at all.

When I say productive, I'm talking about time to market. I don't really care about the efficiency because iron is cheap and development time is not.

Really? Because stuff like silverlight, linq_to_sql, razor/mvc and others might want a word. I know technology moves forward, by typically it does so in a much less costly manner, because in the real world, moving people from asp.net classic to .net core costs money.

I mean, even .net standard came and went before we even started using it, considering it won't be part of .net core 3.0.

I'm not sure anyone who truly cares about effort uses .net core. :p

I mean, it's a cheap shot, but it's frankly so unproductive compared to Django it's basically a running joke. Not that .net core doesn't see a lot of usage, much like angular it's very popular in the european public sector, but it's just such a waste of resources. By resources I mean, man hours by the way, because it's really effective technically, it's just that, all that you can pay for around a million years of AWS/Azure time for the extra wage-hours you need to pay programmers when you use .net instead of something useful.

And in two years it'll be obsolete anyway, because by then Microsoft will have completely changed their direction, again. I say this, as as someone who's running Azure and 365 as our cloud provider for the majority of our services, as someone who's genuinely happy with the services Microsoft provides and having had a great 25 year long business relationship with them, but as far as development goes, .net is just too crazy to be worth it these years.

Because decisions are rarely down to just one field of expertise, and technical experts are often some of the least knowledgeable about fields that aren’t theirs.

Like if you build a new application for handling internal e-commerce. The programmer will know how to build it, the service designer will know how to create the ux, the lean consultant will know how to build the best work-flow, the financial expert will know what functionality is required, the project manager will know how to get things build in the right order and how to manage benefits, the hr-consultant and the lean consultant and the service designer will know how to get it implemented, the data scientists will know what kind of data model their like to do BI. And so on.

The right decision is to listen to all those inputs, and implement them in a way that’s both realistic, possible within the budget and making sure the final product actually fits in within the organisation.

That doesn’t mean you won’t delegate. I don’t really care if it’s build with graphql or not, as long as building it with graphql doesn’t increase production time by an unreasonable amount of time compared to other options and graphql is part of what our company in general uses.

Because the best flashy new tech is useless if only 1 out of your 100 programmers know it.

Because the technical truth is only part of the equation.

The right decision almost always boils down to a combination of experts, finances, end users, over all strategy, corporate culture and realism.

The variables variate in importance, but the one thing you can be consistently sure of, is that experts over value theirs.

On top of that, decision making is only a small part of management. The majority of it is spend on politics, motivation and issues/conflict resolution.

It’s used for bio-diesel. The cars that run on it are sold as green, but by burning the rainforest to make enough palm oil, the cars that run on it are instead the least green.

It depends on what you want to do. There is a lot of room for technical experts who want to build products for other people.

I’m a manager now, and have been for years, but leaving product building behind was one of the hardest things I ever did. I did it because I wanted to make decisions more than I wanted to build things, but that’s not for everyone and it’s not as glamorous as it sounds. I could just never help myself from getting involved in every decision, and then it’s frustrating not to have any real weight, and you won’t as “just an expert”, even when you’re right. A lot of people prefer to just build stuff, and in CS and engineering especially, those people aren’t easy to come by or easily replaceable, and thus they are valuable.

My free time is still spent doing silly CS stuff though, I recently discovered edX.org, and I’ve been fooling around with cryptography.

So you’ll certainly have time for that, even when you get older. The only time I didn’t have time was when my kids were 0-6.

I’m not sure about that. The ability to identify and accept a hard problem, and then do something about it, speaks of good management in their engineering department.

Google wouldn’t guarantee data wouldn’t leave EU for the longest time, and still don’t on some services.

They were also extremely slow to adopt EU legislation required, and still haven’t for all services.

Microsoft by contrast did so immediately, with Amazon doing so as well shortly after.

Still, when I ask our DPO which cloud is better, he’ll point to Azure, then AWS and directly advice against using Google.

Which is a shame, because I’d actually like to use firebase and flutter to up our production effectiveness on mobile. As one example.

It’s also why we solely rely on OpenStreetMap instead of using google maps, even though supporting OSM with server infrastructure to do so is more expensive. At least these days, OSM is a great map service, but we also used it when it wasn’t.

I’m not sure why this was downvoted so heavily, because it has a point. The US is obviously not a trustworthy partner, but neither is China.

At least American companies still reside in a somewhat democracy where they’ll actually protect our rights, even if we’re European. Sure it’s not for noble goals, they want to make money, and they won’t if they don’t care for data security.

Google cloud is the prime example of this. The European public sector is spending billions on Clouds these years, and none of that is going to Google, because Google doesn’t protect your data the same way Microsoft does.

I can physically visit the Azure instances that house our data, and nothing but our data, and it never leaves the union.

Maybe the NSA still listens in, maybe China does too, but it’s not legal for them to do so the way it would be in the Alibaba or google clouds.

But that’s not faster.

The old way: click, you’re done. The new way: click, hold finger, slide, and you’re done.

Like I said, it’s faster to go from 1 to 10, but 99% of the times I use it, I’m just changing the volume by 1.

Hell, it’s easier for my brain to just click 10 times than to watch where the damn slider is too.

How is tapping and sliding easier than pressing a button once?

I think the keyboard is down to preference, I prefer the new one.

It does seem silly not to include a dongle in the box though. I mean, I’m buying apple because I want my tech to just work, and now my mouse or magic keyboard can’t connect and charge?

The only real port annoyance I have though, is the damn headphone jack. :p I mean, I can’t connect my iPhone XS headphones to my MacBook Pro...

It’s terrible compared to the old way.

You click the sound icon, then the slide opens up, then you can either slide it or click one of the two icons.

It’s probably quicker to change the volume from one to ten this way, but 99% of my use cases for changing volume is for one or two steps, for which the slider absolutely sucks.

It’s some of the worst design I’ve ever seen for volume control, and the old system is some of the best.

Did we leave jinja? I mean, I know I know, but we still do a lot of jinja on our smaller projects.

I upgraded from a late 2015 to a 2018 earlier this fall.

I don’t really miss anything, especially not the weight or the keyboard.

The touchbar has never been of use to me though. It doesn’t annoy me much, but the user design for changing volume requires more clicks than the non touchbar, so it’s obviously terrible design.

I don’t miss any of the ports, I thought I would, but it’s not like there was an Ethernet port so I still needed a dongle for the 2015 version.

There’s certainly room for improvement, but the 512gb 13” version isn’t crazy expensive for what you’re getting compared to other laptops, at least not in my country.

I don’t know about that, Django is arguable still the most productive web-framework.

I mean, I like JS as much as everyone else and graphql is better with Apollo than it is with graphene, but I can make a full django app and deploy it before I’m even done looking over the changes to my JS packages that have occurred since I used them last.

Hell, even if you want to use vue or react, I still find django more productive than node, Apollo and prisma. And that’s not mentioning flask.

So I’d wager that python powers a fairly large part of the web, and with good reason.

I agree, this article is basically a long list of unfortunate and terrible things.

If you can’t even keep the happy achievements of a guy with downs from descending into an angry internet mob, then there really isn’t much hope for a positive future for twitter, is there?

Well it’s a range of things, this week it was a SAP update that changed the necessary flow because the render speeds changed in the SAP ui.

A month ago it was a change to the invoices from a specific company.

Every week it’s the business noticing an edge case, or something that could be better. We pile these up, but you’ll rarely have a RPA process that handles 100% so there is an never ending race to get closer and closer. ;)

In one of our processes that handles a major process related to payment, we were able to automate the work of two financial workers, but the cost was that it required a new RPA worker to handle the errors, and a RPA worker is more expensive than two financial workers. It was still a gain, because the RPA worker also does other RPA things, but it’s a good illustration of how terrible RPA is at automation compared to the other tools in the toolbox.

I regret every RPA project we have to build. It’s just so stupid and avoidable by only buying things with APIs.

But it’s apparently the future of a lot of IT, because people aren’t going to stop buying really shitty software or start making architectural demands.

It’s going to be an amazing amount of technical debt in a lot of sectors though.

I mean, some of the integrations I build before my venture into management, decades ago are still running without the need for maintenance. Yet the most recent RPA project my team build has already used 6 hours of maintenance this week.

So stupid.

Why was it wrong to promote your colleague to manager instead of you?

You did technical work, but your colleague build relationships and manoeuvred politically.

So from what you’re saying, your colleague was a better choice for management than you. Because management isn’t really about having technical skills, even in tech, it’s about building relationships and getting the most out of them while you hold a steady course through corporate politics.

I mean, you didn’t even speak up for your achievements when you felt they were being stolen. And now you can’t come to terms with a new management structure. How do you expect to handle a management meeting?

That’s a little rough, and I am sorry, but technical skills isn’t really useful above technical leads, and those guys/girls rarely have responsibilities outside of technical direction.

I mean, do you even want to spend 60% of your time motivating other people, dealing with their problems, resolving their conflicts and helping them improve? Never writing another line of code? Because the other 40% will be spent in spreadsheets and meetings.

One of the first cyberpunk books I read opens with a drone hit on some European business man at a company resort.

It seems like we’re hell bent on making this reality. I mean, military AI is basically an inevitable future for us at this point, and while it’ll probably take a few years to leak into private hands, it eventually will, and the world will be a little more shitty for it.

Aside from that I’d rue the day the Americans get AI murder drones, especially if I was living in one of the 7 or 9 countries they are currently assassinating people in with the use of the current drone fleet. As terrible as a murder assassin drone is, it’s at least controlled by a supposedly moral being.

Does C really teach you how to be careful with memory in JAVA?

I think teaching big O is and focusing on efficiency is much better than teaching someone C. Especially in the modern world where garbage collection isn’t bad and memory is abundant.

I mean, we use a lot of Python and a lot of JS, both are fairly inefficient. On the tech side, but it’s very productive on the human end, and Human Resources are a lot more expensive than memory.

If you spent 1 week writing something that was half as efficient as if you’d spent two weeks on it, that extra week of pay, will still be paying for for the additional hardware after you die of old age.

Not the best CS lesson of course, but having hired people who learned C before X, they really don’t seem to have learned the memory lesson anyway.