scott-smith_us

Serious question - why is this a tool and not a static list or spreadsheet?

Very nice!

Here are a few of mine:

- Dialogs that display truncated information, but aren't resizable (looking at you, Windows).

- File Open/Save dialogs that always open to the same default location, requiring the user to keep navigating to the same directory over and over.

- Information displayed in non-selectable (thus, un-copy-paste-able) form. Generally this is seen more in desktop and mobile apps vs. the web.

- Anything that changes what I type without my explicit OK. This includes IDEs with predictive completion, MS Word's on-by-default correction, and mobile devices that auto-capitalize email addresses and automatically add a space after a period...

- "Secret Question" drop-downs where none of the questions remotely apply to me

- Required fields that shouldn't be, e.g. "Company Name"

- Short length limits for site passwords. If you're limiting passwords to (let's say) twelve characters, that strongly suggests that you're storing the password in plain text on your servers (you should be storing a hash).

- Excluded punctuation characters for site passwords. This suggests that developer(s) decided "rather than expend the one-time effort to properly sanitize/escape our inputs, we thought we'd just dump the responsibility to exclude our arbitrary list of characters on the users for all time"

+1 for the reference to Chesterton's Fence -- hadn't come across that one before.

Now I have a name for the tendency of bad supervisors that show up and announce "Things are going to change around here!" before they have any idea why things are the way they are.

Another consideration:

We've all probably read that “Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”

When another (maintenance) developer sees float/double being used to represent money, their first reaction is going to be "uh oh, this dev didn't know what s/he was doing". There's a big risk of someone reflexively refactoring this later on.

You may ask, "What if I put in big comment blocks saying essentially 'I knew what I was doing here'?"

Well, even if maintenance devs read that and believe you, they're still likely to introduce errors, since they aren't used to using floats for money, and don't know all the tricks to avoid errors...

Unless there's some justifiable win in size / performance, this (although interesting) falls under my "Don't be too clever" rule.

I don't agree with this writer's take on the AA incident.

Any airline has a right to ask you to exit their plane, just like a taxi driver can ask you to leave his taxi. They owe you a refund, and maybe compensation, but they don't OWE you transportation.

If you were getting into a taxi, and the driver (for some reason) determined that s/he couldn't take you to your destination, they have every right to ask you to exit the vehicle.

Other than some kind of life-threatening emergency, there is no scenario I can imagine where you could be in the right by refusing to exit the vehicle and insisting they take you anyway. If you did refuse, force-able removal is the logical next step.

Writer went on to suggest that racism was somehow involved, which is where I gave up on reading the article.

Please explain why wanting to hear both sides of a story gets an "OH COME ON!" from you?

We had a bloviater guy at one company. I used to get up after ten minutes or so and go to the mail room, then call the guy in the next cube and say "this is your rescue call".

A few years back at my last job, I was approached by a senior guy on a product team asking me to game some tests so we could get our Windows certification.

I just kind of brushed him off at the time. I'm still sorry I didn't collect evidence and then report him. He was a real dirt bag.

As a frequent victim of this, perhaps you can satisfy my curiosity: What is the logic behind auto-starting videos at MAX VOLUME?

That just sends me stampeding for the [X] on the tab button all the faster.

> I don't fault the guy for the arbitrage

Well, it's entrepreneurial, but he's almost certainly also violating all kinds of employment stipulations and policies he's formally agreed to (security, privacy, etc.)

I used to do this defensively when submitting 8-bit games for publication back in the 80s.

The non-gamers at the publishing company seemed to feel they had to get back to you with a handful of changes. If your game was really polished, the changes would be pointless or even harmful things. I quickly learned to leave in a few obvious things that were trivial fixes, e.g. blocky bitmaps, misspellings, jarring colors.

Instead of coming back with:

> we really like the game, but couldn't the snake be an F-15 fighter, and couldn't the scrolling be vertical instead of horizontal?

...it would be more like:

> Change that color, fix that icon, correct that spelling

Sounds like Beezid. Worse than payday lenders IMO.

I still think they could have charged for less than the full month. The goodwill and trust that would have engendered would probably have been more than worth it in the long run.

There was an ongoing prank in my high school (late 70's) to insert John Holmes' name whenever/wherever possible. For example, one trick was to ask someone in the front office to add to the end-of-day announcements "{popular girl}, John Holmes won't be able to give you a ride today". Eventually the front office caught on, and it got riskier and more difficult to do.

I was asked to write an Applesoft BASIC program to help the front office collate and remove duplicates from attendance lists taken first and second period. At some point, I added some obfuscated code that would add John's name in when the total number of names was over some threshold.

Believe me, I'm very very ashamed of myself...

You have to have water storage if you've got people on board. I'd rather have one system that stores both fuel and life-support than have to have two separate systems and then guess exactly what proportions of both I'll need...

Thanks for doing this.

SUGGESTION: A video demo link would really help short-attention-span people like me. Something brief that shows it being used and highlights features that make μPad stand out (e.g. "infinite canvas" -- what does that look like)?

> this kid calling himself a prodigy is a clear indication of way too many gold stars handed out for adequacy

Maybe, but people like this have been around since long before they started handing out participation awards.

I think it has more to do with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

I know this was meant to be kind of tongue-in-cheek, but it's really a distillation of all the worst-case, deathmarch, and doomed projects rather than the average experience.

Yes, I can relate to everything the author talks about, because I've been in software for 35+ years and experienced bad times like this. But there are also times when everyone isn't an idiot, management doesn't have their heads up their collective asses, and you actually get to work with good people and create great software.

I only know about thunderfoot's hyperloop debunking video, but it was so full of incorrect assumptions and half-truths that he lost all credibility with me.

Royalties from a book or patent or software?

Untrustworthy is untrustworthy, whether due to incompetence or malice.