Imagine if a structural engineer whose bridge has collapsed and killed several people calls it a feature.

Imagine if that structural engineer made a mistake in the tensile strength of this or that type of bolt and shoved it under the rug as "won't fix".

Imagine that it's you who's relying on that bridge to commute every day. Would you use it, knowing that its QA might not have been very rigorous and could fail at any point in time?

Seriously, you developers have all kinds of fancy stuff like Continuous Integration, Agile development, pipelines, unit testing and some more buzzwords. So why is it that the bridges don't collapse, yet new critical security vulnerabilities caused by bad design, unfixed bugs etc appear every day?

Your actions have consequences. Maybe not for yourself but likely it will have on someone else who's relying on your software. And good QA instead of that whole stupid "move fast and break things" is imperative.

Software developers call themselves the same engineers as the structural engineer and the electrical engineer whose mistakes can kill people. I can't help but be utterly disappointed with the status quo in software development. Don't you carry the title of the engineer with pride? The pride that comes from the responsibility that your application creates?

I wish I'd taken the blue pill. I didn't want to know that software "engineering" was this bad, this insanity-inducing.

But more than anything, it surprises me that the world that relies so much on software hasn't collapsed in some incredible way yet, despite the quality of what's driving it.

Reading minified Javascript feels like entering The Matrix.

Blue pill: master LITERALLY every computer language on earth and be able to use them to their full potential to create LITERALLY any idea that comes to you.
Red pill: master LITERALLY every linguistic language that exists and be able to speak fluently with every human on earth
...........................
I picked the blue pill and people thought I'm weird.

"This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."

Said to a new team member before they embarked on a journey of pain as I took them through a huge web app made with jQuery (think: 10K lines of DOM manipulation horror), WCF, and sadness.

A few years ago I would whine, complain and rant about shitty software, which I knew could be so much better than it was. But I didn't yet write software of my own.

Now I complain about shitty libraries, API's and users. Not much has changed really. And every time I write code, I curse myself, and whoever made this trashpile I have to work with. I curse the user to the moon and beyond for using the program wrong. Funny thing is, exactly the thing I was complaining about (input validation, see earlier rant) is also exactly what no more than 5 minutes after release, a user fucked up with. The bot just does not respond at this point. But fuck these braindead retards for users.

In a few years I expect myself to be complaining about shitty compilers and buffer overflows, segmentation violations, bad coding style (don't make your program a fucking colander kthx), and so on.

Next decade I expect myself to be complaining about physics itself, and why the universe is governed by the laws it's governed by. Whoever this God is, he's a fucking retard. Funny thing is, the signs for it are already there. Electron theory! If only those electrons were positrons, then the math would check out properly. Instead of negative electrons traveling from negative to positive, we'd have positive positrons traveling from positive to negative. At least from what I understand so far, this is still a decade away after all.

The point I'm trying to make is that nothing changes, only my understanding of the world around me does, as I tumble further and further down the rabbit hole. Sometimes I wish I had taken the blue pill... Either complain about others' software or perhaps not give a shit at all. Become one of those filthy users I now despise.

Which one are you?

Everyday I get on my train, get off and go into the office, get some coffee, and sit down at my desk.

Everyday, all of us take a Blue Pill, and focus in on this world they give us. We don't consider this a part of our life. Brushing our teeth, flossing, making breakfast, sleeping .. those are also not our life.

Life are all the other things outside of the routine.

But we spend more time in our routine. We spend more time in our loops than outside of them.

Brushing your teeth, making coffee, coding at work, eating, sleeping: these things are your life.

All those other things, they're the escape from it.

God I hate this loop they have us running in. It was nicer before I was self aware of it.

Knowledge is such a burden.

I should have taken the blue pill.

[Blue pill]
stay in my current workplace [approaching the 10yrs mark], with an agreed salary and seniority raise, with a high probability of losing my current project [which is really fun!] in Feb next year and having to switch to another one, but keep all the benefits

[Red pill]
switch full-time to contracting with a potential to reap big bucks [x2-x4] and be free to juggle as many clients as I like, dictate my terms, become a shareholder, but lose all that warm and cozy certainty guaranteed by my current employer

Morpheus: Do you want to know what is the Dark Side, Neo?

Neo swallows and nods his head.

Morpheus: Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Dark Side is. You have to see it for yourself.

Neo: How?

In Neo's right hand, Morpheus drop a red pill in his left, a blue pill.

Morpheus: If you take the red pill, you will join the Dark Side. If you take the blue one, the story will end. After this, there is no going back.
Remember that all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.

Neo opens his mouth and swallows the red pill.

So... are you brave enough like Neo, to join the Dark Side?

Can The Matrix be actually built..???