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1. Humans perform best if they have ownership over a slice of responsibility. Find roles and positions within the company which give you energy. Being "just another intern/junior" is unacceptable, you must strive to be head of photography, chief of data security, master of updating packages, whatever makes you want to jump out of bed in the morning. Management has only one metric to perform on, only one right to exist: Coaching people to find their optimal role. Productivity and growth will inevitably emerge if you do what you love. — Boss at current company
2. Don't jump to the newest technology just because it's popular or shiny. Don't cling to old technology just because it's proven. — Team lead at the Arianespace contractor I worked for.
4. "Developing a product you wouldn't like to use as an end user, is unsustainable. You can try to convince yourself and others that cancer is great for weight loss, but you're still gonna die if you don't try to cure it. You can keep ignoring the disease here to fill your wallet for a while, but it's worse for your health than smoking a pack of cigs a day." — my team supervisor, heavy smoker, and possibly the only sane person at Microsoft.
5. Never trust documentation, never trust comments, never trust untested code, never trust tests, never trust commit messages, never trust bug reports, never trust numbered lists or graphs without clearly labeled axes. You never know what is missing from them, what was redacted away. — Coworker at current company.8 -
writing library code is hard.
there are sooo many details that go into writing good libraries:
designing intuitive and powerful apis
deciding good api option defaults, disallowing or warning for illegal operations
knowing when to throw, knowing when to warn/log
handling edge cases
having good code coverage with tests that doesn't suck shit, while ensuring thry don't take a hundred years to run
making the code easy to read, to maintain, robust
and also not vulnerable, which is probably the most overlooked quality.
"too many classes, too little classes"
the functions do too much it's hard to follow them
or the functions are so well abstracted, that every function has 1 line of code, resulting in code that is even harder to understand or debug (have fun drowning in those immense stack traces)
don't forget to be disciplined about the documentation.
most of these things are
deeply affected by the ecosystem, the tools of the language you're writing this in:
like 5 years ago I hated coding in nodejs, because I didn't know about linters, and now we have tools like eslint or babel, so it's more passable now
but now dealing with webpack/babel configs and plugins can literally obliterate your asshole.
some languages don't even have a stable line by line debugger (hard pass for me)
then there's also the several phases of the project:
you first conceive the idea, the api, and try to implement it, write some md's of usage examples.
as you do that, you iterate on the api, you notice that it could better, so you redesign it. once, twice, thrice.
so at that point you're spending days, weeks on this side project, and your boss is like "what the fuck are you doing right now?"
then, you reach fuckinnnnng 0.1.0, with a "frozen" api, put it on github with a shitton of badges like the badge whore you are.
then you drop it on forums, and slack communities and irc, and what do you get?
half of the community wants to ban you for doing self promotion
the other half thinks either
a) your library api is shitty
b) has no real need for it
c) "why reinvent the wheel bruh"
that's one scenario,
the other scenario is the project starts to get traction.
people start to star it and shit.
but now you have one peoblem you didn't have before: humans.
all sorts of shit:
people treating you like shit as if they were premium users.
people posting majestically written issues with titles like "people help, me no work, here" with bodies like "HAAAAAAAAAALP".
and if you have the blessing to work in the current js ecosystem, issues like "this doesn't work with esm, unpkg, cdnjs, babel, webpack, parcel, buble, A BROWSER".
with some occasional lunatic complaining about IE 4 having a very weird, obscure bug.
not the best prospect either.3 -
Anybody else have this weird bug where your boss asks for advice, does the opposite of the advice you give, then blames you for the poor outcomes?
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Unlimited time is impossible... But I don't wanna ramble.
The one thing that I absolutely miss in my kind of work is something that does exist in dozens of flavors and each existence promises to solve some thing...
It's "bug tracker" / "time management" / "ticket management" / "board" / "kanban" or what ever pervert method you prefer software.
I haven't seen a decent one.
I'd think I'd want to build one - it would be definitely an all time consuming effort, since I would be in dire need of specialists.
The thing with nearly all of the solutions is that they lack ... an associative mindset.
Simply put, what we humans can.
The longer a project exists, the more it's housekeeping (guess that's a better word for it) turns into maintenance nightmare.
I remember quite well the joy of puzzling together eg Jira / Bugzilla / ... complex search formulars trying to find the needle in a planet of hay.
If you're read so far and have had similar experiences, think about how nice it would be if you had a mixture of AI and BI doing exactly that.
BI / Business Intelligence to get meaningful statistics is possible, but without AI it's a lot of work.
The AI would need to do several things...
- Match information (eg version XY was released at XY, so each bugreport after XY belongs to version XY and higher if no version matched)
- Tag and categorize (crashed / faulted / fried / ... - tag crash)
- "do the mundane work": ask nicely if the marching / tagging and so on was right, ask for missing info, require feedback etc.
There's a lot I could write more about that topic. But that's the gist. ;)
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