Manager: You devs are constantly complaining about context switching, if you were on my level you would be able to multitask and switch from task to task without an— hold on I’m getting a text *tap* *tap* *tap tap* *tap* *send noise*

Manager: Right, what were we talking about again?

Dev: …

WARNING: There is a dangerous malware out in the wild, and chances are, you have it installed on your computer.

It's called Windows Update, and it is marketed as a software that "delivers security patches to your PC". Wrong. What it actually does is hard-reboot your computer at randomly picked time intervals without asking for your consent, or even showing any type of warning, basically deleting all unsaved progress that you've made in your programs or games. It also deletes/undoes all registry tweaks that you might have made (e.g. to the context menu), it deletes your nvidia display configurations, uninstalls any custom themes that you might have installed, possibly even downloads another malware disguised as "Microsoft Edge" and shoves it in your face on next boot without giving a possibility to close it. Oh and it might also make your computer unbootable so you have to go to the advanced recovery settings to fix it manually.

Yes, everything I just mentioned above happened to me about an hour ago. This LITERALLY classifies the software as a malware (Google: "software that is specifically designed to disrupt, damage, or gain unauthorized access to a computer system"). If we throw in all the data collection that happens without your consent, Microsoft actually manages to check not only one, but all three boxes in the "malware" definition.

Pleas, stop using microshit, and switch to linux as soon as possible if you can.

I had code waiting in review for ten days, blocking other work. On the eleventh day, the final reviewer (who was standing behind me as I wrote it) says "I'm not sure that I agree with the design, here."

I get you, man, I can re-write the algorithm, but I am so not in that context anymore and you've just delayed release of the feature by at least a week. Ugggh.

Been really bored with programming-as-a-hobby lately, so I decided to give that a break and switch to physics for a while.

Man I've forgotten so much, time to revisit the Feynman Lectures books.

"Today was a good day, I didn't have to context switch between three different frameworks." -- Ice Cube

Context: We have a 96-port wall-mount patch panel. We're not even using half of those ports. "We" (read: "I") are completely redoing our network rack, as it's an ancient nest of wires. Currently all the ports in use on the patch panel just have random-length cables which are just drooped down beside the rack before running to switches. When I need to trace a cable from patch panel to switch, it's a complete nightmare. However, the cables going to the patch panel do have enough of extra length to do a rack-mount patch panel. I suggest this...

MGR: "Ehhh... I don't really like the idea of tying the rack to the wall... What if we want to move it or something?"
(this rack is in a tiny room and has been there since probably the 1800's.)
ME: "Well the problem currently is that it's all but impossible to trace cables. And even if I rewire it and bundle them nicely, it will still be a headache. With a rack-mount panel, we could just have super short patch cables and so it's super easy when I need to move stuff around."
MGR: "Okkkk..... So what if we would purchase like 3 or 4 switches to get 96 ports, then we run a cable to every patch panel port. That way we never need to change anything :)))."

Dude. Great idea. Let's drop hundreds to thousands of dollars on switches we don't need, rather than just doing a single patch panel. Brilliant. Also another great idea that, running thirty or forty unnecessary cables that we aren't even using. That won't clutter up the rack or use up valuable space or get confusing which ports on the switches are/aren't in use.

I'm trying so hard not to scream right now. I can't deal with this.

EDIT: It gets worse. Apparently part of the reason he wants to do this is "to make it simple". Currently we have our POS system running to its own switch, the printers are on another switch, etc. (yes I know some of this could be accomplished with a VLAN, this was set up before my time). But apparently "if we just had every single port wired then we could plug in whatever we want wherever we want and it wouldn't matter." I just... That's... That's not how you do a network.

Suddenly i realize, the present is a constant context-switch
-- insert mond blown gif here --

Rant time. Oh boi.

So, a bit of context: I am a university student in Greece and I have a desktop PC with elementary OS on it. When the unis closed down because of Coronavirus, I moved back to my parents', without my PC, only a usb stick with elementary OS installed on it. That was before the lockdown. My parents have a desktop PC and my old laptop, both with Windows rn. I'm only able to work using Linux, so I've been just popping that elementary OS USB stick whenever I needed to work.

All cool and good. Until the usb got full. It was a 16GB one after all. No biggie, I bought a new 64GB one from a well known Greek tech shop along with a webcam my mother needed. It was a LEXAR one.

They fucking took a week to transfer it. As if the closest shop to me was in fucking Germany. For context, the drawing tablet I bought from China the other day only did 2 weeks to come. During this time I could barely use Linux because my USB stick had only some 600MB free.

Ok, wtv I said to myself. I am a patient person after all. I received the USB stick, along with the webcam, in good condition, in their packaging. Alright. I dd'ed everything from the 16GB stick to the 64GB one and then I extend the partition. Everything works flawlessly. And it's faster too.

Next day, I boot up from it again. It boots up good. Nice, time to do some work. I open my editor. And it fucking freezes. The editor is not some VSCode or Atom or any of that heavy shit, it's just elementary OS Code. A very lightweight Gtk3 app. Strangely though, the rest of my OS (the dock autohide, eg.) Seems totally responsive. I try to open another app. No luck. Not even switching TTYs work. Good shit. I force shutdown my PC. I try to boot again from that piece of shit. And guess what! NO BOOT BITCH. Like, fuck you. I boot from my previous 16GB one. Linux won't recognize it. No /dev/sdc like I used to have. Ok, lsusb. Nope, nothing. I disconnect it and reconnect it, and lsusb. An empty entry appears.I run it a couple of times, and the it disappears again. I switch to TTY 2. I get read errors and usb error -71.

And I want to fucking explode

I call back to support for the warranty coverage. I wait for a good 10 minutes and a nice lady picks up. I tell her the issue. She says that the support team will call me for the issue this day it the next day.

I hang up.

It feels like some fucking prank. YOU MOTHERFUCKING TOOK SO LONG TO DELIVER MY SHIT. Not to mention that the shitty courier service they are working with wouldn't deliver the goods to my home because it's slightly out of town. AND NOW YOU ARE DELAYING MY WARRANTY RETURN? HOW THE FLYING FUCK DID YOU BECOME A WELL KNOWN TECH SHOP WITH SUCH SHITTY SERVICE?

IF YOUR BRAINS WERE DYNAMITE YOU WOULDN'T HAVE ENOUGH TO BLOW YOUR NOSES.

YOUR THE SERVICE EQUIVALENT OF A PARTICIPATION AWARD.

Foreigners' view of Greeks suddenly doesn't seem so unreasonable. Yes, we are fucking lazy asses. And we also hate that. We hate each other for that very reason. May this country not live any longer.

I wrote driver to a research OS as a university project. The system behave weird in some subtle ways, and I assumed that's my fault, as an inexperienced programmer.

After two sleepless weeks of chasing ghosts, I've realized that for some reason there is a context-switch that *did not* involve the scheduler! Further investigation led to the actual bug: the main trap code in the kernel was maskerading as different process just to be able to work on its virtual address, but never put that mask off!

It could have been found easily by a static analysis tool, given that a non-volatile global variable was only written to and never read; but we didn't use any.

So i wasted last 24 hours trying to satisfy my ego over a shitty interview and revisiting my old job's codebase and realising that i still don't like that shit. just i am 25 and have no clue where am i heading at. i am just restless, my most of the decisions in 2023 have given very bad outcomes and i am just trying doing things to feel hopeful.

context for the interview story-----
my previous job was at a b2b marketing company whose sdk was used by various startups to send notifications to their users, track analytics etc. i understood most of it and don't find it to be any major engineering marvel, but that interviewer was very interested in asking me to design a system around it.

in my 1.2 years of job there, i found the codebase to be extremely and unnecessarily verbose ( java 7) with questionable fallbacks and resistance towards change from the managers. they were always like "we can't change it otherwise a lot of our client won't use our sdk". i still wrote a lot of testcases and tried to understand the working of major features.

BTW, before you guys go on a declare me an embarrassment of an engineer who doesn't know the product's code base, let me tell you that we are talking SDKs (plural) and a service based company here. their was just one SDK with interesting, heavy lifting stuff and 9 more SDKs which were mostly wrappers and less advanced libraries. i got tasks in all of them, and 70% of my time went into maintaining those and debugging client side bugs instead of exploring the "already-stable-dont-change" code base.

so based on my vague understanding and my even more vague memory from 1 year ago, i tried to explain an overall architecture to that interviewer guy. His face was screaming the word "pathetic" from his expressions, so i thought that today i will try to decode the codebase in 12-15 hours, publish a cool article and be proud of how much i know a so called martech system design. their codebase is open sourced, so it wasn't difficult to check it out once more.
but boy oh boy i got so bored. unnecessary clases , unnecessary callbacks static calls , oof. i tried to refactor a few classes, but even after removing 70% of codebase, i was still left with 100+ classes , most of them being 3000-4000 files long. and this is your plain old java library adding just 800kb to your project.

boring , boring stuff. i would probably need 2-3 more days to get an understanding of complete project, although by then i would be again questioning my life choices , that was this a good use of my 36 hours?

what IS a correct usage of my time? i am currently super dissatisfied with my job, so want to switch. i have been here for 6 months, so probably i wouldn't be going unless i get insane money or an irresistible company offer. For this i had devised a 2 part plan to either become good at modern hot buzz stuff in my domain( the one being currently popularized by dev influenzas) or become good at dsa/leetcode/cp. i suck bad at ds/algo stuff, nor am i much motivated. so went with that hot buzz stuff.

but then this interview expected me to be a mature dev with system design knowledge... agh fuck. its festive season going on and am unable to buy any cool shirts since i am so much limited with my money from my mediocre salary and loans. and mom wants to buy a home too... yeah kill me

I enjoy watching her 3-second processing mental context switch gaze when I ask my girlfriend a question while she's on the phone scrollin' or chattin',

*goes to hardware store to purxhase some RAM*

When I get in my coding zone and tech support needs my help to solve a configuration bug.

Money or growth?

I'm mid level SE, looking to get promoted to Senior Level in January 2023.
(context: there are 4 levels before Engineering Manager or Software Architect in our company - 1 (or junior), 2 (or mid), 3 (or senior), 4 (or lead)...

But my total pay (way too good for my age at my place, but Software Engineers specially in FAANG and FAANG-like companies are overpaid here compared to the rest of the market.

My company, an Amazon's competitor in local market, earlier used to pay almost same as Amazon (or slightly higher to attract talent).

Recently, due to splurge of remote jobs, the MNCs started opening more offices (likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Goldman, Morgan etc) hence the salaries increased even more.

Amazon for example, recently gave 33% increment on base pay recently.

Taking their base salary equal to my total pay (including stocks, bonus).

Should I switch for money or stay for growth?

What are your plans for Christmas?!?!!??

I normally won't engage in societal tropes like pointless, generic, smalltalk or those questions people ask for lack of independent thought/societal trope-isms....

Here's my templated answer this year:

Background = ~2k$ in piles of tech... server upgrades components, apparently the only managed switch left in business/non-custom enterprise networking in the country/indexed for sale
(2k in what I would pay.... my tech sourcing is more base level and +4 years pro exp(yea... since age 8... really))

Foreground.... a shiny ✨️ new, wonderfully discounted for dumb reasons that i appreciate... 10Tb LFF HDD! 🥹🥲🤩

I really like raw data... enough raw data and proper context relevant high-level, custom, precise algorithms and i genuinely believe literally any questions or problems can be quantified and solved for

So... I just keep getting data, life, sourcing, stats on human behaviour... i factor everything

Yes i realise im very odd

//initial context plus curiousities
As parsed out to somewhat tangential commentary below... i cant keep making people go away for societally viewed polite engagement. Therefore, when asked again by factory sales rep who enjoys verbosity and apparent finds me extremely worth his intrigue/personal time

// additional context (and my attempt to be more parse and comment conscious)

With a bunch of initial reveals and launches startjng in a week and technically being the "owner/boss"(cringy to me so Ive officially made my title (anywhere with custom input fields) DragonOverlord...dragons being a tied in theme to all sects and no one can say DragonOverlord isn't a position... as it's clearly a class... unless you find a human more style code ignorant, comment inept, and in need of a very multilingual scribe to create a lexicon 2 steps before my code would be even follow-able without a likely, bad, headache and davinci code like adventure including the improbably well placed wise scholars that just happen to have significant unique and vital information they are willing to freely share with strangers.

Here are some:
1. email filters for crap
2. know wtf is your current task and stay on it with minimal context switch
3. get a bot to automate some of your work (build, deploy, health, run tests) inside slack/rocket.chat/otjer-irc-like-software

What's your thoughts on "nano learning"? For example having devs watch a 5 minute education video once per week rather than watching a 20 minute education video once per month.

I used to think it was a great idea, cause as devs we kinda do nano learning all the time on the fly while we are coding and googling.

However after my organisation has started sending us 5 minute education snippets - I've reconsidered.
Since it takes a few minutes to context switch from your current task to an education about something completely different it feels like an annoying chore.

opinion:

If something goes wrong is the 1st response to investigate

Or

Jump on IM and ask the person who last committed?

I would be in the opinion to have a look yourself and try identify the problem before fucking ranting at the last person who touched the code,

Reasons, Maybe that last person is busy and doesnt want to context switch back for a simple problem that would take less than 5 mins fucking investigation time, 1st thing in the morning too doesnt help!

Some long thoughts about state of desktop operating systems.

I always hated window management on desktop. There is basically no difference in usability between mobile and desktop in terms of application management. There is still finite amount of apps you can have in focus and you need to switch between them so they’re left from your screen.

What you end up is finite amount of screens you can connect into your computer or pounding switch context shortcut every other second.

We pushed computing so far and screen resolutions doubled from 1024x768 but the active desktop size is still the same.

For me adding additional display to laptop is not an option. What I love with remote work is that I can lay in my bed or on sofa or wherever I want to and write some code. My point is I don’t want to be stuck to my desk if I want to write / debug something.

Back to the desktop I think there is missing part of our state of desktop right now. The most we have are virtual desktops we can switch between but we can’t get parts of two desktops on same screen.

What I would love to test / develop is smooth infinite desktop with pinch and zoom - drag and drop navigation between my apps.

The problematic thing is determination of where user want’s to focus - is it fullscreen app or multiple apps on same screen and how to handle partially visible windows.

But I would love to test it. Maybe one day I switch to linux desktop just to try to implement the infinite desktop as an alternative to virtual desktops.

Maybe some rich frustrated kid would make it someday while I’m stuck at working my shit ass to pay for being able to have a decent life on this fucking planet…
I wish I can retire to focus on such things.

To get unstuck, do a brief context switch. Let your brain process the problem in the background.
My preferred mode of context switch? Gossip over snacks.

Gonna love ChatGPT from time to time.

Best version of this method I wrote by hand was 7 lines. Now it's 3.

And it's perfectly readable.

private static DateOnly ParseDateArgument(GraphQLValue? argumentValue, IResolveFieldContext context)
{
return argumentValue switch
{
GraphQLStringValue strVal when DateOnly.TryParse(strVal.Value.ToString(), out var date) => date,
GraphQLVariable varVal when DateOnly.TryParse(context.Variables?.ValueFor(varVal.Name.StringValue)?.ToString(), out var date) => date,
_ => default
};
}

What’s more annoying than being distracted from your actual work by colleagues to make a couple of HTTP calls which can be done by them in minutes since they have everything but requires you to switch context and waste almost an hour in retrieving credentials reading documentation and filling Postman forms?

Usually it's customer support.
We are a small team, so developers handle support, on a rotation basis though. But this is a hell lot of distraction because of the context switch. :(
Sometimes there are really disturbing tickets like how do I call this API using HTML? (*cries in spanish)

After spending some times coding in PHP and then i start adding semicolon to my Python code.

The joys of being a multi-project, multi-language developer! You think you'll juggle a couple of balls, but suddenly you're in a full-blown circus act, with chainsaws, flaming torches, and a monkey on your back yelling "more features!"

In the morning, you're all TypeScript: "Yes, of course, types make everything more reliable!" By lunch, you're neck-deep in Python and realize types are a vague suggestion at best, leaving you guessing like some bug-squashing mystic. And then just when you’ve finally wrapped your head around that context switch, FastAPI starts demanding things that make you wonder, "Why can’t we all just get along and be JavaScript?"

Oh, and don’t even get me started on syntax. One minute it’s req.body this and express.json() that. The next, Python’s just there with a smug look, saying, "Indentation is my thing, deal with it!" And don’t look now, because meanwhile, Stripe’s trying to barge in with a million webhooks, payment statuses, and event types like “connect” and “payment,” each a subtle bomb to blow up your error logs.

Of course, every language has its "elegant" way of handling errors—which, translated, means fifty shades of “Why isn’t this working?” in different flavors! But hey, at least the machines can’t see us crying through the screen.