Why do people (Some devs too...) bloody hell think that devs have Hard time fixing the Semi Colon issue, we have a lot of other issues to figure out, like the Structure of Data, Code Fragmentation, API Creation, Invalid Data Handling, Injection Prevention. But no, since we are developers, we are having sleepless nights because of one fucking semicolon? FUCKING NO, it hardly takes 30 seconds to figure out that there is a missing semi-colon. Really People, stop the ; thing!

Fuck Optimizely.

Not because the software/service itself is inherently bad, or because I don't see any value in A/B testing.

It's because every company which starts using quantitative user research, stops using qualitative user research.

Suddenly it's all about being data driven.

Which means you end up with a website with bright red blinking BUY buttons, labels which tell you that you must convert to the brand cult within 30 seconds or someone else will steal away the limited supply, and email campaigns which promise free heroin with every order.

For long term brand loyalty you need a holistic, polished experience, which requires a vision based on aesthetics and gut feelings -- not hard data.

A/B testing, when used as some kind of holy grail, causes product fragmentation. There's a strong bias towards immediate conversions while long term churn is underrepresented.

The result of an A/B test is never "well, our sales increased since we started offering free heroin with every sale, but all of our clients die after 6 months so our yearly revenue is down -- so maybe we should offer free LSD instead"

Google I try to love you and use your messengers but you make it difficult.

I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.

It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"

I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".

- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.

And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.

About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.

Why dont people trust you?

I was hired to be an SQL developer, I don't actually get to do much development, normally doing something involving copying and pasting in Excel.

Some of our databases were running slow and we noticed some (a few hundred) indexes were in shit state.

I knocked up a couple of scripts, one to reorganise indexes that were up to a certain amount of fragmentation and one to rebuild the indexes

My boss wants them tested (they were several times in dev) we've had these for over 3 weeks, but she doesn't want to run them.

Instead of fixing hundred of indexes she decided I should contrate on fixing some historic data issues that are preventing 10 indexes from being rebuilt.

Now there are serious issues and the CTO is asking why the indexes haven't been fixed.

I could have done this nearly a month ago, but now it's turned into a huge fucki g deal, and no doubt they'll try and push it back on me

Rant!

Been working on 'MVP' features of a new product for the past 14 months. Customer has no f**king clue on how to design for performance. An uncomfortable amount of faith was placed on the ORM (ORMs are not bad as long as you know what you are doing) and the magic that the current framework provides. (Again, magic is good so long as you understand what happens behind the smoke and mirrors - but f**k all that... coz hey, productivity, right?). Customer was so focussed on features that no one ever thought of giving any attention to subtler things like 'hey, my transaction is doing a gazillion joins across trizillion tables while making a million calls to the db - maybe I should put more f**king thought into my design.' We foresaw performance and concurrency issues and raised them way ahead of the release. How did the customer respond? By hiring a performance tester. Fair enough - but what did that translate into? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Hiring a perf tester doesn't automagically fix issues. The perf tester did not have a stable environment, a stable build or anything that is required to do a test with meaningful results. As the release date approached, the customer launched a pilot and things started failing spectacularly with the system not able to support more than 15 concurrent users. WTF! (My 'I told you so' moment) Emails started flying in all directions and the hunt for the scapegoat was on (I'm a sucker for CYA so I was covered). People started pointing in all directions but no one bothered to take a step back and understand what was causing the issues. Numero uno reason for transaction failure was deadlocks. We were using a proprietary DB with kickass tooling. No one bothered to use the tooling to understand what was the resource in contention let alone how to fix the contention. Absolute panic - its like they just froze. Debugging shit and doing the same thing again and again just so that management knew they were upto something. Most of the indexes had a fragmentation of 99.8% - I shit you not. Anywho, we now have a 'war room' where the perf tester needs to script the entire project by tonight and come up with some numbers that will amount to nothing while we stay up and keep profiling the shit out of the application under load.

Lessons learnt - When you foresee a problem make a LOT of noise to get people to act upon it and not wait till it comes back and bites you in the ass. Better yet, try not to get into a team where people can't understand the implications of shitty design choices. War room my ass!

The Return of Mr. Gitmaster:
So there is this colleague I already ranted about several times. After my previous team lead had confronted him about not doing much work, there was some irritation because he showed not up at work, but it turned out the external training he did was just a week earlier. Then he was ill a week, another week vacation so we didn't see him much. Not that his pre- or absence makes much difference to our repo: When his and my team lead looked at his commits of the past three months they found like the one copy-pasted HTML-form that wouldn't even show.
Fast forward to now, where we have a new team lead and we were going to lunch with Mr. gitmaster. So we got some more hero stories from the great work he was doing in the previous company. How he was graphically monitoring the heap fragmentation that stupid glibc was causing to their search engine, and how much better it became with tcmalloc.
I still don't understand how he bridges that cognitive dissonance from all the superior tech knowledge he displays to not actually writing any code at all. Not that I would not have experienced some states of feeling low, in paralysis unable to write a single line of code... but he seems so full of confidence, always commenting how trivial and easy all these tasks would be, as if it's all so lightyears below his abilities. Maybe he should just become a manager - but not mine.

Me: Could you give me the path to your Desktop folder, please?
Linux Distros: ... *shrug*, nope?!

Anybody loves python? I don't know why, but the more I use python, the more I seem to hate it. Specially the poor naming of the functions are just horrible! specially when you've been following the #CleanCodePrinciple strictly.

Let me give some example:
What does even "len" or "str" mean normally? is it a variable or a function? can anybody imagine?
where as in Java or JavaScript it is array.length and anyValue.toString()
anybody can understand what these things are, whether a variable or a function.

in python some functions are like "dothisorthat" and some are "do_this_or_that" some are "doThisOrThat". I mean, why can't you just follow an unified rule?

and there's this fragmentation between python 2 and 3! whether in stackoverflow or in youtube/udemy, a lot of them used python 2 and some uses python 3. I mean, can't they have some BackworkSupports?

A toss up between Apple and Microsoft...

Apple I use to love because I used an iPhone exclusively and loved iOS but the more and more I moved into the cloud. The more and more I started hating the lack of online tools like word processing and the like so eventually led me to disliking them but now I hate them exclusively because of there hardware fragmentation, the lack of consistency between there hardware really irritates me...

And Microsoft came from in an instant, I use to love windows and use it exclusively but as soon as I discovered Linux and got my first taste of it through Ubuntu I started hating windows compared to Linux but now I hate the company because of their two faced ways, will state they support the open source community yet only throw actual support when they clearly can't be beaten and give in...

(Can feel the hate coming my way so all good!)

I started working my new job as a programmer(c#, java, etc.) in a very good programming company.

My first task was to optimise their DB. The DB has indexes and around 3mil rows. The db is slowwww as fuck.

So i made a windows service that reorganises indexes (Depending on blank pages and fragmentation of the index) in DB each week on time.

But as soon as new rows start to come in, the fragmentation of the indexes just sky rocket.

I tried with changing idexes so there will accually be onli indexes we need.

Can anyone help me how can i fix fragmentation problem so the select querries will be much faster.

Sorry if I don't know the solution, I'm new at this task.

Thank you!

So I was using Defraggler to defragment one of the partitions on my computer, and somehow ended up with more fragmentation than there were to start with. WTF?!

There must be a simple, reliable, compatible, battery efficient way to poll an api every ten minutes and send user a notification, right?

AlarmManager : Ok. But who cares about battery anyways?

Google cloud messaging : Ok, you can have battery efficiency. But who lives without Google anyways?

JobScheduler : Ok, but you need Lollipop. Which Android phone doesn't get updates? Oh wait, shit.

According to a site I was reading, theres 7 different ways to write a vue component.

Does anyone else think this situation is gonna come back to bite vue in the ass?

Did they even consider userbase fragmentation?

I have done it!

I have discovered my biggest irritant when it comes to the tech world and that is fragmentation and visual disorganisation and once again, Microsoft and Google are the fucking worst for it, all applications have different design languages in play, their OS's are disjointed (Chrome OS shits me just because of how much android is leaking in yet they refuse to use similar navigation and the like)...

Apple did it right, oh we are redesigning our mobile platform and desktop platform at the same time, oh I know! Let's make them follow the same fucking design...

I'm just some random 20 year old and have so many ideas that almost everyone will agree make both teams products so much user appealing -,-

Am I the only one who thinks that Apple loves fucking over its developers? Besides for the yearly fee, they seem to release iPhones with drastically different screen dimensions, which forces devs to make their apps compatible with a new layout. I can't imagine the nightmare this causes for devs of games, which often have custom UIs.

First we have the change to a taller screen dimension for absolutely no fucking reason, then there was a display size increase, and now there's curved corners and the top of the display extends on both sides but not the middle.

That last bit must make for some really fucked up design decisions. Who the fuck thought that a partial screen would be a good idea? Screens would cost a ton more and would be substantially harder to replace. Not to mention how screen protectors will be less likely to stay on...

IMO this is just as bad as Android version fragmentation. 😒

#rant
Is it just me or is the Android Storage Access Layer completely fucked up?

All I want to do is upload an image in 3 sizes (one of them 4k, if available), the correct orientation, on devices >= Android 2.1 (yes, including Samsung crap), without 100m of libraries to an S3 bucket and I need a PHD + an Armada of physical test devices to do so? WTF?