"Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork." - Sam Ewing

Today's bug fix; brought to you by uneducated guesswork.

“Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork.”
(Sam Ewing)

Software engineering gets more diverse every year with problems ranging from faking 3d shadows on 2d browsers to accurately mimicking chemical bonds on the electron level.

I guess we primarily will get advanced tools, to make more complex problems easier to tackle. Just compare manual punch card piercing pliers to the JetBrains tool chain.
Also I believe that the roles that developers embody will get even more diverse, people will have way more specific functions in their ecosystem.

While reviewing a PR from one of our newer FE devs, I ended up spending more time than I would like mulling over its composition. The work was acceptable for the most part; the code worked. The part that got me was the heavy usage of options objects.

When encountering the options object pattern (or anti-pattern, at times) in complex scenarios, I have to resist the urge to stop whatever I'm doing and convert it to the builder pattern/smack them in the head with a software design manual. As much as I would like to, code janitor is one of the least valuable activities I engage in daily, and consistently telling someone to go back to the drawing board for work that is functional, but not excellent is a great way to kill morale. Usually, I'll add a note on the PR, approve it, add a brown bag or two on that sort of thing, and make attendance mandatory for repeat slackers. Skills building and catharsis all rolled up in a tiny ball of investing in your people.

Builders make things so much cleaner; they inform users what actions are available in a context; they tend to be immutable, and when done well, provide an intuitive fluent interface for configuration that removes the guesswork. As a bonus, they're naturally compositional, so you can pass it around and accumulate data and only execute the heavy lifting bits when you need to. As a bonus, with typescript, the boilerplate is generally reduced as well, even without any code generation. And they're not just a dumping ground for whatever shit someone was too lazy to figure out how to integrate into the API neatly.

They're more work in js-land, sure; you can't annotate @builder like with Lombok, but they're generally not all that much work and friendlier to use.

Alright so I have to create an API that communicates with a web interface and three different back end systems. And I think my customer might have thought that I am actually Jesus because they didn't have any docs for their systems and their policy did not allow me to gain access to their internal testing environment (which. Drove. Me. NUTS) and expected me to create this API by pure guesswork basically. After teaching the customer's internal IT guy how to capture requests between the systems I managed to somehow got the prototype working. I am proud and sleepy. ... Mainly sleepy

When you find out you passed the exam in which you guessed half of the answers ! 🎆🎉🎊
The algorithms of my brain seem to work well 🤣
This is now my second best module and I didn't study a lot hahaha

A friend of mine asked me yesterday for help for his bachelor thesis.

He wants to write about MySQL internals in regards to BLOB storage / usage.

We had a veeeerrrry long discussion....

And found a loooot of scary internet pages.

It's so .... Insane....

What some people with doctor titles or higher education generate...

Isn't content. More poo...

Most "blogs" / "articles" or whatever the author named it were missing all kinds of relevant data (version, configuration, anything relevant) but full of opinionated / biased bullshit.

Highlights were:
- we store lot of BLOB data, Backups take long and require more space
(you store additional data in an database, whaddya expect???!!!!)

- interesting guesswork about locking without any reference (interesting since it was sometimes so far away from reality that it looked more like quantum physics)

- storing blobs means that _each_ blob entry will be stored in a separate file (without any reference, but if an RDBMs did that... It would end in an amazing fireball I guess)

- BLOB's bad since it can represent only the file content, the database cannot distinguish wether it's an MP3 / MPG or anything like that...

(Ehm. Yeah. And an database cannot distinguish if you store under "Name" an Name or gibberish?!)

I somehow think that some people made an doctor and post this gibberish nonsense so people stay dumb to give them a job...

Like the TV repair men who steals the batteries from the remote.

Even conspiracy theories were more convincing

90% of work as a developer is not development,
it's guesswork and communication, trying to make sense of requirements and third-party software documentation or filling in the blanks if both are missing.

Hasn't technology become magic - and we ignorant sorcerer's apprentices who can perform a video call to the other side of the globe perhaps while we understand only some bytes of the thousands software snippets that were piled up by us code monkeys to perform the miracle? ...

This however has always been the state of software (for us developers): that this house of cards needs constant care by our hands to not collapse - in constant fear we may preserve the facades while the number of components that interact, the sheer mass of code only allow for guesswork and hotfixes accumulating the technical debt. Yes, we have all that terms for that. The problems are known since the 80s or 60s, so we might be relabeling it once in a while, but mainly it is just: complexity.. or entropy.