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I worked in the same building as another division in my organization, and they found out I had created a website for my group. They said, “We have this database that was never finished. Do you think you could fix it?”
I asked, “What was it developed in?”
He replied, “Well what do you know?”
I said, “LAMP stack: PHP, MySQL, etc.” [this was over a decade ago]
He excitedly exclaimed, “Yeah, that’s it! It’s that S-Q-L stuff.”
I’m a little nervous at this point but I was younger than 20 with no degree, entirely self-taught from a book, and figured I’d check it out - no actual job offer here yet or anything.
They logged me on to a Windows 2000 Server and I become aware it’s a web application written in VB / ASP.NET 2.0 with a SQL Server backend. But most of the fixes they wanted were aesthetic (spelling errors in aspx pages, etc.) so I proceeded to fix those. They hired me on the spot and asked when I could start. I was a wizard to them and most of what they needed was quite simple (at first). I kept my mouth shut and immediately went to a bookstore after work that day and bought an ASP.NET book.
I worked there several years and ended up rewriting that app in C# and upgrading the server and ASP.NET framework, etc. It stored passwords in plaintext when I started and much more horrific stuff. It was in much better shape when I left.
That job was pivotal in my career and set the stage for me to be where I am today. I got the job because I used the word “SQL” in a sentence.3 -
Our front-end team is pissed at me because they found a feature I pushed last month and claimed they didn't know it existed and how can they help clients if they don't know what's going on with the platform and - I pointed them to the Pivotal story of the feature that they were included in as well as the full changelog announcement I made to the entire team the day I pushed it.
Knowledge is power, especially when it's in writing with a timestamp.5 -
Dear fellow developers: Let's talk about the Internet. If you're reading this post, you've probably heard of it and are comfortable using it on a regular basis. You may even develop software that works over the internet, and that's fine and great! But you have to draw the line somewhere, and that line has been pushed farther and farther back as time goes on.
Let's talk about video games. The first game that really got me into FPSes was Team Fortress 2. Back in the day, it had a great community of casual and competitive groups alike, and there were hats! Underneath the hood was a massive number of servers. Some were officially hosted, some were run by independent communities. It had a built-in browser and central index where you could find every publically-available server and connect to it. You could even manually input connection details if that failed. In my opinion, this was a near-perfect combination of optimal user-experience and maximum freedom to run whatever the hell you wanted to. Even today, if Valve decided to stop hosting official servers, the smaller communities could still stay afloat. Fifteen years in the future, after all demand has died off, someone can still recover the server software and play a game with their kids.
Now, contrast that to a game like Overwatch. Also a very pivotal game in the FPS world, and much more modern, but what's the underlying difference in implementation? NO SUPPORT FOR SELF-HOSTED SERVERS. What does that mean when Blizzard decides to stop hosting its central servers? IT DIES. There will be no more multiplayer experience, not now, not ever. You will never be able to fully share this part of your history with future generations.
Another great example is the evolution of voice chat software. While I will agree that Discord revolutionized the market, it took away our freedom to run our own server on our own hardware. I used to run a Mumble server, now it has fallen out of use and I miss it so much.
Over time, client software has become more and more dependent on centrally-hosted services. Not many people will think about how this will impact the future usability of the product, and this will kill our code when it becomes legacy and the company decides to stop supporting it. We will have nothing to give to future generations; nobody will be able to run it in an emulator and fully re-experience it like we can do with older games and software.
This is one of the worst regressions of our time. Think about services like IRC, SMTP, SSH, even HTTP, how you're so easily able to connect to any server running those protocols and how the Internet would change if those were replaced with proprietary software that depended on a central service.
(Relevant talk (16:42): https://youtu.be/_e6BKJPnb5o?t=1002)6 -
you know what i !love?
-project managers that can't manage something as simple as pivotal tracker
-project managers that schedule repeated stakeholder demo sessions when none of my stakeholers show up (ever)
-project managers that hold repeated grooming sessions that no one gives a fuck about because they can't manage what the fuck is going on the current iteration and therfore cannot forecast a proper next iteration
-project managers that complain about what doesn't get done in a current iteration because they don't don't pay attention to high priority stories that are added by developers in the current iteration even though they have (OWN) pivotal tracker
-project managers who have no clue about the business but want to turn grooming sessions into some sort of requirements gathering meeting only so they can appear halfway competent in the stupid little pivotal tracker notes
-cats that can't decide whether they want to go outside or stay inside
i'll take cats. at least their cuddly. sometimes. fuckers.2 -
In these GOT times,
managers will suffer,
PRs will not be merged,
Pivotal Tracker/Jira stories will not be attended to.
Stand-up meetings will be ditched.
Winter is here. -
The biggest distraction in all issue trackers is the hemorrhaging backlog of tickets that will _never_ be done, or aren't important yet.
This is why I just choose not to even bother opening it and let my PM close them out. :-) -
QA: Ok, I'll close this task and open a new task on pivotal for the missing features
... He is flirting me ?
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