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1. No more coding on paper! Why can some already write essays on laptops but programmers are stuck with "analog"?
2. No vendor lock-ins! Teach free, cross-platform development, not VB.NET.
3. No more professors stuck in the eighties! If all you know is 6800 assembly, GTFO. I heard NASA was hiring...
4. Enforce code style consistency, proper documentation and even VCS for larger projects
5. Algorithms -> scripting -> programming. Don't quickly explain the basics, then throw students straight into Java.10 -
Every time management says "were now using SaaS product X, and they're giving a webinar so we can learn how to use their solutions to take our business to the next level!" — I can't help but associate it with Nigerian Prince scams.
The longer I'm a developer, the more I think vertical integration and inventing your own shitty wheels isn't such a bad idea.
Their generalized, overpriced seat-per-month service always boils down to "vendor lock-in, nothing can be customized or exported, integrations are a pain in the ass, and within a few months the bills will explode because of some overage fee".10 -
Apple vs. Microsoft: who sucks more?
At first glance, it's obvious that Apple sucks more. Their overpriced products are so bad that they rely heavily on vendor lock-in and cult-like brainwashing.
Then again, Apple's vendor lock-in also acts as buyer lock-out so that it's easy to avoid Apple. Basically, Apple sucking more also means they suck less. Think different indeed.
Microsoft on the other hand sucks more because their crap is so ubiquitous that it's difficult to avoid Microsoft.
That looks like a draw - but here's the tie breaker: Microsoft tries to ape Apple, BUT! Microsoft even sucks at copying Apple's suck.
So here's the final verdict: Microsoft sucks more.38 -
"Smart" home gym equipment: expensive hardware for some grand, proprietary software, and ongoing subscription fees in the $50/mo ballpark.
The SW is usually designed so that even shit that could have been local is instead stored remote as to make the subscription look more worthwhile. The large front-up cost serves not only as revenue, but also to anchor the vendor lock-in.
Open source hackers could potentially unchain the HW so that users would actually own what they purchased, but there is a catch: the HW is sold at a loss, and the subscription is the business model.
Freeing up the HW would render the subscription rather useless, and ramping up the HW sales prices to profitability would destroy any demand.
Basically, it's products that are technically feasible, but not economically viable. Which is why they are not the future of home gyms.22 -
"Bu...bu..but JAVA SWING and FX are PORTABLE!"
And electrolytes are what plants crave.
I swear half the people I argue with are dinks.
IF YOU HAVE PEOPLE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOU HAVE TO DO WORK PEOPLE WILL HIRE YOU FOR.
Under job listings for javafx: 2 listings within 200 miles of me.
Under job listings for C#/WPF: dozens and dozens of jobs.
Portability doesn't matter if you're broke.
My stomach owes no allegiance to "high fallutin" concepts such as openness, avoiding vendor lock in, or the high ideals of platform independence.
I'll take the microsoft gulag if it pays my bills.
I don't know whats so hard to grasp about this. Some people are completely divorced from reality.
Edit: Hello to all my peeps who I haven't talked with in a while. I hope everything is going swimmingly in your lives. May your beer forever be paid for by your employer and your code bug free!5 -
An identity platform where you can find each other, get the other's public key and preferred contact method. And the entire key exchange and choice of contact method are negotiated automatically. No vendor lock in, encryption happens on your own device. Effortlessly and securely communicating, no searching for skype name, email, phone number, setting up shit. It would just work.7
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Vendor lock-in for cloud providers is really small, and you don't notice it until you need it. Route53 has an "import zone file" button, but they don't have an "export zone file" button. Yes, there are other tools and scripts to do it, but bit-by-bit AWS, GCP, and Azure make it difficult to leave.2
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"Hi X,
Y stepped down from organizing meetup Z.
You are one of the top members of this Meetup, so I think you have what it takes to be a great organizer. Stepping up would help ensure that this community continues to survive past [date in the near future]."
Third time I get a message like this from meetup. Usually followed up by threatening to delete all group data forever if no one "steps up" (e.g. pays their bills). F***ing vendor lock-in! They have been colleting and publishing data for years only to blackmail people to continue using their services.
Some meetups (at least in my region) have switched to LinkedIn, so we will surely receive messages like above from LinkedIn in a couple of years.1 -
At my previous company, we used tools from all over the place. We switched between tools at will. Sometimes, some team would decide to use some tool while the rest of the company would use something else. The worst part was that there was no Single-Sign-On (SSO) either. Everyone would need to have an account on all of these said tools. It was chaos.
I realized that being integrated into one environment (even though would have the cost of a vendor-lock-in) was the best option to have because in that case, we wouldn't have to deal with operational hurdles like having integration from one tool to another. They would just come baked-in with the whole environment. That's how GSuite (formerly Google Apps for Work), Atlassian and other players succeeded - they gave a complete suite of services / software that integrated well with each other. You could jump back and forth between services without having to bother about integration with other tools. They'd all be there wherever you wanted them to be. Even cloud providers so that opportunity and built on it - Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes (in itself).
Another example is a company that used Jira, Confluence and Hipchat but for some dumb reason used Gerrit for their code review / hosting. Eventually, they realized that managing the integration with the Atlassian tools was far more expensive than getting bitbucket and migrating completely into the Atlassian environment.
It's always the integration that matters. Everything else is secondary. -
Unstableness of core technology stack. The more developers are there, the more complicated architecture they create that often doesn’t give any significant value besides what if something goes wrong ?
What if you make mistake ?
What if power goes down ?
I feel I am last optimistic thinking software developer on this planet.
I feel that those tools just try to give some sort of power to the management over developer free mind.
Creatures like multicloud, cloud, k8s I feel that it’s just beginning not the end of road. And this beginning is a wrong turn.
It’s just another vendor lock in.
But I might be wrong.3 -
I had a discussion about SAAS and microtransactions with another dev. They are a little bit younger than me. The trend toward this in games and android apps were discussed. We found that we both avoid software which employs these business models.
We cannot be the only 2 people who avoid products employing these common business models. So I wonder what demographic pays for these services and products? I am to the point that if my kid asks to buy something in a game, I tell them that we will get rid of the game if they keep asking.
The only time I have paid for SAAS is when there is extraordinary perceived value. Quickbooks for small business is one such product (way cheaper than an accountant). Another is the Xbox game pass. So apparently for the game pass I am in the demographic.
Do we not like it because it is new? Or is it a kind of sleazy business tactic? I dunno. I would rather pay up front for most things. I feel like SAAS will be employed in software with proprietary file formats which require a subscription to even get to your data. Vendor lock-in.9 -
Folks, it's happening!
Look at this shit: they managed to create a web editor / infrastructure technology which enables you to write backends blazingly fast. No deploy time, no git (versioning with feature flags).
Sadly, this comes with the worst vendor lock-in ever. But it is still a great idea to take the approach to drastically remove complexity out of today's software.
https://darklang.com/
I am torn. But I would prefer if it was OSS of course (to be able to self-host it).7 -
For me that would be Proxmox. I know, people like it - but for no apparent reason it decided to nuke half my ZFS datasets in a pool, with no logic behind it whatsoever. All disks were tested, all came out good. Within the same pool there were datasets that were lost and some that remained.
I really don't get it. Looking at Proxmox' source code, it's more or less the command line tools and then there's the web interface (e.g. https://github.com/proxmox/...). Oh and they have the audacity to use their own file extension. Why not I guess?
Anyway, half my data was gone. I couldn't tell how or why or what the fuck even happened there. But Proxmox runs Debian underneath and I've been rather pissed about Proxmox' idea of "don't touch the host system aaa" for a while at that point. So I figured, fuck it I'll just take pure Debian then and write my own slightly better garbage on top of that. And as such the distribution project was born. I've been working on it for a little over a year now. And I've never had such issues again.
I somewhat get the idea of "don't touch the host" now, but still not quite. Yes, the more you do in the containers, the better. And the less you do on the host in terms of reconfiguration, the longer it will stay alive for. That goes for any system - more reconfiguration means usually means less stability and harder to replace. But sometimes you just have to work from the host. Like say migrating a container between hosts, which my code can do. You can't do that from a container, at all. There are good reasons to work with the host. Proxmox isn't telling that. Do they expect their users to be idiots? Only enterprise sysadmins amirite?
So yeah, that project - while I do take inspiration from it in mine - I don't like it. It's enterprise, it has the ZFS and the Ceph and the LXC and the VM's - woohoo! Not like anyone could implement that on a base Debian system. But they have the configuration database (pmxcfs), the distributed configuration database of a couple MB large and capped there, woah!
Ok sure it isn't Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or whatever, and those are definitely worse. But those are usually vendor lock-ins.. I avoid those on that premise alone :)3
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