Dah. Boss says we have to set a take home coding task for the dev interviews we're doing. I'd prefer just having a chat and forming an opinion.

I mean, you're the boss, but I still reckon that'll only cause the good candidates to sod off...

When you've got a job you're happy with.

That's it in my book. Studied it and persuaded someone to hire you to do it? Enjoy that job, and it pays the way? Good work. Of course you'll likely go further than that in time, which is great - but there's no great magical point to "strive to" so to speak.

...by saying "so what?!"

Either my fears that I'm not good enough to be where I am are founded, in which case I need to be thankful for this opportunity to be "above my station" so to speak, and work hard to make sure I *do* deserve to be there.

...or they're unfounded, in which case I need to work hard to do the best job I can.

In either case, it doesn't change the outcome, so worrying about it is futile. Heck, even go one step further - shoot for the jobs you *think* are above your station, and then see what comes of it.

Soon even more reason for that friendly high-rep SO user to close your question as a dupe :-)

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/ques...

Years ago when I was doing my internship, I wrote a wiki-type system to catalogue a bunch of druggable targets for a pharmaceutical company. The powers that be were impressed, but also wanted integration with one of their legacy databases that would have been a project in itself to deal with. It was boring, would have taken the rest of my time there and wasn't worth it, so my immediate boss just delayed it until the next intern rolled in.

...then the next intern rolled in, and it was delayed again similarly. And again. And again.

I believe it was delayed for the best part of a decade in total at least, year after year, simply because no-one wanted to do it. After that the site shut, the project was shipped elsewhere, and I've no idea if it ever happened!

Ok, time to eat some humble pie. I seem to remember ranting about the fact we were going to use an offshore dev house a while back, and I'd convinced myself they were going to be absolutely useless.

Far from it. It's certainly meant I've had something else to do in managing them, and I can't say everything has been completely rosy - but overall, they're a bunch of hard working, decent devs who write good, well-tested code, are receptive to feedback in code reviews and take the initiative and ask questions when they need to. Shame on me for initially thinking otherwise - I'll miss working with them when I leave this place.

Bugger me.

https://saltexploit.com/

Anyone that uses (used) salt take note.

...is that someone who finds some, let's say, questionable quality code that I've written in previous roles, finds me again and calls me out on it...

My current "file/media server" is a crappy old falling apart windows box with a stupid mismash of internal and external drives with no redundancy. That sucks for a number of reasons, so planning on dropping around a grand or so (including drives) on doing it properly.

Space requirement would be around 20TB-ish of usable space, with 1 disk's worth of redundancy. That can include a newish 5TB drive I have lying around however. Would also run either Plex / Jellyfin, so some horsepower for transcoding would be nice (but no need for more than a single 1080 stream at once.) 24/7 operation, so don't want anything too power hungry.

Current (loose) thinking on the hardware side is an AM4 board and a reasonably low end CPU, 3x8TB WD golds. Software side, probably CentOS, then mergerfs + snapraid. Anyone got any insight as to other options? Hardware not my speciality in particular, so open to suggestions.

I'm amazed so many people have "one" favourite editor. I have a whole bunch depending on the situation:

- IntelliJ whenever dealing with Java files
- VS whenever dealing with .NET
- VS code whenever dealing with Salesforce
- Notepad++ when just opening "any old file" to do some quick editing (never been won over to Sublime)
- vim when needing to edit files in a console environment
- nano as the second choice in the above situation when vim isn't available
- Emeditor when needing to open / work with very large files

I've never even remotely found a "one size fits all" solution.

TIL "monorepos" are a thing, where you just whack all your projects into one insanely large repo. And not just a niche thing either - used by some of the biggest tech companies.

I thought this was a code smell that everyone moved past when we abandoned subversion.

I understand the theoretical arguments around ensuring that everything can be compatible, can make large scale changes at once, etc. - but I don't really buy that in practice. Surely if you've got that many inter-dependencies going on that just points to the fact you've got crappy code with way too much internal coupling?!

Does anyone use this paradigm? To me it just sounds like, for the big companies, moving away from one huge repo was too much hassle. So they gave it a fancy new name and pretended it's the new "cool way to work" instead.

There is no damn worldwide shortage of Cobol devs. There's a few localised, highly publicised cases where those devs are needed, those cases are diminishing fast, and that's about it.

Please stop touting this nonsense that everyone who learns Cobol can just drop into a job and make 6 figures. The only thing that's going to come out of this is a worldwide surplus of devs who learnt Cobol, and are now gobsmacked no-one wants to hire them to work in an antiquated language they have zero real-world experience in.

Anyone looked at / using Jetbrains new font?

I mean it's... ok, I guess, but I'm still sticking with what I know (Droid Sans Mono being my particular weapon of choice.) I'm probably more likely to switch languages than I am fonts.

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/

I don't move much. My back aches, and I'm getting rather fat.

Like visual basic? Go for it. Scratch? Get stuck in. Like playing around with HTML/CSS/JS? Ignore anyone who laughs. Want to learn C++? Awesome!

The best thing you can do as a kid is get exposure to it, be creative, be curious, work out how to do stuff, and get stuck in. It's not the time in your life to listen to anyone who's discouraging. Then, whether you take this up longer term or not, you'll have had some fun, created some cool stuff, and have a good grasp of some basic concepts.

Almond, are you there?

> Sure, of course.

Oh ok, it said you were on mute.

> I was, I always go on mute if I'm not talking to help cut down on background noise **hint hint**

That's very confusing for the rest of us, can you leave your mic on please?

> Right... Okay.

Had a dodgy stomach. Muted the mic & let out an almighty fart.

Only, as you'll have guessed (and I quickly guessed from the silence that followed), I'd missed the mute button.

Does anyone else use:

cat /path/to/file | grep "blah"

Rather than:

grep "blah" /path/to/file

...when grepping? Or is it just me? Mainly asking because in my half asleep state I just wrote `tail -f | grep "blah"` by mistake and wondered why it was taking way to long to read the file...

Code I'm proud of writing today will likely be code I'm ashamed to have written next year.

Feels weird when others are facing redundancy, and I'm in a stable position but applying to a new job anyway.

Not sure if it's a sensible move, but I'm deferring that decision for now, chances are I may not get it anyway which would save the hassle!

Pet peeve #3984 - when managers / salespeople anyone else pretends it's just appropriate to "add up" years of experience.

"I'm sure we can solve this, the team have over 100 years of coding experience between them"

...yeah, that's not how experience works, doofus. Unless you'd really trust 20 people with 6 month's experience over a single person with 10 year's experience.

I'm curious - how strict are you (or how strict is your lead / manager) about keeping stuff both detailed and up to date in Jira (both in terms of sprints & tickets)?

I've always drawn a pretty hard line with this - stuff in our Jira environment always has a detailed description, approximate estimate, is kept up-to-date with who's working on it, assigned appropriately, etc. But others I've spoken to seem to barely care if any tasks are in there properly at all.

Code review:

- Almond: This method here is a mix of convoluted loops conditionals and ternaries... I really don't think we can pass this. Can we make sure this logic is a lot clearer?
- Bob: Oh, ok, sure. I'll work on that.

Next day:

- Bob: I've hopefully cleared up the meaning of that code now.
- Almond: Sure, let me look. Err... it looks the same to me? Have you done it in another branch?
- Bob: Oh no, it is the same, but there's a link in the code now to a PNG of a flowchart I put together in draw.io to show how it works.

...🤦‍♂️

The 5 second commute, plus no need to get dressed.

Ah, the conundrum when a recruiter emails with a genuinely well-matched and reasonable sounding opportunity (which I often look into), but starts with:

Dear {firstname},

...which of course I aim never to reply to, for the same reason I wouldn't expect them to read a covering letter that said "dear {company}".

I work remote. Sod all.

Eurgh, sometimes there's just *no need* to change stuff between major API versions - such as the AWS secret key being read from aws.secretKey in v1 of the AWS Java SDK, and aws.secretAccessKey in v2.

Just spent way too long to admit wondering why the secret key wasn't being picked up before realising the above. Doesn't help we have multiple projects on differing major versions of the SDK either.

Reactive Java.

I actually rather like it, I really do. But the shift in mindset required, and the limited advantages (especially with fibres under heavy development) both mean I think it's incredibly unlikely to last.

Damn, sometimes I want to rant about something rather badly, but feel I can't as I'd inevitably mention something way to specific which would identify me way too easily 🕵️‍♂️

I'll just say talking to our offshore dev team really does feel like talking to a brick wall 😒

Bollocks. My headset just snapped.

Better hope I can find the duct tape, or I'll be doing client calls all day with one side of the headphones flopping all over the place...

Also, any headset recommendations? G430 was the one I had. Enjoyed it, until it broke.