I wish more workplaces realised how stupid it is to quibble, argue, debate etc. about stupid things like buying Devs intellij licenses. I mean sure, we'll throw a meeting to discuss it, argue back and forth, ignore questions about why the sales guys always get any new tools they want, and then waste more on meeting time than the damn license would have cost... Great idea...

Dude, for the hundredth time, stop leaving random chunks of commented out code all over the place in case we "need to find it easily later"...

This is literally the reason we use git.

No, I will not pass it in a code review. The same as last time. And the time before...

Dahhhhh

Next to a large pond / lake, trying to connect to & debug & rescue a robotic boat that had gone haywire, flipped upside down and was somehow just spinning in circles.

Eventually realised it was spinning in circles because its props were stuck at full power in alternate directions and acting as fans, so eventually decided to just use them as fans to blow it upside down back to shore.

Over the last few weeks, I've containerised the last of our "legacy" stacks, put together a working proof of concept in a mixture of DynamoDB and K8s (i.e. no servers to maintain directly), passing all our integration tests for said stack, and performed a full cost analysis with current & predicted traffic to demonstrate long term server costs can be less than half of what they are now on standard pricing (even less with reserved pricing). Documented all the above, pulled in the relevant higher ups to discuss further resources moving forward, etc. That as well as dealing with the normal day to day crud of batting the support department out the way (no, the reason Bob's API call isn't working is because he's using his password as the API key, that's not a bug, etc. etc.) and telling the sales department that no, we can't bolt a feature on by tomorrow that lets users log in via facial recognition, and that'd be a stupid idea anyway. Oh, and tracking down / fixing a particularly nasty but weird occasional bug we were getting (race hazards, gotta love 'em.)

Pretty pleased with that work, but hey, that's just my normal job - I enjoy it, and I like to think I do good work.

In the same timeframe, the other senior dev & de-facto lead when I'm not around, has... "researched" a single other authentication API we were considering using, and come to the conclusion that he doesn't want to use it, as it's a bit tricky. Meanwhile passed all the support stuff and dev stuff onto others, as he's been very busy with the above.

His full research amounts to a paragraph which, in summary, says "I'm not sure about this OAuth thing they mention."

Ok, fine, he works slowly, but whatever, not my problem. Recently however, I learn that he's paid *more than I am*. I mean... I'm not paid poorly, if anything rather above market rate for the area, so it's not like I could easily find more money elsewhere - but damn, that's galling all the same.

Ponderings more than a rant.

Can't help but feel that if Google (and other companies with similar ridiculously hard interview experiences) want to keep attracting the best candidates, they'll have to change their approach. I can't be alone in that, surely?

I know a lot of good senior & lead devs through various networks - *really* smart people, definitely way brighter than me, who stay on top of their game, work really well in any team they're a part of and create top-notch, beautiful and well-tested code to do just about anything they set their mind to. A few of them have literally turned around projects on the brink of disaster into massive successes.

Have *any* of them expressed any desire in working for companies like Google? Not one iota, and mainly because of the interview process which has a (deserved) reputation for being unnecessarily long, drawn-out, and full of irrelevant questions and mind games.

20 years ago when working for Google was *the* cool place to be, I could see it. But I really can't see them attracting the cream of the crop all the while they continue to take that approach. The really good devs just have too much choice elsewhere - there's not much reason to bother.

Anyone got any experience with offshore teams? I'm meant to be taking on the role of managing one in a month or two (yay...) Not quite sure what to expect.

All doom and gloom? Or any positive experiences?

Manager: "Hi Almond, how is X going?"

Almond: "...I don't know, Bob is in charge of that."

Manager: "Ok. Do you know the status of Y at all?"

Almond: "Not sure, isn't that Bob's responsibility too?"

Manager: "Well, yeah, but I never seem to be able to get a good answer out of him. Find out on both fronts and let me know ASAP please"

...sure, I know how this goes. I'll stop all the dev work I'm doing, do your job for you, talk to the lazy bonehead that never bothers doing anything, report back that he's done sod all (or still "in a requirements gathering phase" as he puts it), be asked "why is he taking so long", have a bit more back and forth, then decide we'll just leave him be as actually trying to get him to do any work is going to be too much like hassle 😒

One of our devs seems to love "attribution" comments in anything he writes.

private void foo() { //Author: John Cribbins

...public static final int FOO_BAR = 21; //Author: John Cribbins

I mean, I get it for an author tag at the top of a file, but certainly not on every field or method. Is this some kind of weird thing newer devs are encouraged to do these days?!

I've got tens of thousands of lines (maybe hundreds 🤷‍♂️) in open source bits and pieces. Much of it my own, but also other projects.

Not seen a penny, but never expected to. That's not why I do it.

Always as I'm just about to fall asleep.

Hooo boy. Has anyone seen the drama unfolding on StackExchange at the moment?

Today I learned that Mavis Beacon isn't actually a real person. I'm a bit sad.

Damn, how have I only just discovered localstack?

The ability to spin up and use SQS queues, S3 buckets, lambdas, Kinesis streams etc. for development without worrying about bankrupting myself if I screw something up is really quite liberating.

Anyone else here that, if working on a challenging problem, just needs silence (rather than music or background noise?) Seems to be an increasingly rare thing, especially with younger folk.

If I'm just doing boilerplate coding / something not too challenging I can work with whatever. If I really need to think however - I do that way better with no auditory distraction.

"We decided to use RxJava while you were on holiday, as it basically makes it impossible to write bad code."

You what now?!

....

*Looks at code*

Bloody hell.

Oh LinkedIn.

You were ok back in the day. But after the fifth recruiter in as many days sending a message about "fantastic opportunities for the senior codings with the great salary in a relocation budget friendly area", and the only other messages asking me to celebrate someone's "work anniversary", it may be time to say goodbye.

Stay relevant enough to earn a living until I retire.

DigitalOcean have given me heaps of free credit for hosting open source projects / things related to open source projects over the years. They've also given free hosting to various charities I know. Seem like a bunch of genuinely good people.

Probably the intern who, while a decent and intelligent guy for the most part, thought it was increasingly hilarious to keep putting random cat GIFs somewhere in the product with each PR he made.

First time "ok, very funny, but you can't do that in production software, don't do it again."

The third time around the "joke" was wearing a little thin.

Eventually a script was written so that, every time he made a PR, he'd get "emailed" one of a few pre-defined messages from a random member of the team a few minutes later, telling him to remove it and stop pissing about...

Dev: "Oh, btw, I updated our dependency on X since a new version was available."

Almond: "Really?! They only released the last new version yesterday."

Dev: "Oh, I know, but there's a new one now."

Almond: "Ok, fair enough."

*Pulls code*

com.x.x:3.5.1.SNAPSHOT

🤦‍♂️

Sales guy: Hey, you're technical. Can you tell me how I'd go about doing (foobar) in this webapp I have here?
Almond: Err... I've never dealt with that webapp in my life. I wouldn't have a clue.
Sales guy: ...but you're a dev right? Oh well, never mind. Anyone more experienced around here that may know?
Almond: No idea, but I seriously doubt any of the devs will have used it. Maybe one of the other sales guys will?
Sales guy: So you're telling me *none* of the devs around here will know how to do this?!
Almond: Very unlikely (thinking why the hell would any devs be using a sales app, but whatever)

...15 minutes later...

Sales guy: Ahah, I figured it out! (Explains what buttons he had to click in crappy app to do foobar)
Almond: Glad you got it sorted!
Sales guy: I'm really surprised none of you devs could figure this out, but I could. Perhaps I should change careers and be a dev.

...what?!

"Oh btw, since I'm passing..."

Varies wildly, depending on location and company.

Find yourself in the right location (London, for instance, and some other big cities) and there's heaps of companies all competing for good devs - willing to pay great salaries, great pensions, free food, offer working from home, healthy training budgets, etc.

Find yourself in the wrong place, or not willing to travel, and you may have to settle for being the "IT guy" at Bob's budget consulting co. where your main job is resetting Lauren from HR's password every few days, even though she "definitely hasn't forgotten it, it's the computer's fault."

"Almond, I thought you said the cause of the outage the other week was that our server crashed?"

"The Tomcat server crashed, yeah. Not the physical server." (And you won't give me the time or budget to spin up any kind of redundant one, but that's besides the point...)

"Ok, but I've spoken to ops and they say none of the servers have gone offline in the last month?"

"Yup, the physical server was fine, it was the Tomcat server running on it that crashed."

"...so the server didn't crash?"

"We're mixing terms here. There's two things that can be referred to as the server. One is the physical machine, and one is an application running on it. The physical machine was fine, but
the application running on it crashed."

"What?! It's a very simple question. Did the server crash, or didn't it?!"

🤦‍♂️

"Can you give an example of a work-based conflict you were involved in, and how you went about resolving it?"

"Heh, ohhhh yes. Last job actually. Manager flipped out at me for the billionth time for no reason at all. I calmly handed my notice in, changed a bunch of encryption keys and disabled a bunch of users on the server before leaving and never looking back."

"Wow. Seriously?!"

"Absolutely. I'm very forward-looking."

Still no idea if the guy just decided to turn up to the interview to waste our time, or he really was stupid enough to think that was a positive.

Am I the only person who hates people using "intuitive" when giving feedback about interface design? It's *completely* meaningless. Heck, this isn't even my design that's being critiqued and the comments make my skin crawl.

"It works well, but it's not very intuitive"

"Can we make this section of the interface more intuitive somehow?"

"I don't think our customers are finding it very intuitive, they're having lots of issues"

If I had my way everyone using the word would be kicked out of the meeting and made to wear an "I'm a moron" t-shirt for the rest of the week, especially the smug arses that act as though they've just said something profound.

I'm not sure I have a "favourite" per-se, but Grace Hopper certainly features high up on the list. We might not still all be writing in machine code had she not existed, but such "higher level" languages would certainly have been many years behind where they are now.

The commonly touted "best" experiences are when you just get told "wow, this code is amazing!"

I hate those code reviews.

The best ones are the ones where I get my code completely ripped apart by 10 different people in 10 different ways. Some of them might be amazing. Some of them might be arseholes thinking slating other people's code is how you climb the career ladder. But they all generally teach me something, and they all cause me to stop and think "hmm, have they got a point, or is my original design better?" The discussion that comes from those reviews is also often very interesting; and (when done well) the whole process can become somewhat of a teambuilding exercise for everyone involved.

Dahhhh. Pay for a damn hosted CI server please, like Circle or Travis, so I don't have to maintain this crappy Jenkins instance. More "plugin" updates by default than a crappy wordpress site.

Talking of which. Circle CI has come on leaps and bounds since I last looked at it. So much nicer than Travis. Think this is going to be my de-facto CI solution for open source stuff from now on.

Has anyone else actually *used* mutation testing at all?

Heard a lot about it recently - it seems all the rage amongst the bloggers, but I'm generally always very sceptical of things touted as the "latest hotness" (my thoughts on blockchain for instance are well known.)

So I went ahead and whacked http://pitest.org/ into one of my more recent pet projects to see if it offered anything decent. Surprisingly, it did - in particular it caught a number of places where switching "<" for "<=" and similar had no affect on the pass / fail rate (indicating the tests should be better.) There were a *few* false positives, and some which were borderline useful, but as a whole I'd say it was a worthwhile addition.

Curious as to if anyone else has had the same experience?