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?

Dahhhhhh. Retrofitting CSP to an established, legacy site with inline scripts and random CSS/js loaded from all over the place is damn stressful.

Why did I volunteer to sort this crap out... What a pleb.

Mac text substitution is coming to Chrome 77!

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/...

...and it's a TERRIBLE BLOODY IDEA. Any Chrome Mac users visiting any sites that display code will likely be shown the substituted crap, unless they've picked up on it and modified their site in time.

Seriously, take these cutsie "oohhhh, I want my ellipsis to display as a *proper* ellipsis character" mindsets and shove them where the sun don't shine. By all means provide the functionality as opt-in via a CSS declaration or whatever, but don't just assume your love of bloody "smart quotes" trumps everyone else's ability to see the *actual content* on the site.

Grumbly grumble old fart grumble.

Oh, my promotion happens whenever I'm on a call with a sales guy, who announces they have a (insert grandiose job title here) on the call in case the client has any technical questions.

Unfortunately it comes with no pay rise, and I'm immediately demoted again when the call ends ;)

Existing projects, fair enough, but why you'd start a new Java project these days and *not* use Lombok is beyond me. The amount of boilerplate cut down is staggering. Some people still seem to hate it though - the mere mention of the word sends them into tremors.

(also, in b4 the predictable smartarses come in with "why you'd use Java these days at all is beyond me" 😉)

No chairs.

It's amazing how quick and to the point people can be when they can't get comfy.

Ouch. Friend started at a smallish company (~20 employees), and instead of a new machine he got handed the CEO's 5 year old Dell so the CEO could buy a new machine.

He sees it as no big deal, but am I the only one that sees that as (to put it mildly) a bit of a red flag? It's not the machine itself that's so much of a problem, more the attitude behind the decision that stinks.

Oof. Stackoverflow coming under fire again.

Not sure what they expect though given their audience consists of millions of devs from across the world who use the site daily...

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

First world problems - approaching 50k rep on Stackoverflow (well, currently on 46k.) Would quite like to get to 50k. But my days of enjoying procrastinating on there are long gone.

Sadly, so are most of the good questions it seems.

Anyone else still answer random questions on there for fun? Or has everyone else pretty much given up with it too?

Does anyone else get irrationally annoyed when a team member says "Hi" via slack/messenger etc. and then nothing else until you say "Hi" back, and only then describes what they want?

Dahhhhhh. Stop wasting my time. Just ask what you want.

"Hey boss, could you look over this reply to this support case before I send it? I just want to clarify a couple of things first."

"I haven't got the time to look over support case replies - you need to be proactive in deciding what's right, and then just sending them on."

"Ok, no worries."

5 minutes later...

"What the hell have you written on this support case? This isn't correct at all. Now they're going to be really confused. You've completely contradicted what I told them yesterday on the phone."