So much irrelevant shit keeps popping on my feed here. So I’m going to post a software industry related book a day.

Hopefully others continue as well. And we can have book discussions.

So many books on the industry, the industry is always changes so much. Things are forgotten but the things that remain frozen in time are always the books. Some are timeless but much of the “forgotten” things can be found in the books.

Soo I will officially start the daily post NOW.

The Mythical Man-Month... adding more people to a late project will only make it more late.

What paradoxes taught me.

Perhaps each time a paradox is encountered in mathematics, there is a useful distinction or mathematical tool hiding in plain sight, one that hasn't be discovered or utilized. For cursory evidence I give you: division by zero, the speed of an arrow at any point in flight, and calculus.

Maybe this isn't true for some paradoxes, or even most, but as time goes on I suspect people will discover it is more true than they might have thought.

Undefined behavior and results aren't nonsense: They look to me like golden seams to be explored for possible utility when approached from uncommon angles with uncommon problems.

The future is finally here

Boss - so how long will this transport booking app take, native android and iOS ....plus backend, plus localization, plus live location tracking, blah blah.

Me - at least 4 months, or more

Boss - HOW can an app take MONTHS? That is totally unacceptable, it’s not gonna work this way, blah blah. I’m giving u 2 months, tops. No project should take more than 2 months.

—

Next app,
Boss - so this new e-commerce app needs to be made, u have api. How long?

Me - 2 months coz ——-

Boss - WHATTTTT!!!??? 2 months for an APP!!???? What is this? Not gonna work this way, you should make apps in a week. Other people make apps in a week.

Then fucking hire those other people. Lol.

The WIZARD BOOK.... (SICP) has arrived!

How does it feel to work in a project where it doesn't have a proper planning ?. Anyone experienced?

This just made my day 😂

Where do you see yourself after 10 years? 🤣🤣

So I found myself in a situation where I scored 50% on Turing test. How can I be sure that I am human?

For the reference:
https://newscientist.com/article/...

I'm so fed up of this shitty ultra-ortodox industry

I've worked on many different projects, been in many different teams. It's an ever changing industry, but, surprisingly, it's so orthodox. Dev industry nowadays have some rules, that everybody adopts them as "best practices". You have to work on pull requests, and several of your teammates have to review your shit (as if they have nothing better to do).
I'm sick of people using fucking DTOs in shitty frameworks like Laravel. Using DTOs in Laravel is like putting mustard in a fucking chocolate cake.
I'm so fed up of SPAs and node.js. I've yet so see a single SPA that handles jwt tokens correctly. I'm tired of spending hours and hours, days and days, struggling with thousandls of layers of abstractions instead of being productive and getting the shit done.
Because end customers don't give a shit about your "best practices": They have a problem and you are getting paid for it to be solved, not for spending hours and hours struggling with stupid Javascript and its crazy async nature and their crappy libraries.

Damnit. I say. Now. I now feel better. Thanks for listening :)

I started learning programming recently, what do you think of my first project?

Proudest bug squash? Probably the time I fixed a few bugs by accident when I was just trying to clean up an ex-coworker's messy code.

So I used to work with a guy who was not a very good programmer. It's hard to explain exactly why other than to say that he never really grew out of the college mindset. He never really learned the importance of critical thinking and problem-solving. He did everything "by the book" to a point where if he ran into an issue that had no textbook solution, he would spin his wheels for weeks while constantly lying to us about his progress until one of us would finally notice and take the problem off his plate. His code was technically functional, but still very bad.

Quick Background: Our team is responsible for deploying and maintaining cloud resources in AWS and Azure. We do this with Terraform, a domain-specific language that lets us define all our infrastructure as code and automate everything.

After he left, I took on the work to modify some of the Terraform code he'd written. In the process, I discovered what I like to call "The Übervariable", a map of at least 80 items, many of them completely unrelated to each other, which were all referenced exactly once in his code and never modified. Basically it was a dynamic collection variable holding 80+ constants. Some of these constants were only used in mathematical expressions with multiple other constants from the same data structure, resulting in a new value that would also be a constant. Some of the constants were identical values that could never possibly differ, but were still stored as separate values in the map.

After I made the modification I was supposed to make, I decided I was so bothered by his shitty code that I would spend some extra time fixing and optimizing it. The end result: one week of work, 800 lines of code deleted, 30 lines added, and a massive increase in efficiency. I deleted the Übervariable and hardcoded most of the values it contained since there was no possible reason for any of them to change in the future. In the process, I accidentally fixed three bugs that had been printing ominous-sounding warnings to the console whenever the code was run.

I have a lot of stories about this guy. I should post some more of them eventually.

tests? ain't nobody got time foh dat. my brain already does all the job. it assumes and says to myself "all tests passed ✅" whenever i make quick changes

i like to live dangerously 😂

how many emails shall I send for payment reminders?

This was supposed to be a day's job and it's been a month for the delayed payment. (Also this was supposed to be a favor)

Never realized with a industry that changes by the second how relevant and timeless a single book(set) can remain. 52 year old book.

The work that knuth put into this collection to keep it timeless and language in-specific keeping it to theory rather than details of syntactical details is amazing.

Sure there are other timeless classics out there.. the algorithm book, K&R C, the dragon books, the wizard book.

But I think this single book outweighs them all in the abstraction point of view... AND it’s abstraction in the “opposite direction”... abstraction to a machine language architecture that is purely theoretical... brilliant.

What a consultant's gotta do for his timesheet when homeworking:

1. Fill in Excel, send to self by mail (corporate bitlocker protected PC on proxy that doesnt allow local printer connections)
2. Go upstairs to secondary Windows PC (no Excel on main Linux laptop) and open mail
3. Send to printer, wait 10 minutes (old printer needs to 'warm up')
4. Sign timesheet and go back upstairs
5. Scan signed version, send mail to self.
6. Open personal mail on corporate laptop, send to manager. (can't send directly from personal mail)
7. Wait to get back signed timesheet from manager
8. Finally, send to own admin dept.

2 story points completed, time for a break.

I find it bizarre that streaming services have a "skip intro/recap" button and clearly marks a segment in a film/show worthy of forgetting but will keep it in your "continue watching" section if you leave during the credits.

Surely you would mark this as complete if the identifiable segments exist?

Overheard a conversation...

Dev: We should focus on getting it working in production, then we can copy it over to dev so we have a working version.

Me: da fuq?

If you like looking at language designers fight on Hacker News (and who doesn't?) go ahead and search for the V programming language or Vlang as it is also called and also for the posts that the creator of Odin lang has done in regards to V langs creator.

Its a shitstorm. Apparently both languages have been designed as alternatives to C (not as in "this will kill C!!" like rust does) and occasionally you will find some posts from the Zig language creator.

Fascinating fights actually, have been able to learn a thing or two about why some ideas concerning language design are whacky etc.

I am also trying to understand language design better, which is the main reason why I appreciate all of them fights.

10/10 best drama series I have seen thus far.

I'm 54 y.o.

I think I'm completely outdated in my skill, as in the last 14 years, I worked on a specific business problem, with an old technology: a JSP application + javascript + postgres.

I do understand software development, agile, web application development, linux server, basic/moderate AWS skills, etc.

Now they laid me off instead of including me in the evolution of version 2 of the software. Maybe covid, company had almost no cash-flow. Well they have now...So basically they fired me to find money to rewrite the application.

I feel without hope at my age.
I'm a generalist.
I can understand fairly well everything you'll throw at me, reactnative, angular, nosql, python, but I have little first-hand experience.

I don't have a lot of management skills, even if I've given frequent presentations to C-roles and board, and I implemented a whole agile methodology in my team.

I don't know what to do.
The amount of technology to study is huge nowadays. When I was younger I could get away with some php and java.

Full-stack developer is a big word for me. Maybe I could handle a full stack web application, but not from scratch.

I feel at my age, I'll compete with 20-something guys with better skills and lower salary requests.
I don't think I can pull a night anymore.

I'm trying to shoot high to management positions with no much success.
I'd like to go on developing, I know that there are 50-something developer out there, but who managed to find a new position at 55? at 60?

As soon as I finish the few money I spared, I'll be on the street, I'l be the "website for food" guy.

Always include import statements. Always. No excuses. I don't care if you can't be arsed to copy-n-paste an extra bit of code.

Nothing worse than trying to learn something new, copy-n-paste a sample code then your wonderfully helpful IDE asks you which of the 8 matching packages you wish to import.

When someone asks me, "where did you get that", I don't simply say, "a shop"!!

If you don't include your imports in answers then I hate you.

Nothing

In an in-house beta our product was causing blue screens. We had some the crash reports and a I dug out the technical notes in how to decipher that gibberish. Still no real clue, but there was an address happened where it was supposed to happen. So I dumped our binary into two reversing tools, jumped to that address and looked at the surrounding code.
And sure there it was: A missing check when manipulating a C-string which could lead to out of bound access. Added a check BSOD's gone.

A new and shiny microprocessor looks too beautiful to get it dirty with thermal paste and cover it with a heatsink.

Cutting edge

Thank you

Girl: "hey"

My Brain:
java.lang.NullPointerException:
at net.brain.functions.Talk.retrieveSpeech(Talk.java:2978)
at net.brain.functions.Talk.createFlirtyResponse(Talk.java:3132)

Me: null

*Girl walks away*

Does anyone else suddenly lose the ability to type properly as soon as someone is watching/pairing?

"Whenever I see a door that says push I pull first to prevent conflicts"

General advice: If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.