Cool. Fuck cars. Take transit in NYC.

They could pay people to check, but it’s more important that they spend billions on slop and executive bonus.

I’ve seen a lot of Nirvana tshirts lately. Did they do a sale at … Wherever teenagers get clothing now?

Ars is weirdly pro-windows sometimes , in the comments. I don’t read them as much as I used to.

I did some webdriver stuff for reasons I don’t remember anymore.

I also made a simple Django app to track job applications.

Unsolicited advice:

• use type annotations. You’ll thank yourself later when your IDE tells you “hey this can be None are you sure you want to call .some_func() on it?”
• use an ide. Don’t just raw dog it in notepad. You should have syntax highlighting, red squiggles for errors, the ability to go to definition.
• learn to use a debugger. Pdb is built in and fine.
• don’t write mega functions that do a thousand things. Split things up into smaller steps.
• avoid side effects. You don’t want your “say_hello” function to also turn on the lights

There’s also the class of comments that explain strange business decisions.

# Product guy said to return January 1st if the user doesn't have a birthday on record

Kind of arbitrary but someone with decision making power decreed it.

Pop!_os has been fine for me. I’m not a tinkerer. It’s a machine for a web browser and video games.

I recently knew two people who came to the US recently.

One was from India, and he came for the money. He has a low six figure job as a “product manager” and the CEO’s toady. He’s quite ignorant of US politics and history, so he’s not really concerned.

The other came from canada, but also has EU residency (or citizenship? unclear). He said he makes more money here. He’s making mid six figures as a software engineer at a startup, with poor work/life balance. He can always leave, since his parents own a house in germany.

Neither were coming here like an old timey tale of immigrants trying to find a better life.

I want job postings and a way to reach people I worked with.

I absolutely do not want the click bait and slop.

I’ve known several people who moved from QA and testing to developer roles, but usually as an internal transfer.

Most recruiters and management don’t know shit about fuck when it comes to technical details, so it’s not surprising a lot of them think “Oh the guy who knows how software works and how to handle edge cases? No, we don’t want him”

Fuck test automation, it’s a fucking trap get out of it as soon as you can

lol.

Meanwhile, the org I work at has no test automation, so things that should be trivial require hours of tedious, error-prone, manual testing. Also they break stuff and don’t find out until after it’s merged.

I have no regrets from setting my editor to save-on-blur

The opportunity cost for AI is pretty high. That’s a lot of resources spent on something that’s bad for the world, even if it’s not specifically the worst for climate change reasons in a first order sense.

Sometimes the manual steps grow like weeds. Where I’m at now, they haven’t invested in automation much at all. Now deploys take all day. Making a code change is a sweaty manual regression search process. It’s bad.

We used to do retrospectives at one of my old jobs, because everywhere loves cargo-culting agile and scrum stuff.

I quickly realized that a lot of the problems were largely outside the team’s control. It was shit like “The CEO doesn’t believe in designers or UX, so he won’t hire one, so we spend a lot of time doing that work badly ourselves.” Or, “management is making us spend all this time in ‘planning meetings’ so we don’t get anything done”

Stuff that has easy solutions, but we can’t do because some idiot or powerful cry-baby is in the way.

My last job was pretty good about code reviews, when people actually spent time on them. My front end code got much better when the front-end expert actually reviewed it.

My current job, code reviews are a rubber stamp farce and I’ve seen total garbage sail though. The code base is a tire fire. These things are related.

I suggested at my current job that we adopt a policy of fixing things as we go. Boss wasn’t interested. He said his boss said “he doesn’t want people gold plating things”.

Okay. I guess we’ll keep this tower of bash scripts that breaks once a month.

Well, yes, though my direct manager isn’t the worst. He’s trying to protect me from other teams that might get pissy.

One of my friends is a product manager type and his analysis was basically “if stakeholders don’t care it’s not a problem, even if by any reasonable metric it is a problem”. So. Here we are.

I thought about it but people are so sensitive here. If they broke something and couldn’t merge they’d probably raise a big stink, and then there’s good odds the checks would be removed “because they’re adding friction” or some nonsense. My boss has already warned me about staying in my lane.

These people have never done any automated testing of any sort. No linter. No unit tests. And they don’t seem to want to.

Sounds about right.

I’m using GitHub actions at work because this place is extremely dysfunctional, and I can just add GitHub actions without it being a whole “research spike planning meeting impact analysis” six week journey.

I took it from “there are absolutely no checks and Bob broke the environment because he pushed up a change that’s just invalid syntax” to… well, I couldn’t make it block the build on failures but at least now when Bob breaks it again I can point to the big red X and ask why he merged with an error.