I was rewriting some old code of mine and ended up stripping out the comments. I kept reading them instead of the code, which I had been changing, and they were irrelevant. (I added new comments back in, though a big reason to rewrite was to make the code more self-explanatory.)

Someone shared this on Mastodon so I’ll just repost my thoughts from there. (Bonus for Lemmy, I was forced to squeeze all my thoughts into 500 characters, so this is the most succinct I’ve been on this site!)

Pretty incredible how little people seem to understand these. For one thing, every method other than waterfall is a subtype of agile methodology. The major distinction is that waterfall has a series of phases from design through building, testing, and delivery that attempts to plan the whole project up front. Agile methods focus on smaller iteration cycles with frequent, partial deliverables.

Something like kanban is designed for continuous delivery: we want to go to mars weekly.

LEAN development is a scam though, that one is accurate.

I think if I saw a statue of a cat just chilling, I’d get the vibe. Humans have been entertained by animals doing human-like stuff since we first developed the brains to recognize it.

I feel like this has truly earned a “bazinga!”

Ah Texas, where children can’t make decisions or be held accountable in any way, unless they’re brown skinned and can be accused of a crime, then they must he tried as adults and sentenced to life as an imprisoned slave.

Out past the planets is the heliopause, the final boundary between the solar system and interstellar space. Voyager discovered it, but other probes have confirmed it. The radiation and particles emitted by the sun create a pressurized bubble around it, where plasma (energized particles, mostly hydrogen) is much denser than past the heliopause. Cosmic rays are more prevalent outside it.

I’ve heard it compared to the empty zone around where a sink faucet first hits, creating a little “wall” of water around it as the splashing water pushes back the standing water.

“Empty” space is anything but. There’s tons of particles and energy flying though it, just not as dense.

Arguably the first Dark Souls is one of these. Most of the classes push you towards shields as the cornerstone of defense. The studio felt like this overemphasis on shields was such a mistake they took 2 whole games (Bloodborne and Sekiro) in an almost entirely shield-free direction to teach players there were other ways.

Pyromancy (and magic in general) were also undervalued in DS1 initially due to how the game presents them. People eventually figured out that Pyro is so OP you don’t even need to use leveling with it to have an easy time.

I never I realized I was so evil, nor so neutral.

You seem like a person who wants to try and do well and be a good manager. So be very careful of burnout, because the constant tension between doing what is right for your team and meeting upper-management expectations can drive you crazy. It did me anyway, which is why I don’t manage anymore.

Take regular vacations and actually disconnect from work when you do. Try to do the same for at least 1 or 2 weekends per month. Being organized is important and helps with the job and the burnout, but there’s a thin line between “keeping notes in Obsidian keeps me focused” and “my entire 2nd job is now maintaining Jira tickets.”

Organization is for you, keep it for you, and don’t let your organizing become a part of your “public api” or else it’ll become another avenue for status updates that you’re obliged to maintain. Turning your notes and private charts into data for upper management is why you compile special reports, just for them.

Ah man, living the dream!

I made a static site with Hexo a few years back. I thankfully didn’t make any “Get started with Hexo” posts but I did only really use it for a few months. I think that puts me in the cluster with the “switch from Jekyll to Hugo” people. Now it just sits there, absorbing some money every two years for the “personal website tax”.

Shame too, I constantly think I need to get back to it. Hexo is nice, popular with Chinese users I think. I don’t recall now why I liked it over Jekyll or Hugo, but I’ve always loved an underdog. Once I got the hang of using it, it was very customizable and fun to work with.

I, like most of the millenial lemmings it seems, am not shocked about this. I remember what Dubya said as president, the daily evils. I would have never thought it could get worse and then we got Trump, and I think it all does echoes out from 9/11. If there are future historians, 9/11 is going to be the pivot that this entire century stumbles over, probably leading directly to WW3 any day now.

But when I see articles like this, (in the Atlantic ofc, always this one or the NYT) my nostrils fill up with the smell of consent being manufactured. Has the shadow council decided that we shall war with the Saudis now? With Russia and China just flat-out taking land now, has the US decided to extend it’s “protection” more directly over a few strategic areas?

I keep my Obsidian notebooks and several source code repos in syncthing and then have them auto-shared between all my computers and my phone. Its been a great system, all my docs I need are readily available on all my devices with almost no delay and no cloud needed. A little advanced configuration to allow local deletes and I also have all my phone photos backed up this way too.

When I travel, I use my laptop and phone on a little travel router, so they’re always networked together and syncing files. Definitely saved my butt a few times!

But then I decided, I wrote my own solution, a thing of 1,600 lines of code, which is, yeah, it’s like thousands of times less than the competition.

And it works. It’s very popular. … I got 100 emails from people saying that it’s so nice that someone wrote a small piece of software that is robust, does not have dependencies, you know how it works.

But the depressing thing is, some of the security people in the field, they thought it was a lovely challenge to audit my 1,600 lines of code. And they were very welcome to do that, of course. And they found three major vulnerabilities in there.

He makes a ton of excellent points, but the succinct impact of this little example really hit for me. As someone who often rewrites things so that I can both understand and fully trust in what I’m depending on, it’s always good to be reminded that you literally can’t write 500 lines of code without a good chance of introducing a major vulnerability.

The tech stack is so dizzyingly high today, and with so many interlocking parts, it continually amazes me that anything at all functions even in the absence of hostile actors.

I do wonder what’s up with fascist nerds and Tolkien names.

I’m convinced it’s the whole B-2-B software world at this point. The shit starts at MS (or any of the FAANGS) and rolls downhill to everyone else.

We’re working on a huge Dynamics 365 thing at work, and one of the third parties we use for automated testing is just… the product seems barebones, is clearly built on top of open source automated testing tool, and is riddled with indicators that barely anyone works there, from the AI help bot to the “submit a ticket and we’ll assign it eventually” approach to all other interactions.

I looked them up on Linked In and 12 people work there. 8 of them have C-suite or VP titles, and 4 of them are interns from a local university. This is the state of all modern tech: a board room full of investors, a website, and a product barely glued together from FOSS parts by interns. If you wonder why everything feels like a scam now it’s because it is.

There’s infinite ways to organize code. In C# or Rust where this isn’t an option, you might use nested classes or traits hidden behind a module/namespace.

Good use cases are data structures with associated helper classes. For example, a collection/tree and an iterator/tree-walker for working with elements of the collection. Or for something like a smart memory allocator (an arena or slab allocator), you might use a friend-class to wrap elements returned from the allocator, representing their connection back to it (for freeing up when done or to manage the allocation structure in ie a heap or sorted tree).

With what Spice does to people, and the general weirdness of the spice/worm/maker life cycle, suggesting that the worms are partially fungal in nature actually makes a lot of sense!

When I read the 4 Hour Work Week years ago it was exactly the same thing. Turns out the “secret” to getting rich has always been “get someone else to do your work for you for a pittance of the money you can make off that work.”

I worked at a place where I did the not-funny-but-serious-and-banal version of this bit, including the burnout breakdown at the end. I’m working on ERP systems now and it’s a lot less stressful, plus things just have normal names like “Accounting Module” or “Third Party X Service Connector”.

I did love Galactus though