Oof. I’ve had places that the pipeline was getting long. At one of my previous jobs I made it so all the tests could run locally, and we were keeping the full build as slow as possible.

We also didn’t do any browser tests (eg: selenium) because those tend to be slow and most people are bad at making them stable.

It’s important to know whats worth testing.

That’s the plan. Unfortunately the market is kind of meh. Lots of AI slop. Lots of getting ghosted.

There’s a lot of fear at my job about changing code. I’ve been trying to tell them to start writing automated tests. Or at least a linter to check for syntax errors. They’re all like “ooh that sounds hard maybe next quarter”

Meanwhile, a trivial change requires a whole day because the developer has to manually test everything.

I just unilaterally added checks to code I have ownership over, but anything shared I’m getting “maybe in two quarters we can prioritize this” from management.

My job has a “scrum master”. She’s nice, I guess, but as far as I can tell her entire job is sharing her screen so we can look at tickets. Then people tell her what to click on and what text to change. It’s excruciating because it would just be faster for the person talking to change it, instead of being like “remove the second bullet point. No, not that one”

On top of that they have all these tasks for “unit testing” but they don’t actually do unit testing. Someone just said, in the distant past, we should do testing so it’s there.

I feel like every retro I’ve attended has been a farce.

“What went bad? We said doing it this way would be harder and more risk prone. Management insisted we do it that way, and it took longer than and caused a site outage.”

"What should we do differently?’

“Listen to the team next time”

“That won’t happen”

One of the guys I worked with said be prefers the chatbot because stack overflow always made him feel stupid when he’d ask for help. The emotional dimension is big for some people.

I just recommend checking things from the live boot environment. I found out once that some things didn’t work (HDMI , Ethernet, Wi-Fi) only after installing, and it was a hassle. Ended up switching to a different distro that did work out of the box.

• it’s free
• runs on a wider range of hardware
• is more customizable
• can run much windows software with wine or proton
• has a large ecosystem of native software
  • much of it free and open source

The advantage of Mac is it’s more widely used and thus more widely supported (for things that are supported at all). You can just buy an apple computer from a trusted source and it’ll work. Linux doesn’t quite have that yet. If more people move to Linux , you’ll find better drivers and stuff.

Most of the code at my current job doesn’t even have the optional type annotations. You just see like def something(config). What’s config? A dict? A list? A string? Who the fuck knows.

Unfortunately most of the developers seem to have a very pre-modern take on programming and aren’t interested in changing anything.

Get a code formatter. Ruff is popular. So is black. Never think about it again.

I’ve seen at a very large company a workflow that involved manually updating an excel workbook and (I think) saving it on confluence, so a python script could download it and parse it later. It wasn’t even doing formulas. It was just like less than a hundred lines of text in a half dozen sheets.

As someone who works in software, I’ve been using macs at work for more than a decade. One job had Linux machines. One place had windows for developers and it was a shit show.

Apple isn’t amazing but at least the terminal is sensible.

I’ve seen some garbage slide through code reviews. Most people don’t do them well.

I’m doing contract work at a big multinational company, and I saw a syntax error slide through code review the other day. Just, like, too many parenthesis, the function literally wouldn’t work. (No, they don’t have automated unit tests or CI/CD. Yes, that’s insane. No, I don’t have any power to fix that, but I am trying anyway). It’s not hard to imagine something more subtle like a memory leak getting through.

In my experience, people don’t want to say “I think this is all a bad idea” if you have a large code review. A couple years ago, a guy went off and wrote a whole DSL for a task. Technically, it’s pretty impressive. It was, however, in my opinion, wholly unnecessary for the task at hand. I objected to this and suggested we stick with the serviceable, supported, and interoperable approach we had. The team decided to just move forward with his solution, because he’d spent time on it and it was ready to go. So I can definitely see a bunch of people not wanting to make waves and just signing off on something big.

SCP to prod, or ssh in and copy paste. Devops only removed write access to prod machines this month, and people complained. (No, we don’t have docker)

I think they used Amazon CodeCommit for a while, but I don’t know what that’s like.

This almost makes me appreciate my current job, where most stuff has been in place for years and any changes take forever.

It’s kind of a bummer that it’s going to take like six months to add a linter, and they only started using git like last year.

Adding websearch to the start bar’s search was solving a problem that didn’t exist.

Maybe the average user is so ignorant and bad at computers they don’t understand this. They don’t know what a browser is. They don’t know what a website is. They don’t know what a program is. It’s all just stuff.

Personally, I’d rather spend billions on education than AI slop and other patches on “people are kind of dull”

I’ve been pushing to add some basic checks on PR, and people are reluctant. There’s one repo that I’m code owner on so I spent the like 15 minutes to apply a code formatter and add a GitHub action to check. But on the main repo people are dragging their heels. I’m like just pick ruff or black and do it. It’s going to take like 10 minutes. I’m not asking for us to go crazy and add automated tests right now, but can we at least get something to verify the python code is syntactically correct?

The other day something went through code review until I looked at it and saw there was an extra (, and that shit wouldn’t even run. I’m like please please add an automated check. I’ll do it. Please.

I think a lot of people just aren’t familiar with how other places do software. This is the same place that was ssh’ing into prod and making changes right on the machine until like this month.

I’m kind of bummed no one at my job really does code reviews seriously. I don’t really get any feedback, so it’s hard to improve.

That’s also probably why the older code is an idiosyncratic mess of mutations and "oh yeah you need this config file that’s not in source control " and “oh sorry I guess I hard coded that file path, huh?”

There was a website where users could request something or other, like a PDF report. Users had a limited number of tokens per month.

The client would make a call to the backend and say how many tokens it was spending. The backend would then update their total, make the PDF, and send it.

Except this is stupid. First of all, if you told it you were spending -1 tokens, it would happily accept this and give you a free token along with your report.

Second of all, why is the client sending that at all? The client should just ask and the backend should figure out if they have enough credit or not.

I feel like most people don’t buy software anymore. Everything runs in the browser.

Like, nerds and enthusiasts and game playing people sure. But most people? Nah. It’s all Instagram, Facebook, tiktok, Reddit, YouTube. Maybe like roll20 if they’re a dnd nerd. Most people aren’t doing Photoshop or blender.