DoubleGlazing

A few years ago I left the company I was was working for. We had an internal doc wiki that hardly anyone used. I was one of the ones who did and I would document code changes and things like how to setup a dev environment and to list known gotchas.

During my final week when I was doing code handover I sent an email around the company pointing out that the wiki would answer most of the questions they might have about the apps I worked on.

Three months later my phone starts ringing. I was in a new job so I didn't answer, but they kept ringing. Then they started calling my wife as she was listed as my next of kin. My wife also didn't answer as she was with a client. After a few hours, my wife picks up the call and texts me that my previous employer was desperate to speak to me. So I called them during break and after a bit of an ear bashing I was informed their whole warehouse system was down and all business had stopped.

After a bit of diagnosis I realised that they had fallen for the first gotcha I listed in my docs, they deployed the wrong DB driver. I asked why they didn't read the docs. They responded "what docs?". I explained that I sent an email round before I left with guidance on the app. Rather than apologise they berated me for not doing more to alert people to the existence of the information. It was that attitude that contributed to me wanting to leave the company in the first place.

I think the moral is that no matter how good your docs, some people will always ignore them even when the world is collapsing around them.

I was hired by a company that made client on-boarding software for investment banks. It did all the Dodd-Frank, EMIR and KYC stuff. It was built around SQL Server and table and column names were quite long e.g. CustomerReferenceForGovernmentCompliance. We got a client from Massachusetts, they used Oracle 8 and wanted us to use Oracle 8 in our app. Oracle 8 has a 30 character limit for column and table names, so we had a problem.

I had Oracle experience and was hired to develop a middleware to translate long DB object names to short ones in Oracle (no refactoring of the app was allowed), plus I had to convert a shedload of T-SQL to PL/SQL. I told my employer this would take months.

Two weeks in to the job I was told "You're off to Boston to demonstrate your work to the client", "Err, its not ready" I said, "Don't worry its just a demo to get our second payment from the client, it will be Okay" my CTO said.

So on the flight from Dublin to Boston, my CTO leans over and says "I'm not asking you to lie, but..."

Long story short, they rigged the application to make it look like it was connecting to Oracle, but was actually saving data in SQL Server data files. I had to convince the client it was working fine. A low level techie kept giving me the stink-eye as he could clearly see this was a scam.

On my return I resigned and called the security department of the bank concerned. My wife is a US citizen so I really don't want to get in to trouble with the US authorities. The bank took the product, but they insisted on a massive discount to not take legal action.

Okay, it wasn't my dodgy code, but I felt the experience was similar.

If they get such a law enacted, then people who really care about end to end encryption will simply "opt out".

There are so many open source crypto tools out there with no backdoors that anyone savvy enough to find them and use them will do so.

Of course the average user probably wouldn't care enough to do that, but maybe a few privacy scandals could change all that.

My son is a Lego obsessive, but he doesn't really go in for the more technical stuff like Mindstorms or Technic - he thinks it is overpriced and prefers to use Scratch and an Arduion to make machines and the like.

The irony is that he owns about €1000 of Lego bricks. He spent half his first communion money on Lego (€300), we made him put the rest in to the credit union. Since them he has told us he has become atheist as science makes more sense, but he'll still do his confirmation to get more money to buy Lego. Hmm....

I should have got MIG then. A nice weld is beautiful to look at, but my needs are more practical.

Still, I'll give it a go. My son wants to build a "mecha arm" with all sorts of spy features. This might be a good excuse to learn how to use it.

Two different countries. There was a big hoo-ha in 1916 about all that.

But this isn't slander. The Indo didn't lie they grossly exaggerated the truth in a gory manner.

Yes, the daughter was distraught - why wouldn't she be in the circumstances? But the Indos headline was along the lines of "AGONY AND PAIN FOR name AS FATHER PERISHES IN NORTH-SIDE INFERNO". This was accompanies by lots of quotes from anonymous "friends and family" about how she and her family were suffering. This article featured lots of personal photos. The really sore things about this is that these photos were only on display in her house, someone she trusted took copies with a smartphone and sent them to the paper.

As she is the copyright owner of some of the pictures I am going to suggest she invoice the paper for reproduction fees when she feels up to it.

Not great, but others are having it much worse.

For me it's the fact that all our normal stress relief outlets are shut that is the big issue. The children can't go to scouts, my daughter can't do her ballet classes and my son can't see his friends. My wife leads a few choirs which were very social, but now she has to run rehearsals over Zoom which is a pain. I'd love to go fishing or camping, but I can't. I am a radio ham, but having just one hobby available to you can get a bit dull after a while.

The biggest issue for us is our work schedules. For a few months before it all went a bit weird I had been gradually setting up my own business. A mixed bag of IT consultancy jobs and app development. I was happy with it and I had to the time to put in to it when the kids were at school. The lockdown messed all that up as my wife is a speech therapist and now has to do teletherapy from home. Unfortunately that is something she has to do during the day - thus I have to look after the children during the day. That includes homeschooling, cooking cleaning etc.

My wife has to put in a full 9 to 5 shift. It's not just a few Zoom meetings, but also note and report writing. So after she finishes work, we have dinner, a bit of family time and then if I'm lucky I might have an hour or two to work on my own things - I'm not a great evening coder.

When it all kicked off I had some plans to learn and achieve new things that I thought the lockdown would give me time to do. Stuff like learn welding, do some redecorating and learning Unity. In reality this has been the busiest period I've had since having children. Plus I've put on a fair bit of weight so that is one more thing to deal with.

That being said, we still have a good income. My wife's work is secure, in fact she is earning more with the teletherapy model. But, her employer has given up the lease on their office as they can't see a return to face-to-face working for quite some time. I have a few passive income streams. We have good family whom we can keep in tough with via Zoom etc. Putting it all into perspective we are Okay compared to some others who must really be struggling.

Edit: Plus our children's sleep schedules have gone completely bonkers.

The father of one of my neighbours recently died in a house fire. It was a tragic accident, nothing sinister. The whole family could be described as boringly average with nothing of note about them. The family refused all requests for interviews from the media.

That didn't stop the Irish Independent (big national paper here) from publishing gory headlines about the families pain. They also managed to source family photos (both old and more recent ones) and published pictures of the whole family. The family could deal with the headlines, but that someone leaked family photos to the paper really hit them hard.

The story was so sensationalised and gory and completely off the scale. A few column inches would have sufficed, instead it was double page spread implying the family was in turmoil. The paper turned an already painful family situation in to an absolute nightmare.

I have a fairly basic stick welder which I have used on a few occasions to do a few basic repairs and and make some metal supports for storage boxes.

I don't have a particular need for a TIG welder, but I bought it so I suppose I should find something useful to do with it. Problem is, I'm more of a woodworker.

I managed to plant vegetables and keep them alive and growing well in to June.

I make the same attempt every year, so this is a record for me.

On a more serious note, I had plans when the lockdown began. I wanted to build some kind of a "robot" as an educational venture. Do some redecorating, learn Unity and figure out how to use the TIG welder I bough one night when I was drunk. In reality what has happened is that my children's school, after school club, their sports clubs and Scout groups have given them so many lockdown "challenges" I haven't had time to do anything because I'm in charge of them because my wife has to lock herself away from 9 to 5 to do teletherapy.

Maybe I'm missing something, the article isn't very clear. One of the reasons why we have front end apps pulling from an API is because it allows for interoperability.

The same API that serves data to the web browser can serve that data to mobile apps and to third parties as well.

The idea of bringing HTML rendering back on to the server just doesn't seem useful to me.

This lustrates a problem I've encountered on a few recent projects - we are suffering an embarrassment of riches when it comes to front end technology.

I found myself slipping in the architect role on a few recent projects with various employers and being forced to make the call on which front end framework to use. The problem is that there are so many to choose from and it very hard to predict what you will need in terms of features from your chosen framework six months or longer after making your decision.

Plus, your fellow devs will probably be arguing with you over which one is better based on their experience. All the emails and messages pointing me to various websites claiming React/Vue/Angular etc is best with stats and graphs I really don't have to the time to get my head around.

It's that fear of making the wrong choice that bothers me. The idea a year down the line the front end seems a bit sluggish and someone then points out that {other_framework} would be flying with the same workload.

Don't get me wrong choice is good, but with so much going on in the world of front-end right now coupled with all the hype and shouts about which is best it is hard to just pick one and run with it. Especially in the metric driven world we live in where a manager who doesn't get tech will berate you for choosing the wrong framework or wonder why you aren't buying in the latest hyped up framework.

That being said my preference is to use a framework to prototype and then convert to plain old JS where possible.

In a perfect world the EU/US (and others with big tech presences) would have laws that state companies based in their jurisdictions can only operate in other countries where they aren't required to change their policies or practices in ways that would breach UN human rights guidelines.

One point often overlook with phone cameras is that although they can take great pictures, the image quality degrades over time as the glass is rubbed/scratched etc.

When I first got my Huawei P20 Pro, I was seriously impressed with just how sharp and crisp the images it took were. A year later that "wow" sharpness factor just wasn't there anymore. Looking at the glass covering the lenses you could clearly see scuffing and small scratches, the result of a years worth of normal usages.

For daytime snaps it wasn't that big a deal, but for indoor snaps every light source looked like t had the starburst effect.

It's a minor issue, but definitely worth noting. It's also the reason why I still take a "real" camera with me on holidays or to events.

I think this is a subject most editors fail to address.

A single line of code should be written to file as a single line - no matter how long. However, the editor you are using should be able to gracefully word wrap it depending on your settings.

Most editors word wrap based on window size or some other hard setting. They should be able to wrap gracefully at a logical point in the code e.g. at a comparison operator or a dot in a function chain. Wrapped lines could be tabbed or visually flagged to let you know.

In other words there should not be am ideal line length for code, but instead editors should be able to adapt to make life easier for developers.

Look at word processor documents, imagine how much of a nightmare it would be if such documents had a hard limit of characters per line.

That's why I miss pre-Google search engines such as AltaVista and alltheweb. "If you searched for "some obscure string of words" you would only get results that matches that exact string. I really don't like how Google just chooses to vary the spelling of your query when a match isn't found. I often search for electronics components using their part number. I'll type in something like "P204PPX" (a random code I just made up) and despite there being no match Google still gives me pages of results that are nowhere near what I was looking for.

And the worst thing is that this is all done to keep those ad dollars flowing. Look at how many companies always have a paid advert associated with their name when a search is made. They are paranoid about losing rank due to Google fiddling their algorithm or someone else doing a better SEO job using their brand.

I have a friend who used to be a purser for one of the big cruise lines. They had a leak which ruined a huge amount of carpet in a dining room. They carried spare carpet on board and replaced it... and then dumped the old carpet off the side of the ship.

They sometimes refer to their referral bonus system as a game or challenge, that says it all really.

When I opened my Revolut account I took advantage of their referral scheme. I would get €15 for every customer I referred to them and who used their debit card. The new customers would also get €15. I got five people to sign up, the max.

We never saw the money. When I raised the issue over chat they told me that all my referrals took too long to setup their account and make the first payments. They wouldn't tell me what the time limits was though. Every referral made their first payment within 30 days, so that doesn't seem too long for such an offer if you ask me.

At this point I was using it as my primary account so it wasn't like I was just signing up to get referral bonuses.

This experience made me think they weren't as trustworthy as they claimed to be.

The secondhand market for Lego can be crazy.

A few years back The S*n would occasionally run promotions where they would give away free mini-figs. There was nothing particularly rare about them, and the packs were specially branded for the promotion.

A colleague of mine hoarded as many as he could and a year later was selling them for €10.00 each.

> 1. Why do tech workers need a union?

In my experience the normal dynamics of employer-employee relationships are broken in the tech sector.

In most cases where employees have a grief with an employer it's usually due to a lack of something, be it wages, safety, job security etc.

In the tech sector that doesn't apply. Wages are good, normal health and safety issues are non-existent and you have no problem finding a job if you need one - if you have the skills.

The problem is that the environment can be very, very toxic. My experience has been of employers offering me a big salary, but then expecting me to work very long hours. Couple this with an obsession with being the first to market and rushing to get the product out of the door and you end up with an unpleasant and stressful work environment.

There are health and safety issues, but they don't manifest in broken bones or bruises, but in stress, anxiety and nervous breakdowns.

And you can't opt-out. I've asked to have my contract changed so that the overtime clause has limits applied to it in exchange for a salary reduction - in three attempts every employer has said no. It's like overtime is expected as a normal thing and that you can't complain because your salary is so good.

But of course if you are putting in just an extra hour each day and you are contracted for a 37.5 hour week, you are actually reducing your salary by around 13%.

And if you are perceived as a troublemaker by your employer for standing up for yourself you;ll find that news gets around other employers faster than you'd expect.

Its that broken dynamic, combined with a lack of ethics that means tech employees need to unionize in order to reign in bad employers.

I always read things I'm about to sign, even if it annoys the staff. It's too much of a risk to just agree and hope all will be Okay. I'll not sign stuff that has clauses about binding arbitration or mandatory data sharing with other organisations.

I was signing up for a phone and started reading the T&Cs. Two pages of super small text. The staff member was surprised and said "No one reads that, it's just standard stuff". After a few minutes he starts pressing me to sign it as their system will cancel a signup not completed within five minutes. I doubt that 5-min timeout was a deliberate attempt to coerce people to signing up without reading the terms, but it certainly shows just how little people care about that stuff if they don't account for reading time in their signup process.

I have a five year old HP laptop. It was an Elite model, top of the line when I bought it with an i7 processor and SSD.

14 months after I bought it the hinge failed and the screen part physically detached from the base, with only the data/power wire holding them together. This also broke the screen beyond repair.

Low and behold there had been a recall issued on that model to fix the dodgy hinge. Despite me having registered my laptop with HP on day one, they never told me - and the refused to fix it now as it was out of warranty.

So I carefully detached what was left of the screen and was able to disconnect the wires with no issues. I built a box to hold the base, with holes to attach an external monitor and plug stuff in. It now functions as part family media server and computer for the children.

Also never buying HP again.

That office was brutally loud. 100 people in a low ceiling office. The a/c was bad, but the plotters the engineering guys used were particularly brutal.

We also had dot matrix printers churning out triplicate documents.

They were lucky, us in IT were technically working illegally due to the noise in our part of the building. So many fans in so many server racks. Plus super cold a/c.

Nothing. Head if IT had words with her and she acknowledged What she did.

HR also offered her a free hearing assesment. It was a semi-state co so they actually cared for their staff.

I was an admin for a company that had lots of open plan offices. In one of these offices a specific row of computers kept failing. Although they were cheap (Compaq Evos with NT4), they were pretty damn reliable throughout the rest of the company.

Lot of head scratching ensued about the fault. Nothing really made sense.

Totally by chance we found out what was wrong. One Saturday when the office was empty and with no a/c background noise one of the other admins noticed the PCs in the problem row weren't making any fan noise. A quick investigation revealed that the PSU fans had been blocked with paperclips and bits of paper causing the CPU to overheat.

An older member of staff who was in that row found the PSU fan noise irritating and just decided to take action to stop it. She genuinely didn't realise she was breaking the PCs.

I've had the same happen to Wifi plugs bought as recently as three years ago. They all seem to use different (buggy) apps and route the signal to the plug through some obscure website (usually in China). Of course these sites and domains will go down from time to time. Plus, they all use different, undocumented protocols so homebrewing a new controller app is a no-no.

Lesson learned, I now carefully research any smart home stuff I buy now to make sure it has an accessible API I can use if the cloud stuff goes down.

Someone once taught me a phrase I often use "Lowest common denominator coding." What it means is that you should code to the most common abilities held by the group of coders you are working with.

In practice what that means is when you are writing a piece of code you should do so in a way that the new hire fresh out of university with less that a years real world experience should be able grasp what you are doing fairly quickly.

Abstractions, using the latest and greatest additions to the language you are using and obsessing over reducing the code line count can help the code run faster, but it also increases the learning curve for people looking at the code for the first time.

I think it's more to do with the demand for talent. The people with their sights on mega success need talented tech people to bring those ideas to reality. Problem is their ain't enough of those people to go around, so as a result salaries are high - but long hours and overtime are expected. As part of the process of convincing people to do that managers try to play to our egos and say we'll e successful and rich of we do.

At a previous job, a developer for a logistics firm, we got reviewed on the amount of overtime that we gave to the company. I refused to do overtime unless it was to fix a problem of my own making. My manager told me that was a very unprofessional attitude. My response was to say that I spent seven years at University getting my BSc and MSc. I lived on ramen and cheap Tennents lager. Why should I give away those hard acquired skills for free? "To be successful!!" my manager said. I told him I was successful. I earned a decent salary and was able to provide for my family and put savings aside... what more did I need?

Later the MD of that company would give a speech at the summer party saying that if you put in less than 10 hours a week overtime then you didn't value success and didn't care for your family.

Be good at selling yourself and your ideas. Try to hide your failures. Go after smaller niche VCs who don't have the resources to do proper due diligence. Play to investors greed and ego. Manipulate figures. Claim you are speaking with multiple potential funders.

At the end of the day investors are human too and suscetiple to.maniulatiin, even though they may think they are more savvy than they actually are.