askyourmother

We are told that Rust will save us. Glib answer - if it was going to, it already would have (and this is from someone already writing Rust code).

I hope it will lead to a change on two fronts:

1. Simpler formats for file representation and data interchange. When someone tries to add an extra bitfield option, say no. When they keep trying, get a wooden stick with "no" written on it. Part of the disease of modern computing is bloated specs.

2. Restrictive not permissive code bases. Exit and bail out early. Tell the user "file corrupted". Push back.

As they say: once you've been surge priced (by uber), you never go back (to uber)

None of this is intended as an anti-uber rant, I simply think they're failing to deal with the primary issue: regulations and real service are not just for breakfast.

The large number of drivers who refuse dogs, especially guide dogs for registered blind people is appalling.

The London transport regulator wanted to bring uber under reasonable regulation, uber bugged their users to go and annoy the regulator to back off.

Go still keeps it lean, and is great.

The fact it does not have hipster dev approved status is also an added bonus. The minute we see a bloated testing suite with yet another DSL, for Go, we are in trouble.

I recall the professors at our uni treating the undergrads with contempt as wasting their precious lucrative research time.

Big firms are greedy and dumb. IT is a cost centre too them, every tech employee is a moocher sucking cash that could be used in yet another stock buy back to try and keep the stock price high a bit longer so the board can cash out and run.

I think ageism will play a part in the selection process, but not always because of the age directly, rather the older staff may have larger pay, pension and benefits costs.

The last two jobs I took were with companies that treat people with respect, and I would now never go back to a big American megacorps HR drone hiring tech test filter rubbish again.

A lot of the time conflicts arise due personality clashes rather than technical differences, basically your face no longer fits/the manager wants someone else in your place.

Best advice on those circumstances is to be polite, absolutely do the work asked, keep records of everything, look for a new job, but also retain an employment lawyer, so if they move onto stage two - aka "really fucking over the staff", you have options.

I have a colleague who followed this process in the UK, took them to tribunal, they bottled it, and settled when it became apparent how much evidence the staff had collected to support their position.

I still play games on the old 8 and 16 bit consoles, where gameplay always shone. No matter how many times you complete R-Type, you still come back for more.

The disappointment was that the actual job did not entail data structures, Algorithms or even skipping! Just CRUD web apps.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3561995/Police-inves...

http://www.princessplumbing.co.uk/about.html

When I hired a programmer for our doomed to die VC life support funded fart of a project, we put her through numerous rounds of comp sci bingo and algorithm hell. Why? Not sure. Everyone else does. I mean, hiring in IT is shit, why should we break from the industry norm? Why should we want to care about the candidates? Right? I mean if Google can do it...

And yet, they are treated as the lowest employees there, well, most are not even employees, outsourced three or four levels removed as a cost to be cut to the cheapest provider, damn the consequences.

Society has some warped views sometimes.

I however hope 'agile' as a spirit of talking to your users, breaking down tasks into bite size deliverables, testing, and making sure things move in a generally agreeable direction, well, I hope that persists and flourishes.

After all, why have a simple left-pad function, when I have lots and lots of modules, just to achieve the same result?

The only interesting bit is whether it will be webassembly or something else that actually drags us into a paradigm shift for the web.

Trying to explain how they failed to find the twenty needles in the three pieces of straw, they now want to roll forward to a barn-full of bales of hay to try and find less needles!

New tech lead comes in, swaggers about, declares all the street now uses Java for their trading code, we should too. I got the desk heads to listen and be wise to the impending issues, and they told him fine - but if the new Java based code had direct impact on PnL, then his budget, ultimately, he would pay for it. Cocksure, he agreed.

Despite throwing bucket loads of Java devs at it, spending fortunes on "tuning" consultants, performance suffered, GC did affect at critical trading conditions, and eventually he was exposed and kicked out.

The C++ code came back out of retirement, was updated for C++11/14, and still serves them well to this day.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95

It was such an awesome phone at the time, such quality hardware, and once they patched the firmware (a lot), it was an awesome phone. Loved the dual sliding action, the solid feel in the hand, so many features, and the amazing call quality. Still miss it.