d2p

My post was actually aimed at the industry more than specifically developers. The headline was a bit bad (it was written before the post) but I didn't expect to get 30k visitors overnight so I probably didn't proof-read/tweak as much as I could've done :D

It's disappointing, whatever we call it :(

Long story ;)

I was setting up a staging database for some testing. Our DBs are big so we truncate a bunch of data we don't need on the staging server so we can have more DBs without wasting tens of GB per database.

I ended up executing this against the wrong server.

Needless to say, we've learned from this. Luckily nothing critical was lost, but I felt like a complete spanner :(

Yeah, someone told me about that. It's still ridiculous. And why couldn't the input tell me what the min/max was before I entered it?

For some devs, I'm sure that's true. For me, I like to take pride in my work and be proud of the products I work on. I love people reporting bugs so I can improve :)

Yeah; that got me too. Needless to say I won't be trying that again :)

Yeah, could've been something like that. It doesn't normally do that it was just a one-off, so I figured it was just something weird up (like maybe I'd already told it to reboot and it didn't seem to work, so I sent it again but it was just starting).

I wondered that; but the first several emails didn't start like that. It was only after I complained that wasn't my name it started, like they were taking the piss :(

That's true; and the post wasn't aimed specifically at devs, but more of the software dev industry as a whole (I know the title is pretty badly worded).

I think companies should start caring more about their quality and users should stop giving money to those that don't. Some of these silly bugs are pretty ridiculous and should never have happened.

Yeah, I don't know if I get more than my fair share, or if I just notice them more. Maybe it's good attention to detail =D

I disagree. While there are management/process/whatever issues, there's also a lot that could be improved by the devs.

For example, take the podomatic example - that's just a sloppy function written by a dev. The NPower thing is just sloppy setup of the website and bad links in email templates. The MS thing, well why did the devs add jQuery to a site that is so incredibly static?

Devs make a lot of decisions that influence the quality of software and I think we need to start taking more responsibility for that.

Like everything, it's a trade-off. People try to say "you should do x", but it's just never clear-cut.

I think in general though, we would be better moving slightly towards the "spend a little bit longer" end of the spectrum.

I totally agree, and since I became team leader where I work I like to think we've made MASSIVE strides in quality. We've moved from CVS (lol) to DVCS; we review every checking; we have build servers and perfectly matching local QA and production staging environments. We devote time to fixing bugs and eliminating technical debt.

We're still far from perfect, but I we're definitely on the right track. It's possibly because we try so hard to improve that I get so frustrated when big companies appear not to :(

> If you think that software/service X sucks, why not see this as an opportunity to do something about it?

I try very much. I try to report any issues I find like this (I spoke to 5 different people at NPower trying to explain their issue, and nobody cared or understood).

I have a job/family/life. There's only so much time I'm prepared to put into trying to make silly things like these better, and I'm certainly doing far more than most! :)

Often the buggy software turns out more expensive. It can be a false economy not putting that extra time in to ship stable software.

If you ship something that loses data and you have to start restoring backups and patching data, it probably would've been cheaper to do a little extra testing.

Like everything; it's a tradeoff. I think we're universally bad at playing the game!

> The fact that a developer was making manual changes in a production environment points to bad process and lack of knowledge of a better way.

I'm guessing this is relating to my SQL mishap in the opening lines? You're making assumptions that I was doing something manually in production here, and not that I was executing a script that was buggy or against the wrong machine.

Sure, we could build safeguards against this, but it wasn't something we really considered would happen. Needless to say, we've learned from that one!

I've also seen a lot of recruiters going through GitHub and contacting people that way lately. People with public source on GH tend to be really passionate devs because they're frequently spending time outside work doing dev.

Windows 10!! Fuuuuu! How did Windows 10 escape my post?!

I did use technology before the iPhone, but I don't remember being as frustrated by it as I am now.

The most frustrating thing is that we seem to be getting worse, not better. We're not learning from mistakes, we're too busy churning out the next buggy release to review the mistakes in the last one :(

When huge software companies like Google and Microsoft are churning out buggy crap, it's easy to see why others assume they can't do any better.

As well as what others have said, it might long-term give an easier path for developing things that work across platforms too.

Lots of companies spend a lot of effort to run code on multiple platforms (SQL Server recently announced Linux support; .NET core has supported runtimes on Linux too and tons of OS languages have runtimes for multiple platforms). It would be great for both devs and end-users if the number of things that are different between platforms was reduced.

Really concerned that MS did not :(

I really like this. I used to play piano, and I just hated reading sheet music. This seems to much more simple.

I don't think it'd work well in paper/book form, but on a scrolling screen I think it'd be a great learning aid.

This is not a valid reason. Having access to all my private data, my banking website, my gmail, and anything else you want is unacceptable. I'm shocked that anyone at all would install your extension.

It's no wonder so much private data is leaked all the time when people make our these sorts of permissions are acceptable and defend them when questioned.

Marking them as obsolete doesn't hide them; nor stop them being reopened if they're deemed worthwhile!

I've starred a load of Android bugs in that tracker; and over the last few weeks, loads of them (many tens) have been flagged Obsolete.

Many of them are absolutely not obsolete; they're as relevant in 5.0 as they were when they were raised.

It's great that they're cleaning up the issue tracker as if they might actually use it (or maybe it's preperation to move to GitHub, as many other Google projects have been), but it sucks that they're just blanked fobbing off a load of relevant cases :(

I recently heard someone (Gilad?) say that it's still not "a done deal", but they're confident it will be agreed. Can't come soon enough for me; will make convincing others that Dart is here to stay much easier.

I would love to see this happen; but I'm just not convinced it will. I just don't see MS/FF ever choosing to build/maintain a Dart VM for their browsers (even though I think it would be a massive step forward for web dev).

(Google should've spec'd a generic VM together with MS+Mozilla and built Dart on top of it; but that ship has sailed!)

We're not using Dart commercially currently; though we are prototyping in it as a candidate for vNext of some very large applications. To me, it seems incredibly promising. Every time I have to go back and write JS in our production apps; I seriously miss the static analysis Dart does; it's so clunky to find trivial errors at runtime in a browser that the editor should've been able to show you!

However; there are some frustrating holes in it though that have made our prototyping tricky; such as:

Serialisation; not even JSON support. Alan Knight is working on a Serialisation library; but even that is frustrating to use (it doesn't support DateTimes at all well for ex), so I'm generating having to generate serialisation code from C#.

No private pub server. If you want to host Dart packages internal to your company locally; you're out of luck. Although the source for pub.dartlang.org is open; it's written to only work on AppEngine; which kinda sucks.

We're also slightly nervous that the Dart VM still isn't in Chrome. I don't know what's taking so long, but this would seriously help convince others that Google is really invested in Dart.

Having had to fix many bugs in libraries that failed in newer browsers, I disagree. Things get deprecated; new browsers stop supporting them. My current project is full of abandoned JS libraries, and we spend a lot of time patching them up.

That's fine if your app is a toy you can rewrite in 6 months.

If you have a huge number of products that span millions of lines of code and took over 10 years to write and you're trying to pick a tech stack you can use across them all; this isn't going to fly.