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Ah. Reminds me of a place I worked. The software build would take seven hours, and my coworker would play ping pong for the rest of the day.

When I sped it up to five minutes, I’ve never seen someone become so pissed off.

Always “store” timestamps in UTC is more accurate. For date math purposes alone.

There was an affordable service that would drive your car home for you. The problem leading to its failure, as I understand it, is that drunk people that needed it were too wasted to remember that it existed.

You can also use your own modem and WiFi access point, save monthly rental fees, and get better throughout.

Yes, it can vary, but it’s kind of important. If you don’t know the order of specific operators, or if your language violates math rules, a dev might want to know that instead of resigning to just not know things.

For readability, yes... sometimes, but for readability sake, not “I don’t know what this does without them.”

I’m not just talking about math operators, but logical ones too. I’ve seen people put parens around every “not” because they weren’t sure. There are three essential logical operators. Surely those can be learned at least. And yes... in those cases where readability is an issue, of if they’re necessary, please do add them, but please don’t if you’re unsure what “!a && b || c” does. Seeing “((!a) && b) || c” raises red flags.

I think that if you don’t, you might end adopting superstitious “best practices” to compensate.

For example: Countless engineers I’ve worked with don’t know operator precedence. So tons of ”y = ((i * m) + b);” type stuff. Do not need any parentheses in this case, but if I remove them, then they have no idea what happens... So they litter all math with superstitious parens.

There are so many better examples, but you get the idea. I have suffered “coding standards“ that existed solely because of the devs that won’t RTFM.

STOP nominating narcissistic sociopaths to paths of power. Yeah??? Real easy.

Transaction & processing fees are no joke. Big or small, 3% of your revenue before profit, is a big deal.

It made sense as a convenience fee, until it became ubiquitous. Now it’s a tax that people are blindly opting in to.

I don’t know how many times I see devs put database checks in their liveness checks. The database blips and and the containers restart. Awesome!

I think I’d lose it if I had to npm update before installing a device driver.

I meant, in the context of schooling & learning. Coding boot camps can sometimes result in some behaviors that require unlearning.

I’m mostly talking about trivial things. For example: Adding a third-party dependency to evaluate euclidian distance. i.e. A^2 + B^2 == C^2.

Conversely, too much practical experience can lead to a lack of fundamental understanding, innovation, and helplessness.

I can’t stand it when an engineer wastes hours looking for a library, instead of even considering actually writing code themselves. Many just can’t because they’re so accustomed to glueing together other people’s code.

Of course, I’ve worked with academic types that can never stop theorizing and actually be productive. That have zero discipline.

There has to be a balance. But yes, fresh out of school == fairly worthless for anything I’ve worked on ever.

I always assumed it was 16hz. Oh well. That was a long time ago.

Fortran has great linear algebra libraries.

True story: I worked for a mobile app developer that earned a reputation for destroying Android phones.

Logging bugs would trash the flash storage in months or weeks. Other bugs and “features” would drain the battery so aggressively that several phones caught on fire, some injuring customers. We found ways to hide our actual power usage and circumvent protections that would have prevented rapid battery discharge.

In a meeting, it was said, “Stupid Apple won’t let us run background processes.” To which I thought, “Thank God.”

It was Apple’s approval checks and policies that prevented this app maker from potentially physically damaging their customers’ phones with this terrible software. Physical injuries weren’t enough to fix the bugs or stop messing with low level settings. Nope.

There are some “choices” that shouldn’t be put upon consumers. There are some profoundly bad developers out there. Shouldn’t there be protections from app makers that intentionally hide their shady tweaks that disable power protection safety?

Apple’s approval process does indeed root out many of the worst offenders, like my former employer.

I wish they used regex literals.

Cool. Now everyone can go back to cigarettes.

It’s a certified UNIX, which Linux & BSD are clones of (UNIX).

If I’m working on a specific algorithm, I’ll drill it. Setup a test rig and test my assumptions. I’m often wrong about a lot of things, and playing around with something in isolation is great practice.

For example, when learning ant colony optimization, I started with a naive approach. Then I tried to see if I could estimate an ideal termination condition. Then, researched known methods and refined my approach. Then looked at ways to optimize, refactor, specialize for different use cases. The hours I spent would be considered excessive to some, but far more effective than writing something that works and moving on.

As a result, I’ve used ACOs to model NPC swarm behavior for ground troops that respect mutual collisions, multiple openings, and group behavior that looks very convincing with minimal computation cost. It never would have occurred to me if I only saw it as a graph path optimization technique. I can also with an ACO from memory.

I do similar things when learning new languages. Start with something and focus on interactively refactoring it to be as idiomatic to the language as possible. For hybrid languages like Scala & Ocaml, I try different approaches and try to solve in as many ways as possible.

It’s Javascript running in a stand-alone browser??

This is the future of web tech.

To add: Short stints on a résumé are warning signs for a hiring manager. Too much concern about them is a warning sign for an applicant.

I’ve encountered a handful of companies that expect applicants to have been with their previous company for five+ years.

It’s not always the case, but it can be a sign of a toxic work environment. It’s important to discuss, because it can also just the result of recently losing a key employee.

If they demand a verbal commitment, a proving period, or some other type of assurance: run.

The government sanctioned AT&T’s monopoly in exchange for building the world’s most capable telecommunications. They’d probably still be the only telecom, if they could have behaved.

Microsoft has a long history of illegal anti-competitive behavior going back decades. I particularly remember an attempt to break Lotus Notes in a service pack that backfired and broke Windows servers.

This was as they were building up Exchange.

Can we include Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion to the list of monopolistic anti-competitive financial companies?

This is literally how I get “impossible” changes to happen virtually anywhere. There’s so much psychology that goes into the impact of the written word.

Don’t spread my secret. :(

Fonts are terrible on Windows. It feels like nitpicking, but as a former designer, I notice. Constantly.

Maybe for the same reason my employer made me open up the ports to a PostgreSQL instance? Stupid cloud reporting service to make stupid charts with a stupid point & click UI.

At least I enabled SSL, whitelisted the IP range, and set a password... and made it read-only.

I was going to say that the SSD is slower on the XPS, and it is, but it’s close.

The storage in the MBP is wicked fast even in the base configuration.

I have Windows running along side macOS on my Mac Pro. It boots faster and the video screams... when it’s not installing updates. Seriously. It’s worse than my xBox.