Management often views software engineers more like machines that spit out code rather than actual engineers who design software. I can’t tell you how many projects I’ve been on where someone up the ladder is unhappy with the time estimate given to complete a feature so they either bring on a contractor or pull a team from another project

Invariably, the additional “help” makes a giant cluster fuck and the people who are actually familiar with the code are now stuck having to scrutinize every PR and fix a ton of defects rather than contributing to feature development. Then the feature takes twice as long to develop as originally estimated. Management scratches their head, shrugs it off, and repeats the same mistake the next time.

• Stores putting out Christmas merchandise before Halloween.
• People who use their phones while driving.
• Littering.

If it’s not leaking oil then it’s not a Chevy smallblock.

One of my old bosses used to say, “the choice is often not between right and wrong, but good, better, and best.”

I agree with that sentiment for the most part. Different styles is fine. But sometimes you run into someone who is trying to use a socket wrench to drive nails and all you can do is just kind of watch in amazement and wonder how they arrived at the conclusion that this was the way to go.

First One:

Big ASP.Net Core Web API that passed through several different contract developer teams before being finally brought in house.

The first team created this janky repository pattern on top of Entity Framework Core. Why? I have no idea. My guess is that they just didn’t know how to use it even though it’s a reasonably well documented ORM.

The next team abandoned EFCore entirely, switched to Dapper, left the old stuff in place, and managed to cram 80% of the new business logic into stored procedures. There were things being done in sprocs that had absolutely no business being done there, much less being offloaded to the database.

By the time it got to me, the data layer was a nightmarish disaster of unecesary repo classes, duplicates entities, and untestable SQL procedures, some of which were hundreds of lines long.

“Why are all our queries running so slow?”

We’ll see guys, it’s like this. When your shoving a bunch of telemetry into a stored procedure to run calculations on it, and none of that data is even stored in this database, it’s going to consume resources on the database server, thereby slowing down all the other queries running on it.

Second One:

Web app that generates PDF reports. Problem was it generated them on-the-fly, every time the PDF was requested instead of generating it once and storing it in blob storage and it was sllloowwwww. 30 seconds to generate a 5 page document. There were a list of poor decisions that led to that, but I digress.

Product owner wants the PDF’s to be publicly available to users can share links to them. One of the other teams implements the feature and it’s slated for release. One day, my curiosity gets the best of me and I wonder, “what happens if I send a bunch of document requests at once?” I made it to 20 before the application ground to a halt.

I send a quick write up to the scrum Master who schedules a meeting to go over my findings. All the managers keep trying to blow it off like it’s not a big deal cause “who would do something like that?” Meanwhile, I’m trying to explain to them that it’s not even malicious actors that we have to be concerned about. Literally 20 users can’t request reports at the same time without crashing the app. That’s a big problem.

They never did fix it properly. Ended up killing the product off which was fine because it was a pile of garbage.

Who? Us avocado toast swilling, quiet quitting, not consumery enough losers who still live with our parents?

The guy literally only remembers the last conversation he had.

Every photo of him that I’ve seen lately looks like a man who sold his sold his soul to the devil without reading the fine print first. Not that he had much of a soul to begin with. Sorry “little Marco.” Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

That’s like saying “I refuse to drink wines older than 2000.” Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s good. But, some of the old ones are very, very good.

Facebook is optimized for other stuff. Vacuuming up data for instance. That tends to drag on performance. If you want to see a “fast” website, I believe McMaster-Carr’s is still the gold standard.

Growing up comes in stages, some of which are difficult for both parents and children to navigate.

When your kids are little, you’re the center of their universe and they are dependent on you for everything.

They grow up and become more independent. It’s a natural process as they prepare for adulthood. Their desire for autonomy develops without the benefit of experience. That can lead to conflicts.

Some of it is hard to take. Especially when your kid is telling you that “you don’t know what you’re talking about” or “I don’t need your help.” It makes you feel angry in the moment because it’s disrespectful and dismissive of your own experience. When I’m standing there, glowering angrily, I’m trying to think of what to say that doesn’t make things worse. Meanwhile, in my head I’m thinking, “Listen you little shit. You don’t know anything about anything. If you want to disregard what I’m telling you, fine. You can learn that you’re wrong the hard way.”

Then it makes you sad because you know that they will, in fact, have to learn the hard way. The hard way is painful. You know because you learned that way too when you were that age. But we learn from our own mistakes. Not from those of our parents. At least not when we’re young.

Love is not a feeling. Love has feelings connected to it but at its core, love is an act.

I loved my kids when they were adorable newborns. And when they screamed half the night and had explosive diarrhea.

When they come running, excited to see me and wanting to play. And when they’re being naughty little shits whom I’ve told to stop doing something seven times already.

When they’re telling me I’m a jerk because I won’t let them go to some party at some shithead from schools house because I know there will be drugs and alcohol involved. And when they need a hug because their boyfriend/girlfriend broke up with them or they’re just having a rough day.

Love means trying to do what’s best for them whether you’re happy, disappointed, or angry with them. Whether you like them or not. And there are definitely moments when you will NOT like your kids. But you still love them and want them to have a good life.

Its also incredibly fast.

One time my wife got me a really nice DeWalt jig saw for Christmas. I already had a jigsaw. It worked well enough for as much as I use it. Although the newer one was better quality and had a few nicer features.

You know what I did? I thanked her and told her how much I appreciated it. She saw something she thought would make my life a little easier and got it for me as a gift. It was a very kind gesture. If it were the wrong one, I probably would have talked to her later and asked if I could exchange it for one that would have suited my needs better while still letting her know that I appreciated what she was trying to do. I’m sure she would have been fine with that.

What I wouldn’t have done was gripe at her for buying me a new power tool because I “don’t like new things” or “I already have a jigsaw and it works just fine.” That would be a terrible idea which would understandably hurt her feelings when she was just trying to do something nice for me.

It wasn’t about the “thing”. It was about the gesture. The fact that they gave you such a gift shows that they pay attention to what you do and they wanted to give you something to make your life a little easier. That was very thoughtful but you threw it back in their face. I completely understand why they’re angry.

he would also stand far too close to people, which only served to amplify his size.

This was completely intentional. One of LBJ’s many “persuasion” tactics that were collectively known as “the treatment”.

“We’re going to use NestJS for the backend.”

Wait… Oh no. Oh please no. God why!?!

You were “filled with the holy spirit.” You really couldn’t help it. 🤷‍♂️

Access is one of those programs that was a game changer in its day. Desktop databases became popular in the 80’s for orgs that either couldn’t afford or didn’t need a mainframe.

All the other competing desktop database systems were slow to transition from MS-DOS to Windows and Access offered quite a few features that the others didn’t have. Microsoft included Access with Office 95 and every office version thereafter. That pretty much wiped out the rest of the competition.

Access has just outlived it’s usefulness. Better solutions exist now. Microsoft seems aware of that since they’ve done basically nothing to it since 2016. They’re probably just keeping it around for the enterprise customers who are too stubborn to migrate off it yet.

“The weatherman said the word “snow” so now we won’t be picking up this week. You’ll have to wait until next week. Sorry, not sorry. Also, your quarterly payment is due and no, we’re not going to give you a discount for the pickup that we missed.” --Republic Sanitation

“So it’s called a ‘knight’?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s shaped like a horse, not a knight.”

“Yes.”

“And it can only move in an ‘L’ shaped pattern.”

“…Yes.”

“That’s not confusing at all.”

All the function parameter and returns types are going to be “any”.