MagicShel
@MagicShel@programming.dev
- Comment on is this the right way to establish boundaries with my nosy coworkers at the hospital? 5 days ago:
I didn’t say he did. I agree. Just trying to set expectations.
- Comment on is this the right way to establish boundaries with my nosy coworkers at the hospital? 5 days ago:
Some people are going to be offended unless you participate in their games. In the army I had someone tell me he was going to punch me if I didn’t drink at a get together. So I drank. I probably would’ve anyway, but he was super weird about it.
Redirect conversation, be noncommittal, let yourself get pulled away by duties, etc. Eventually if you’re lucky you just won’t be in the clique any more. But they’re never going to understand what you’re telling them without offense because they just don’t want to. There is no polite, easy way to do this that isn’t going to upset them. They will feel like you think you’re better than them.
- Comment on What's up with all the "___punk" stuff? 5 days ago:
Punk indicates rebellion against the status quo as part of the theme. If that isn’t part of it, then IMO it has no place in the name.
- Comment on Is it practically impossible for a newcomer selfhost without using centralised services, and get DDOSed or hacked? 6 days ago:
Well he specified static website, which rules out WP, but yes. If your host accepts posts (in the generic sense, not necessarily specifically the http verb POST) that raises tons of other questions, that frankly were already well addressed when I made my post.
- Comment on Is it practically impossible for a newcomer selfhost without using centralised services, and get DDOSed or hacked? 1 week ago:
As a newbie, DDoS and hacking are like taxes. You should be so lucky as to have to worry about them, because that means you’re wildly successful. Worry about getting there first because that’s the hard part.
- Comment on Faces made of living skin make robots smile 1 week ago:
Well, that looks horrifying.
- Comment on Is there any real physical proof that Jesus christ ever existed? 1 week ago:
That’s what I’m saying. There’s no record of him wiping his ass or playing cards. If it’s in the book it must be intended to present something exceptional. Explain his actions as something mundane and there isn’t really any reason to write it down.
But equally, the fantastic supernatural elements make the whole thing into a fairy tale to be completely disregarded as a dubious source of folk wisdom at best by any thinking person.
- Comment on Is there any real physical proof that Jesus christ ever existed? 1 week ago:
So it wasn’t alcohol or anything remotely like what we would call wine today? That’s a bad translation.
That said using reasoning like this to remove the supernatural from the Bible rather defeats the entire point, doesn’t it? If Jesus just made Gatorade like anyone else would, that’s a rather unremarkable thing to describe. Hardly worth committing to writing.
- Comment on Is there any real physical proof that Jesus christ ever existed? 1 week ago:
The Bible is a bunch of self-contradictory folk-tales. Which makes it useless in knowing any real Jesus. So, while one cannot say historical Jesus absolutely didn’t exist, one cannot cite the Bible as a credible source of any knowledge about him. One might as well contemplate historical Hercules.
- Comment on With AI looming, is there still space for new coders? 4 months ago:
I agree with you on the testing point, but I disagree with everything else that you’ve said. I didn’t say infinite demand, did I? I said there is an infinite need for coding. Just in the realm of business software, there will never come a day when there isn’t one more business requirement, and there will never come a day when there isn’t a need to translate that requirement into code. Is that literal infinity or only effectively so? I don’t care. I’m not writing an academic thesis here.
Coding demand is not constrained by the amount of work that needs to be done, but by money (and to a degree organization because larger groups become less efficient) because there will always be more coding that needed to be done.
- Comment on With AI looming, is there still space for new coders? 4 months ago:
How much coding work is left to be done? Infinity. There will always be more needed. Always. And while there is a certain truth to the idea that software just needs to be good enough, it will very quickly become nearly impossible to maintain and add new features.
AI doesn’t make us 30% more efficient. There are certain tasks that’s it’s really helpful for, but they are really limited. I can see issues with junior developers being replaced with AI when they are in the takes more work to train them then just do their job stage. Beyond that, a good developer has skills and experience that AI will never be able to replace, especially since the code has to be maintained.
- Comment on dotnet developer 4 months ago:
How many strains of does it take to develop using .net? Are we talking high end or ditch weed?
- Comment on ifn't 5 months ago:
Reduce exclamation marks!? Great Scott!!! Is there a shortage of punctuation in the future!?
- Comment on Algorithms instead of source code !! 5 months ago:
Also, it’s not just that it’s boring, difficult, and undervalued, but also during development the code is constantly changing and to constantly spend 20 minutes updating documentation for a 3 minute change that might or might not solve an issue is horribly wasteful of time. So by the time a project releases, probably 80% of the documentation is outdated already.
The only exception to this I’m familiar with (though I’m sure there are others) is using OpenAPI to generate both source code and documentation from a configuration file. That way your documentation and code are always in sync. But that’s a relatively narrow use case that isn’t going to cover low-level stuff like algorithms.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 months ago:
I completely agree. The experience sucks. I almost think programming would be better to follow a skilled trade path like electricians or something with apprenticeships and the like. The current system isn’t working for anyone, really. I mean I suppose it works for people like me but that’s not sustainable.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 months ago:
I’ve got twenty five years in and I know how good I’ve got it. I may not always be able to get the job I want, but I don’t ever have to worry about not working. That’s an incredible luxury. But also, unfortunately it really sucks training up completely green developers. They often contribute negative value to the team and then once you finally get them to the point where you can start relying on them, they leave or your team gets broken up. That’s not the fault of young developers at all, but it’s just a reality we all have to navigate. I do enjoy working with enthusiastic and curious people, and experience is certainly no guarantee of that. And I like having new perspectives and skills, even if I hate to crush their expectations with the reality of development. We currently can’t use fucking lambdas because they aren’t supported on our ancient version of Spring.
- Comment on Cloud engineer gets 2 years for wiping ex-employer’s code repos 6 months ago:
A new one??? No I could tell some stories. They aren’t first hand knowledge so I guess they are disputable, but it has been far worse, but I’m an older guy and thankfully the world has changed in thirty years. At a minimum someone I know had to deal with complaints that someone at the city govt was printing porn to the shared office printer. Huge stacks of it that he’d pick up at the end of the day .
- Comment on Programmer tries to explain binary search to the police 6 months ago:
I mean… You’re not gonna outrun that sabertooth on foot.
- Comment on How to properly document code? 7 months ago:
Yep. I mostly document why the obvious or best practice solution is wrong. And the answer is usually because of reliance on other poorly written code - third party or internal.
- Comment on I wrote a program for my boss. How legal is to to write the program again and make it FOSS? 7 months ago:
I agree. Particularly because it’s less about the truth and more about what can be proven in court. But even more, they don’t want to pay a lawyer a bunch of money to defend this even if you could prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. You can tell by the way they didn’t want to pay a lawyer to answer this question.
- Comment on Welcome to the wonderful world of code obfuscation 7 months ago:
I’d make it a named function for clarity and testability and proceed to give zero shits how it is implemented. I would unironically write this code if it worked, but I wouldn’t inline it to reduce the cognitive load of reading it.
- Comment on Merge then review 7 months ago:
I’ve been doing this for twenty five years and I’m nowhere near 100%. In fact I think my percent might be going down.
- Comment on [deleted] 7 months ago:
It’s hard to say what algorithm would serve you better. Seems like this does what you are seeing it to do. It’s not how I’d do it, but I don’t prioritize unblocked users. To fix this, I’d assign a multiplier for zero blocked users. It might be one so that no blocked users is the same as one mathematically. But maybe free speech is so important to you that you give it a multiplier of 2 or wherever.
active_users / [MAX(1,blocked_users)]
This would be a multiple of 1. Change the 1 to a 0.5 for a multiple of 2.
I didn’t look at the script but it probably has a Max function which just takes the higher of two numbers.
- Comment on A lot of YAML 7 months ago:
There are plugins that go back and forth between JSON and YAML so as you might expect it’s similar. Unlike JSON, spacing has semantic meaning, which can be a little annoying, especially when cutting and pasting. It’s nice in that configs aren’t cluttered up with open and close braces. It could be annoying AF if you’re a tabs instead of spaces person but idk because I’m a spaces person.
I like YAML for config over .config files but it’s not a big deal either way. It just encourages better organization of settings because the hierarchical structure demands it while .config let’s you just drop a setting anywhere in the file. But it’s valid to have the opposite preference for the exact same reasons.
- Comment on I am God's greatest programmer 8 months ago:
Generally, yes. However I have been known to document exactly why I’m doing something incredibly stupid - because it’s required but a stupid third party library which, despite being awful, is still better than implementing it myself as a refactor.
- Comment on I am God's greatest programmer 8 months ago:
I don’t want that shit all over me though. That’s why I hired junior!
- Comment on How do you explain your reasons for jumping ship? 9 months ago:
You’ve got a lot of good reasons here, it’s just about how you phrase it.
- lack of opportunity for advancement
- frequent leadership turnover is disruptive
- you’re not challenged by your current role and you’re looking for something more challenging
- excessive technical debt prevents establishing forward momentum
Looking for new opportunities is extremely bland. It makes it sound like you’re bored or fishing for more pay. By being clear about what is wrong with your current environment, you demonstrate an understanding of what makes an effective team, and you feel you are ready for more responsibility. All good things.
Just don’t say anything about personality conflicts or you can’t stand your boss or call them all idiots or anything that sounds angry or overly emotional. Frame anything you have to say in positive or neutral terms. Like frequent leadership turnover makes it difficult to have consistent goals and direction vs. I hate constantly getting new bosses and each one is dumber than the last.
- Comment on 20+ years of xp, interviews are still hard, still dunno what to do with carrear 9 months ago:
Management isn’t the only career path forward, but leadership is certainly part of any role of senior developer or higher unless you have very solid specific domain knowledge. Perhaps an architect role might work?
Having a broad base of experience can work for you in interviews, but you need to present it the right way. You know 20 different ways /tools for doing things and are able to choose the best to for the job rather than having only a hammer and hitting everything like a nail.
- Comment on What was your experience climbing the career ladder in tech? 9 months ago:
I once worked with someone with the title Vice President of Awesome. We worked for a consultancy where you could just pick your own title.
- Comment on What was your experience climbing the career ladder in tech? 9 months ago:
I’m fifty, so I started my career in a different world. I hired in to a small consulting company. Our business was selling IBM systems and development was just a required value-add to that end. There were three of us when I hired in, knowing nothing. I was computer savvy but only a hobbyist programmer.
In the course of the next year, both of the other developers left the company, leaving me to grow and learn for myself. After 5 years I was promoted to senior. I had nothing but time in and there was no one to evaluate my skills or mentor me. I stayed another 4 years until the changing business model to IT as a service forced me out.
I was now a ten year senior with an unrelated two year degree and no knowledge except what I’d uncovered myself in a dying niche. I tried owning my own business but I’m not cut or for that. I lucked into a large project that was half the old stuff and half Java. I was there for a year or two when that business failed and I was spun off into a new consultancy.
One project had me commute back and forth to DC every other week. I liked it so when a government contract reached out to me with an opportunity, I took it and moved my family. This was my first time being part of a long term team and this is where I learned everything about that side of things.
Fast forward a few years, a move back home, and a few jobs, and with 24 years of experience I just accepted a position as a tech lead which I think is as far as I ever want to go in my career. I’ll put in a few years and look for a better contract or non contact position because this current company is shitty.
Title has never mattered in my career until I moved out of the SMB market into big business where title is tied to promotion path and salary. Most of them were totally arbitrary like when every one of twenty developers were just software architects. But now it’s important at least in the positions I’ve been seeing and taking.