Out of interest, what do you do and where are you based? It’s a shitty place to work, but if you’re near an Amazon office and you do Amazony things I’m happy to send a reference your way.

I’ll die on this hill.

If you want an easy language for beginners, Ruby is a much better alternative. It’s like a simpler Python, and aside from a crazy loop syntax teaches clean programming principles better than most languages.

With that said, Rails IS a ghetto, and many of the kinds of companies that use Ruby as their main language are stuck in the past or are full of the biggest toolbags you’ll ever meet. DHH, in particular, built a reputation on being a programming contrarian, so much so that there’s a golden rule where if he says something, the opposite is probably the correct choice.

IMO more people should be critical of the systems and tools that they use instead of shitting on the tools that others choose to use.

We do assume too much of our tools, but many people here are guilty of assuming that other OS’s are broken in ways that do not reflect the average customer experience.

Working in Ruby did 10x more to help me write clean code than reading Clean Code ever did.

Many of the lessons drilled into me with Ruby (keep a consistent style, tests are cheap, keep your methods relatively small where possible, reduce nesting where possible) carry over nicely into other languages without needing to go through any OO bullshit.

IMO, the best lesson around Clean Code is this: you’re not clever, write obvious code that works with as few tricks as possible.

I switched from .local to .honk and I’m never looking back.

You’ve just made your first post regarding Arch. The cycle is complete.

That is a wild assumption with two key flaws

1. Windows in many workplaces has updates locked down too, except in circumstances where critical security or vulnerability patches are pushed through.

2. The same is true for many servers that run Linux.

As someone that works on tier1 services for arguably the biggest tech company right now, that’s how it works in most of FAANG. Updates are gated, sure, but like with many things there’s a vetting process where some things that look super important and safe just slip through.

In regards to your edit, I guess most cases are different from others, but if your entire business requires you to be able to use a machine 100% of the time then you should have the means to either use a different machine to continue transactions (ideally one with a known state that won’t change, or has been tested in the last few months). If you need to log transactions and process 24-48 hours later do that on something that’s locked down hard, with printed/hard backups if necessary.

Ultimately, risk is always something you factor in. If you don’t care about 48 hours of downtime over several years, it’s not a huge concern. I’d probably argue that many companies lost more money during these days than they would have spent in both money and people-hours training them on a contingency system to use in case of downtime.

No. If everyone were on Linux and there was a breaking change introduced by a third-party there would be similar problems.

The problem is that critical infrastructure isn’t treated like critical infrastructure. If something you rely on can go down due to a single point of failure, maybe don’t fucking use it?! Have backups, have systems that can replace those systems, have contingency! Slapping Windows on to a small machine and running some shitty Chromium app to work as a cash register is a fucking stupid idea when you consider that it is responsible for your whole income.

The problem was never Windows. It was companies that were too cheap to have contingency, because an event like this was considered extraordinary and not worth investing in.

We installed Slackware. One kid bet me that Linux wouldn’t let him drag his entire drive into the bin to delete. It did, and we all laughed, including the professor - who still gave him the passing grade since he’d seen enough of it working before it went up in flames.

Out of interest, do you think that this would be a natural occurrence in the industry if a company were to say “right, no more managers, you self-manage and build this ting, and if it doesn’t work we go bust”, would software engineers look to build the best possible thing to their knowledge?

It’s something I occasionally think about, because various companies like Valve and Fog Creek a decade or so ago did try similar stuff - and they had some great success with some absolute duds.

I’ve honestly never understood why someone at Google or Mozilla hasn’t decided to write a JavaScript Standard Library.

I’m not opposed to NPM, because dumb shit like this happens everywhere. If such a package is used millions of times a day, perhaps it would make sense to standardise it and have it as part of the fucking browser or node runtime…

While I agree with the body of the post, the title is just utter bullshit in this context.

With that being said, GitHub is a prime example of Rails in action, warts and all. To many that use Rails it probably is erring towards legacy given some of the technical decisions made regarding frontend within Rails. Rails is one of those rare stacks where it isn’t uncommon to see the likes of jQuery powering parts of UI, and parts of the Rails stack trying to make quasi-SPA’s. Personal thoughts aside as a former Rails developer, it’s long been said that GitHub and Rails have probably been too heavily intertwined.

I can understand why they’re moving to React, but the gripe seems mostly with server-side rendering - which you can do within Rails. This just feels more like a feedback piece for a specific area of functionality over saying that GitHub is legacy.

The sad thing is that the last few years was the PERFECT time for open source to see a youth resurgence.

Almost two years ago we saw widespread layoffs across the tech industry, and tens of thousands of young people found themselves without work for long periods of time. Many of them would have killed for an opportunity to spend that time “working” for major open source projects with a small stipend for services provided. Young people can say “I was laid off at Viacom, but worked for the Linux Foundation for 6 months before finding my next role at …”

Hell, you want some hungry talent that would love to work on open source? Target those that are laid off or PIP’d while on visas, and put some legal resources behind supporting their stay in the country while they work on open source, until they find their feet again. Most of them will either go back home or will end up working at predatory consultancy firms that hire L1 or H1 workers that need to stay for their families sake, so take that conveyor belt of talent and put them to work on something useful.

Atlassian is one of those companies that I equally laugh at, love, and hate.

They’re in so many markets in software and project management, and have so many large clients that pay for Confluence, Jira, BitBucket, etc. Despite this, people almost universally despise their products, with bugs being left open for years, features blissfully ignored, etc.

I often imagine what it would be like to work for Atlassian, and what “that” code based must look like. Working there must be fun as hell given the impact and breadth of opportunities, equally frustrating if you dogfood your own products, and infuriating given just how much stuff must be utter shit under the hood.

Yeah, that’s true. It amazes me how some of my team in NYC will make double what I make, but live like I lived when I was a student, and be amazed that I own a car.

*If you’re in the US.

Some interns in the US make more than experienced engineers in Europe…

I work at a FAANG company. I’ve also worked at startups and smaller national companies. They’re all morally bankrupt, just in many different ways.

Hell, I’ve worked for “tech for good” clients that have done reprehensible things that required legal intervention…

I remember joining the industry and switching our company over to full Continuous Integration and Deployment. Instead of uploading DLL’s directly to prod via FTP, we could verify each build, deploy to each environment, run some service tests to see if pages were loading, all the way up to prod - with rollback. I showed my manager, and he shrugged. He didn’t see the benefit of this happening when, in his eyes, all he needed to do was drag and drop, and load the page to make sure all is fine.

Unsurprisingly, I found out that this is how he builds websites to this day…

I graduated in CS alongside a guy in his fifties. He’s now retired, but he had easily 10-15 years as a software engineer, and was the lead of a group at a large company before he retired, so I assume it all went well for him.

If you want to learn something, do it. if you want to do it professionally, do it.

It’s a mix of both. My wife makes good money as a teacher, primarily because she’s very senior in her role, and takes leadership responsibilities. Teachers are required in (mostly) equal measure everywhere, whereas software engineers always gravitate towards HCOL areas where the jobs are. If you’re not in one of these areas, you’re stuck with limited jobs, with limited pay.

My commute is close to two hours, one way, but the pay I can get here is over double what I’ll get where I live. Comparably, as a senior I probably get paid less than a new graduate in a HCOL city in the US.