TheHarpyEagle

It could be credibly called an homage if it had a new punchline, but methinks the creator didn’t know what “sanitize” meant in this context.

I definitely agree, but that’s true of any system. The particulars of the pitfalls may vary, but a good system can’t overpower bad management. We mitigate the stakeholder issue by having BAs that act as the liason between devs and stakeholders, knowing just enough about the dev side to manage expectations while helping to prioritize the things stakeholders want most. Our stakes are also, mercifully, pretty aware that they don’t always know what will be complex and what will be trivial, so they accept the effort we assign to items.

Honestly a little confused by the hatred of agile. As anything that is heavily maligned or exalted in tech, it’s a tool that may or may not work for your team and project. Personally I like agile, or at least the version of it that I’ve been exposed to. No days or weeks of design meetings, just “hey we want this feature” and it’s in an item and ready to go. I also find effort points to be one of the more fair ways to gauge dev performance.

Projects where engineers felt they had the freedom to discuss and address problems were 87 percent more likely to succeed.

I’m not really sure how this relates to agile. A good team listens to the concerns of its members regardless of what strategy they use.

A neverending stream of patches indicates that quality might not be what it once was, and code turning up in an unfinished or ill-considered state have all been attributed to Agile practices.

Again, not sure how shipping with bugs is an agile issue. My understanding of “fail fast” is “try out individual features to quickly see if they work instead of including them in a large update”, not “release features as fast as possible even if they’re poorly tested and full of bugs.” Our team got itself into a “quality crisis” while using agile, but we got back out of it with the same system. It was way more about improving QA practices than the strategy itself.

The article kinda hand waves the fact that the study was not only commissioned by Engprax, but published by the author of the book “Impact Engineering,” conveniently available on Engprax’s site. Not to say this necessarily invalidates the study, or that agile hasn’t had its fair share of cash grabs, but it makes me doubt the objectivity of the research. Granted, Ali seems like he’s no hack when it comes to engineering.

Windows into I went to college for development and decided to check out this Linux thing. At the time, I wanted something as different from Windows as possible, so I went with Ubuntu with Gnome 3 (I know) for about a year. Tried out Fedora, couldn’t get my sound to work and accidentally uninstalled the desktop environment trying to fix it, slunk back to Ubuntu, tried out a Debian briefly, and eventually ended up on Linux Mint with Cinnamon and KDE.

At one time I really wanted to try a bunch of stuff and probably would’ve hopped a lot more if Fedora didn’t shatter my confidence, but nowadays I want as little disruption between machines as possible. I have to use Windows for work, so I keep my Linux setup pretty vanilla so I don’t miss features between the two very much. I’ll probably still play with other distros every now and then on old laptops, but I’ve fallen into a “if it ain’t broke” mindset with my daily machines.

Indeed, I’d say an algorithm split among different objects is usually an indication of tightly coupled code. Every code pattern has its pitfalls for inexperienced devs, and I think tight coupling is OOP’s biggest.

You might still try using Proton or Lutris to run it. It may be a pain to get working, but hopefully someone out there has a guide for the mod manager you’re using.

You take that back, python is my homie!

In all seriousness, I freely admit that I’m biased towards python because it was my first language and remains my favorite. I use an IDE for anything but the simplest scripts, so I’ve very rarely had any issues with spacing.

Everyone has a limited time on this earth. Some of us don’t mind or actively enjoy spending that time learning about the technology we use. Others, not so much. I think this comic is really spot on because it’s hard to understand as a tech literate person just how little other people may know. “What browser are you using?” “What’s a browser?”

The foundational knowledge is not that tough, but when you’re just interested in getting the damn thing to work so you can get on with your life, it’s easy to get frustrated by having to take a crash course on what the hell a BIOS is before you can try to fix it. And when you learn all that just for it to still be broken, patience quickly runs out.

As long as people have the general understanding that power cycling will solve a good 75% of issues, I’m happy. I hope people give me the same grace when I pay a someone to fix my car or replace my phone screen (I love building computers, but god I hate working on phones).

Proton is a godsend. Some games can be a little unstable, but I’ve yet to find one that doesn’t work at all. Even was able to install and mod a game from 2000. For what doesn’t work on Proton, Lutris can hopefully handle. Takes a little doing sometimes but I got Battlenet/WoW working almost prefectly with CurseForge.

Nvidia drivers are a huge pain in the ass, though, and haven’t played nice with Wayland in my experience.

I also recommend trying out FreeCAD and seeing which clicks with you. I found FreeCAD’s sketch system more intuitive, though you have to be pretty careful about your order of operations while building your hierarchy.

I agree to a point, but users also do some weird stuff that you just can’t predict sometimes.

Thank you for this comprehensive writeup! I’m a big Mint user and like not having to mess too much with the OS itself, but I’ve run into a few issues where the stable release of something doesn’t have newer features I want. I might try Arch out on a spare laptop.

What is the practical difference between Arch and Debian based systems? Like what can you actually do on one that you can’t on the other?

If you ever think “an actual human couldn’t possibly click that fast”, you are wrong. Debounce your critical actions.

I tried it for a moment, made games stutter like hell, switched back. I know I need to go in and figure it out at some point, but it’s hard to muster the energy when X, for the most part, works fine.

From what I’ve seen, it probably has to do with my Nvidia GPU.

That’s a heartbreaking read, and I can’t imagine how it feels now to know that someone who finally helped lighten the load may be involved with such an egregious breach of trust and safety.

I think this is why I can’t get behind Linus-style takedowns, even if the prospective maintainer has made bad a mistake. Entitled consumers make things hard enough already with direct access to the developers, they don’t need any help getting burned out.

I respect code golfers the same way I respect a cobra, from a distance. Don’t bring that single character naming to the codebase please.

I got a Brother embroidery machine only to find that making anything other than the most basic patterns required a very pricey proprietary program. Thankfully I found Ink/Stitch, an open source plug-in for InkScape. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but after getting used to its foibles, it’s very capable with the right amount of elbow grease. The main dev is active and very helpful in their issues.

I have an Nvidia GPU and have had a few issues with crashes on Mint even after manually installing the latest drivers. Is PopOS noticeably more stable? Have you by chance played Helldivers on it?

Also it seems like it’s pretty tightly coupled with Gnome and tweaks, is it still adventageous if you use, say, KDE?

Could you explain a bit about what makes it better?