There was a website where users could request something or other, like a PDF report. Users had a limited number of tokens per month.

The client would make a call to the backend and say how many tokens it was spending. The backend would then update their total, make the PDF, and send it.

Except this is stupid. First of all, if you told it you were spending -1 tokens, it would happily accept this and give you a free token along with your report.

Second of all, why is the client sending that at all? The client should just ask and the backend should figure out if they have enough credit or not.

I feel like most people don’t buy software anymore. Everything runs in the browser.

Like, nerds and enthusiasts and game playing people sure. But most people? Nah. It’s all Instagram, Facebook, tiktok, Reddit, YouTube. Maybe like roll20 if they’re a dnd nerd. Most people aren’t doing Photoshop or blender.

Good. The more people switch, the more support there will be.

Yeah I would use python and pytest, probably.

You need to decide what you expect to be a passing case. Known keys are all there? All values in acceptable range? Do you have anything where you know exactly what the response should be?

How many endpoints are there?

Personally I feel like SQL syntax is upside down, and things are used before they are defined.

SELECT 
a.id -- what the fuck is a?
, a.name
, b.city -- and b??
from users a -- oh 
join city b on a.id = b.user_id -- oh here's b

I’d expect it to instead be like

From users a
join city b on a.id = b.user_id
SELECT
a.id,
a.name,
b.city

People have suggested web rings, but most people don’t care much.

Most users are kind of learned helplessness and don’t really try much different.

Lowering indent levels is nice in functions. Early returns mean you don’t have to think as much. “If it got here, I know foo isn’t null because it already would have returned”.

Yeah some comments are not useful

# returns the value as a string
return str(user.id)

Some comments are

# returns the user id as a string because ZenDesk's API throws errors if it gets a number.
# See ticket RA-1037
# See ZenDesk docs: https://etc/
return str(user.id)

One of my jobs went to microservices. Not really sure why. They had daily active users in the thousands, maybe. But it meant we spent a lot of time on inter-service communication, plus local development and testing got a lot more complicated.

But before that, it was a single API written in Go by an intern, so maybe it was an improvement.

It’s wild to me how some places I’ve worked are like locked down, all the infrastructure is in terraform or whatever and can be deployed immediately… and other places are like “ssh into prod with the credentials from confluence, edit the config in vim, and paste the new code into a new file”

I don’t think an average user is going to know how to interpret the output of mount or findmt

I think installing Linux exposes you to higher severity issues, like “now it won’t boot”. Once you get over that initial setup, it’s not much different than windows or apple.

If more computers came with it pre installed, it would be even easier for folks.

I think about half the time I’ve installed Linux it was fine. The other half were problems with esoteric solutions.

Still glad I made the switch.

Linux doesn’t really have the profit motives that lead to enshittification.

I guess a bigger entity could try to start charging for… something… Support, maybe, but that seems unlikely to take off.

I think there’s a certain kind of user who doesn’t really learn concepts, but rote actions. They click the start menu and then excel to open excel, but they don’t really understand that the start menu is an application launcher and Excel is an application that can be opened in other ways. It’s very one dimensional.

Then when something changes, like the application launcher is moved, they freak out. They don’t have a mental model.

That’s how my mother is, anyway. It’s all magic with no underlying coherent anything. Not sure how to fix that, because it usually comes up when they’re mad or scared, and that’s not a time anyone will learn.

Use a dedicated data type or library. Some languages also have something like python’s Decimal type

>>> .1 + .2
0.30000000000000004
>>> Decimal(".1") + Decimal(".2")
Decimal('0.3')

Yep. Open your browser’s console and do .1 + .2 and you get 0.30000000000000004.

One of the reasons not to use floating point when working with money.

Fed up with Microsoft. I had a windows 10 computer they said couldn’t update to windows 11, and they said Recall was coming, so I said fuck it. Switched to mint, and now I’m trying pop!_os.

Way back like 10+ years ago I ran Ubuntu for a while, but I play a lot of video games and support was lacking. Wine, proton, and other tools have come a long way since then.

My old desktop couldnt update to 11. But for my newer computer, Windows recall was a deciding factor. Fuck that shit. Also fuck their “ai” nonsense.

It’s nice that it’s free and doing little to nothing contrary to my interests.

I used to try to explain to management that some debt is high interest.

Do you actually do work or are you one of those middle-men that add dubious value?

And, like, do you think I can read my coworker’s screen from across the room and be like “Ah yes, that is TransferProjectView.py. I should tell him that I am also planning on touching that file”?

And adults can learn to explicitly communicate. It’s not impossible. You just type into the box.