Still happily using Linux.

I did switch the DE to kde plasma because the cosmic desktop was giving games a lot of trouble. Opening in weird window sizes, mostly. I did some light trouble shooting but decided I didn’t care that much about the desktop environment, so I installed the 2nd one.

Cool. I’m so tired of management huffing their own farts about AI.

I started using bruno for lazy gui “make a request” needs.

But for anything serious python requests is right there, so I mostly used that for testing.

I use keyword arguments in Python to minimize this pain. Instead of

create_user("Bob", True, False)

it’s

create_user(name="Bob", admin=True, send_email=False)

JavaScript makes that more cumbersome with the object thing , but it’s better than nothing.

I use nano for quick edits. I don’t know more than the basics of vim, and don’t do a lot of editing on the terminal so I haven’t needed to.

Still on Linux. Updated to the new pop!_os LTS. It’s been pretty good. The new desktop environment has had a few quirks where I had to fuss with hitting alt+enter to get some games appropriately full screen, but generally it’s been good.

Worth it to be free of microslop

Ars is weirdly pro-windows sometimes , in the comments. I don’t read them as much as I used to.

I did some webdriver stuff for reasons I don’t remember anymore.

I also made a simple Django app to track job applications.

Unsolicited advice:

• use type annotations. You’ll thank yourself later when your IDE tells you “hey this can be None are you sure you want to call .some_func() on it?”
• use an ide. Don’t just raw dog it in notepad. You should have syntax highlighting, red squiggles for errors, the ability to go to definition.
• learn to use a debugger. Pdb is built in and fine.
• don’t write mega functions that do a thousand things. Split things up into smaller steps.
• avoid side effects. You don’t want your “say_hello” function to also turn on the lights

I want job postings and a way to reach people I worked with.

I absolutely do not want the click bait and slop.

I found Castle Rat when they opened for The Well a bunch of years back. Had no idea what to expect, but they really killed it. Been a fan ever since.

Sometimes the manual steps grow like weeds. Where I’m at now, they haven’t invested in automation much at all. Now deploys take all day. Making a code change is a sweaty manual regression search process. It’s bad.

We used to do retrospectives at one of my old jobs, because everywhere loves cargo-culting agile and scrum stuff.

I quickly realized that a lot of the problems were largely outside the team’s control. It was shit like “The CEO doesn’t believe in designers or UX, so he won’t hire one, so we spend a lot of time doing that work badly ourselves.” Or, “management is making us spend all this time in ‘planning meetings’ so we don’t get anything done”

Stuff that has easy solutions, but we can’t do because some idiot or powerful cry-baby is in the way.

My last job was pretty good about code reviews, when people actually spent time on them. My front end code got much better when the front-end expert actually reviewed it.

My current job, code reviews are a rubber stamp farce and I’ve seen total garbage sail though. The code base is a tire fire. These things are related.

I suggested at my current job that we adopt a policy of fixing things as we go. Boss wasn’t interested. He said his boss said “he doesn’t want people gold plating things”.

Okay. I guess we’ll keep this tower of bash scripts that breaks once a month.

Well, yes, though my direct manager isn’t the worst. He’s trying to protect me from other teams that might get pissy.

One of my friends is a product manager type and his analysis was basically “if stakeholders don’t care it’s not a problem, even if by any reasonable metric it is a problem”. So. Here we are.

I thought about it but people are so sensitive here. If they broke something and couldn’t merge they’d probably raise a big stink, and then there’s good odds the checks would be removed “because they’re adding friction” or some nonsense. My boss has already warned me about staying in my lane.

These people have never done any automated testing of any sort. No linter. No unit tests. And they don’t seem to want to.

Sounds about right.

I’m using GitHub actions at work because this place is extremely dysfunctional, and I can just add GitHub actions without it being a whole “research spike planning meeting impact analysis” six week journey.

I took it from “there are absolutely no checks and Bob broke the environment because he pushed up a change that’s just invalid syntax” to… well, I couldn’t make it block the build on failures but at least now when Bob breaks it again I can point to the big red X and ask why he merged with an error.

I was on some website the other day and I opened the browser console for unrelated reasons. They had a giant message there that was like “STOP. If someone asked you to paste something here, you are probably going to be hacked. Do not do anything here unless you know what you’re doing.”

Which, admittedly, is probably good advice.

Javascript is a horrible language, but it is ubiquitous. You’ll want to spend a little time on html and css if you expect them to do more than print output.

You could focus on TypeScript, which will help them avoid some of the worst things, but then you spend more time on tooling and it won’t just run in the browser console.

Python is a reasonably popular language with a good standard library. It has fewer bizarre quirks like adding two lists of ints together to get a string.

I wouldn’t teach C to a general audience.

As discussed at length in last week’s planning meeting, we agreed to continue using isort at this time. Here is the decision document to review: {confluence link}. If you would like to relitigate the issue, which I would not recommend, please add it to the tech planning meeting agenda.

(More seriously, I started using ruff and have no complaints about it.)