I remember when I first read about AGILE. I was like “this is pretty cool - but there’s no way corporations will actually adopt this methodology without completely turning it into just a set of new names for the same shit they’ve always done.” Naturally, that’s exactly what happened.

I recently learned that a web app I wrote in 1999 (for Internet Explorer lol) is still in use by the company I wrote it for. And this app was basically a graphical front end sitting on top of a mainframe application that dated to the 1970s, so my app’s continued existence means that mainframe POS is still running, too. My app was written in Classic ASP and Visual Basic 6 - I truly pity whatever poor bastard has to keep supporting that shit. They probably have one ancient PC in a closet somewhere acting as the server for it.

The most efficient use of my time as both an engineer and a people leader

My last company had the most efficient standup meetings possible. We always did them by phone since 4/5 of the team was in India, so I was able to shower at home during them and then catch the bus in to work.

I would actually like to work at a place like that. I’ve worked with a very wide variety of languages and platforms and I don’t much care which one I use now. I’m much more interested in what the project is than in what tools are being used to produce it.

Just kidding - nobody has interesting projects any more.

I like the ones where the tech stack is literally every language/framework in use by anybody anywhere. Maybe you guys should try picking the stuff that’s best suited for whatever it is you’re doing.

This reminds me of how much “fun” it was to write Blackberry apps back in the day. Whenever you compiled your app, not only did the entire app need to be signed by the RIM servers, each individual module of library code you incorporated into your app had to be signed, so the more shit you added the longer the process took (and signing a single app sometimes took 30-40 minutes or never happened at all because the signing servers were down). I remember once I needed to use the sin() trigonometry function, which forced me to incorporate one of the cryptography library modules, which in turn doubled the amount of time it would take to compile and sign my app - so I ended up writing my own custom sin() function for no good reason at all.

There was a whole website back then called isthesigningserverdown.com (long gone now) devoted to telling you whether the RIM servers were working or not. The only good part about this was that if I ever felt like blowing off work, I would just tell my bosses that the signing server was down and go home.

Seems like a situation rife with abuse.

Just like leetcode - where you’re helping train the AI that will replace you while not getting a job.

Long ago (mid-90s) I had a coworker who was one of the last people alive who knew still how to program Cyborg, a 1970s-era programming/database platform that was still a legacy platform for a lot of companies. His job entailed making very small changes to the codebase and then waiting literally hours (sometimes days) for the shit to compile. He ended up being able to work from home for three different companies concurrently, making $300 an hour from each company. $7200 per day for about 15 minutes of actual work - while living in rural Texas.

I know Qt is cross-platform, but cars? Wow! I only ever used it for shitty Skype clones for Canadian ISPs.

Y’all need Qt Creator: C++ for under the hood and Javascript for the UI. Virtually nonexistent base of coders who can do both competently and if you’re not careful you end up moving to Finland because of it.

I started out with Visual Basic using the Variant type all the time, and even though I was usually just working on one-person projects it was a fucking disaster. You don’t even have to collaborate to see the virtues of strong typing.

if the code changes and the comment isn’t updated accordingly, it can be ambiguous.

People always cite this as a reason comments are bad. In 30+ years as a developer I have seen (and participated in) a lot of failed software projects, but not once has a mismatch between comments and code been the actual cause of the failure. Moreover, the same logic could be applied to the names of methods and variables (“if the code changes and the method and variable names aren’t updated accordingly, it can be ambiguous”) but nobody ever suggests getting rid of that. At the end of the day, comments are useful for imparting information about the code to future developers (or yourself) that is too complicated to be adequately communicated by a method name.

One thing I always liked about the various flavors of BASIC was that nobody ever pushed that shit as a religion.

There’s a name for that: DEVELOPMESTUCTION

I learned it while at the same time learning (or really enhancing my previous knowledge of) javascript, thanks to an insane mostly-Finnish app development platform known as Qt Creator, which for no rational reason uses C++ for the under-hood-stuff and javascript for the UI front end. Just an absolutely horrible mismatch of mental states. For bonus points, the company that I worked for that used this monstrosity for its suite of apps got purchased by a huge west coast company and the apps were shut down and everybody was fired, after two years of my working on this shit.

I mean, it got the case right on every other letter.

You used to could, on Blackberry at least.

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At least it got the last letter kinda wrong.

:(

You kids today. In my day we used Visual Source Safe and would accidentally leave a critical file checked out when we went on vacation and nobody else could get anything done until we came back.