And how will that help those that are struggling with healthcare costs? Frankly, I’m shocked it’s taken this long for America to shoot the shit out of these cunts, but you’ve shot one dude - and a new CEO is probably rubbing their hands with glee with replacing them and getting that big fat bonus.

Make the change that will help people, rather than the one that satisfies your exec-level death kink.

That’s all well and good, but don’t just sit back and hope that healthcare magically improves, or that other healthcare CEO’s start getting their life claims denied.

Take the current well of anger, and point it towards politicians that will actually fight for free healthcare. It’s not only a public health emergency, but also a “crime” emergency, and one of safety.

It’s easy to sit behind a keyboard and laugh. It’s slightly harder to sit behind a keyboard and email your local reps. It’s again slightly harder to rally at your local reps office hours or town halls for free healthcare.

After a year of Ruby.

It absolutely fucking BAFFLES me that Brooks’ Law isn’t known by every software manager on the planet.

I’ve quoted it so many times at work, even in engineering focused teams in at least two big tech companies. It’s not a concrete fact, but it explains why so many teams are hilariously shit at delivering software.

I got into cooking during lockdown, and have managed to get surprisingly good at it, to the point where if you asked me to make a meal of your choosing I could probably make it without looking up a recipe. It’s actually unbelievably simple to make even complex stuff, basically using all the same rules you apply at work:

• Use the right tools for the job
• Plan it out first, do your prep and the actual work is simple
• A simple dish will take much longer than you think
• RTFM. Many sauces and dishes from classic cooking are basically a mixture of a small handful of base ingredients/techniques, and they’ve been written down for decades.
• Once you have the basics down, you can basically make it up as you go. You’ll make amazing meals, and you’ll never be able to replicate it again because you eyeballed it or cooked it in a way that made sense at the time. You say you’ll document it well, but deep down, you know you won’t.
• Nothing is original, everything is stolen. Adapt recipes you see, look at ingredients of sauces and sachets you buy/use, etc.
• You can be a solid hobbyist, but against a pro that does this shit all day every day, you don’t know a fucking thing. You’re also probably not going to replicate what they can do in a professional setting while at home unless you’ve got money.

I’ve fought this battle so many times.

My most recent battle was being told to implement Scrum and agile practices. When the subject of standup NOT being a status update came up, and I forcibly told people to keep their updates brief, it was changed to a “Sync Meeting” that lasted over an hour. Apparently, despite delivering stuff faster, being able to track velocity and ensure we’re not overextending ourselves each “sprint”, and actually knowing what we’re delivering through actionable tasks - we’re not doing agile any more…

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.

You can be as obtuse as you want. You know I’m right, and it’s exactly why legislation is needed to ensure these things are done correctly to stop businesses from exploiting the rules.

It’s a simple solution to what’s a more nuanced problem.

Be honest. If faced with the choice to cut hours/roles, move roles overseas, or to “pay more”, do you think many business owners will do the latter?

You need to consider the nuance here, otherwise you find a similar situation to the minimum wage rises, where businesses complain about the operations not being viable because they need to start treating workers like humans.

Might be another Americanism. It’s been close to two decades since I worked retail, but I got paid more on weekends than weekdays.

While true, there are some complications to this:

• Unsociable hours usually require more pay
• If you’re already working 40 hours a week, focusing on stuff out of hours is going to be hard. I know this all too well!

IMO, this is EXACTLY where outsourcing should be used. Either move someone from the US (or your home country) to where you need support, ensure you have a good triage system for issues that might come up, etc.

There are a lot of jobs that require out of hours support, specifically those that aren’t tied to business hours. In tech at least, many of the sites and services you use are built off the backs of software engineers that are paged at 5am because latency is a little higher than normal.

I don’t raise this to say that this rule is bullshit, but to say that there are a lot of arguments that will be used to push people to work longer than their allotted hours. IMO this is absolutely required, but I would go further and say that any contact outside of working hours implies a working contract, and guarantees that the employee is paid for the disruption caused. That includes on-call too, which is often unpaid.

Labor laws in the US are, frankly, hilariously bad. You deserve unlimited sick pay, at least 25 days holiday (separate from sick leave), and the removal of at-will employment. What is described here is the bare minimum of what you should have.

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.

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…

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…