Don’t they use super statically verifiable code for these kinds of applications? Like, Ada?

Cheaper & faster development by leveraging large libraries/frameworks, but inability to automatically drop most unused parts of those libraries/frameworks. You could in theory shrink Electron way down by yoinking out tons of browser features you’re not using, but there’s not much incentive to do it and it’d potentially require a lot of engineering work.

Try porting a very small bit of behavior into a new tiny library or module that is Typescript based and independently published. Enable the strictness checks in tsconfig - really, really resist the urge to use any, and enforce that any is disallowed in tsconfig. Familiarize yourself with its utility types that really trip new authors up. “Record” comes to mind here, and others that involve generics if you haven’t before worked with generics. Some of the type error messaging can be pretty obtuse - don’t be afraid to paste them into an LLM (or use Copilot enhanced Intellisense) to explain what it actually means. IMO the type violation messaging is a weak dev experience point for new authors, so don’t sweat it if you occasionally “struggle to make the squiggles go away”.

This is why I will never touch Javascript again. Long ago when I worked on web stuff, half my workflow was spent in the debugger tracing garbage to find where a typo was. The industry moved to Typescript, and now assuming the strictness checks are enabled, if some Typescript transpiles successfully, I can be 95% sure whatever fuckup I observe at runtime is a logic problem.

Weakly typed languages were an awful idea. But in general, if the compiler isn’t able to detect most runtime issues (like with C++ here), it’s not going to be the most productive language to use for building solutions compared to smarter alternatives.

Ew siloing

He’s just refactoring it

Hated this in one past job. It gave me great joy to quit and work somewhere that wasn’t bean counting. But I can say that RescueTime with Toggl was pretty handy to track stuff. RescueTime would autotrack the time spent in different apps and tabs. Toggl allowed me to do a simple start/stop with a label for more focused work.

Sometimes I am happy about the increase in AI assisted coding specifically so junior devs won’t get as stuck without outside help. Very frustrating when they don’t reach out when they struggle, but at least they can privately copypaste into ChatGPT and get ideas. But, still requires a fine toothed comb when you’re doing the review to know if any toilet tier material sprayed out.

I commit and squash before pushing the branch if I have to change what I’m working on. Keeps the changes on remote so I don’t lose progress. Not like a PR is open if the work I isn’t ready anyway.

If it’s a build artifact, put it in a registry. If it’s resource type files, Git LFS can be used if it’s not an absolute ton.

Use the unknown type so at least someone might have enough brain cells to validate before casting because squiggles