I’ve been pushing to add some basic checks on PR, and people are reluctant. There’s one repo that I’m code owner on so I spent the like 15 minutes to apply a code formatter and add a GitHub action to check. But on the main repo people are dragging their heels. I’m like just pick ruff or black and do it. It’s going to take like 10 minutes. I’m not asking for us to go crazy and add automated tests right now, but can we at least get something to verify the python code is syntactically correct?

The other day something went through code review until I looked at it and saw there was an extra (, and that shit wouldn’t even run. I’m like please please add an automated check. I’ll do it. Please.

I think a lot of people just aren’t familiar with how other places do software. This is the same place that was ssh’ing into prod and making changes right on the machine until like this month.

Mint is fine. I went with pop!_os because at the time mint didn’t play well with my hardware.

Make sure you test things from the install live disk before you commit. Internet access, displays, audio should all work.

I’m kind of bummed no one at my job really does code reviews seriously. I don’t really get any feedback, so it’s hard to improve.

That’s also probably why the older code is an idiosyncratic mess of mutations and "oh yeah you need this config file that’s not in source control " and “oh sorry I guess I hard coded that file path, huh?”

People don’t really like change.

Think about free public libraries. They’re fairly popular, and not controversial outside of fringe libertarian types and assholes. People like that you can borrow books and other media for free. Usually there’s a bit of a backlash if there’s a movement to shut down libraries or limit their services.

Imagine if free public libraries didn’t exist, and someone tried to invent them today. People would be having screaming fits about communism. It’s stealing from the authors. it’s ruining publishing. We don’t need tax dollars for this when we have amazon. Blah blah blah.

It’s the same with other things we could socialize. health care is a privatized nightmare. If we somehow got a public option in, eventually people would start reflexively defending it.

So what I’m saying is many people don’t really have a set of internally consistent beliefs. They just don’t like change.

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.

ls never asks you to create an account or to update.

Don’t give anyone ideas.

“Pay $2.99/mo to see hidden files!”

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

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

Sometimes I feel like everyone who would care already knows , and everyone who doesn’t care won’t care no matter what the facts say.

You could prove definitively that LLMs summon demons that eat live babies, and they’d shrug and dismiss it.

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.

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.

I don’t think microsoft understands shit. I think their leaders are out of touch, lying, idiots. They continue to exist based on inertia and past success.

It’s frustrating because management are so colossally, transparently, stupid but they get the big paychecks and the workers get fucked. And then like half the workers sit there going “Well this is just and fair. this is a good world. If the people actually doing the work had more of a say, that’s communism and thus axiomatically bad”