Codex

Hey if it’s good enough for From software…

Someone shared this on Mastodon so I’ll just repost my thoughts from there. (Bonus for Lemmy, I was forced to squeeze all my thoughts into 500 characters, so this is the most succinct I’ve been on this site!)

Pretty incredible how little people seem to understand these. For one thing, every method other than waterfall is a subtype of agile methodology. The major distinction is that waterfall has a series of phases from design through building, testing, and delivery that attempts to plan the whole project up front. Agile methods focus on smaller iteration cycles with frequent, partial deliverables.

Something like kanban is designed for continuous delivery: we want to go to mars weekly.

LEAN development is a scam though, that one is accurate.

Look, this isn’t a diceocracy, its a dicetatorship. If they can’t roll right, perhaps they have no place in our society.

I was going to say, as I understand it, some true crime podcasts turn out to be false crimes once the investigations are reopened.

I feel like this has truly earned a “bazinga!”

I never I realized I was so evil, nor so neutral.

You seem like a person who wants to try and do well and be a good manager. So be very careful of burnout, because the constant tension between doing what is right for your team and meeting upper-management expectations can drive you crazy. It did me anyway, which is why I don’t manage anymore.

Take regular vacations and actually disconnect from work when you do. Try to do the same for at least 1 or 2 weekends per month. Being organized is important and helps with the job and the burnout, but there’s a thin line between “keeping notes in Obsidian keeps me focused” and “my entire 2nd job is now maintaining Jira tickets.”

Organization is for you, keep it for you, and don’t let your organizing become a part of your “public api” or else it’ll become another avenue for status updates that you’re obliged to maintain. Turning your notes and private charts into data for upper management is why you compile special reports, just for them.

I made a static site with Hexo a few years back. I thankfully didn’t make any “Get started with Hexo” posts but I did only really use it for a few months. I think that puts me in the cluster with the “switch from Jekyll to Hugo” people. Now it just sits there, absorbing some money every two years for the “personal website tax”.

Shame too, I constantly think I need to get back to it. Hexo is nice, popular with Chinese users I think. I don’t recall now why I liked it over Jekyll or Hugo, but I’ve always loved an underdog. Once I got the hang of using it, it was very customizable and fun to work with.

I’m following a few dozen, but as others have said, there’s little enough content that I just sort by Scaled and browse Everything. The Voyager app has an option to block all NSFW content (I wish it had the opposite for my alt account though! 😅) and I block non-nsfw communities that I don’t care about (like a lot of the sports team ones).

There’s infinite ways to organize code. In C# or Rust where this isn’t an option, you might use nested classes or traits hidden behind a module/namespace.

Good use cases are data structures with associated helper classes. For example, a collection/tree and an iterator/tree-walker for working with elements of the collection. Or for something like a smart memory allocator (an arena or slab allocator), you might use a friend-class to wrap elements returned from the allocator, representing their connection back to it (for freeing up when done or to manage the allocation structure in ie a heap or sorted tree).

Claudia Black, and Ben Browder! They had such amazing chemistry on Farscape so it was a real treat to get them both again on Stargate!

I worked at a place where I did the not-funny-but-serious-and-banal version of this bit, including the burnout breakdown at the end. I’m working on ERP systems now and it’s a lot less stressful, plus things just have normal names like “Accounting Module” or “Third Party X Service Connector”.

I did love Galactus though

As a senior at my last big company job, basically all I did was conduct meetings and do PRs. It’s such a grind.

My opinion now is that most PR is worthless anyway. Most people give, at best, a superficial skim for typos, lack of comments, or other low-hanging replies (that usually, really, a static checker or linter should be dealing with).

Reading the code base in little chunks like that doesn’t give you proper context for the changes you’re reading. Automated unit and integration tests would be better for catching issues like that, but of course then who is reviewing and verifying the tests? Who’s writing them for that matter?

Ideally, pair-programming or having extra people on projects to create knowledge redundancy would help. But companies want to replace juniors with AI now, so that’s not looking good. Senior devs and architects might know the major pieces of much of the code, but can they “load it into working memory” sufficiently to do a quality PR that will catch something the tests didn’t and QA wouldn’t? Not in my experience.

I think the best actually-implementable solution for most teams is to get rid of PR expectations and take a multi-pronged approach to replacing that process.

1. use tooling to check for and fix basic stuff. Use a linter, adopt a code standard, get a code formatting tool that forced adherence to the standard and run it on every PR.
2. Unit tests if you got them, start if you don’t. You don’t need 90% code coverage, just make sure critical paths are covered.
3. Turn one of your useless meetings into a code review session. Each week/sprint, one Very Important Code section is presented by the developer that works on it most or that last changed it. This helps the whole team learn the code base, gets more eyes on the important stuff regularly, and enforces not just a consistent style but a consistent approach to solving and documenting problems.
4. PR (and the github PR approval stuff or its equivalent for you) should be streamlined but preserved. Do have a second person approve changes before merging, just to double check that tests have finished and passed and all that. If your team is so busy that no one ever approves PRs then allow self-approval and be done with it. This will make regular code review very important for security and stability, since any dev could be misbehaving unseen, but these are the trade-offs you make when burning out your team is more important than quality.

the last generation to write FORTRAN

runs to look out window

My God is the sun turning into a red giant?!

Oh no, whew, that’s a relief! Guess the FORTRAN programmers will be relevant for a little longer too then.

(As a .NET dev, I wish some languages (or versions of languages) would die but i really think once code has been written it never goes away!)

“So uh, did you remember to sheath your weapon after the last fight? Well, you didn’t explicitly say that you did…”

I used to have a big list of gender ambiguous names I’d use for examples. So I’d use “Alex” and “Blake” or something like that. It also had some non-anglo names on it, just to spice things up.

In comp sci papers there’s a few other common example people. “I” for intruder or imposter (Irene, Isaac). “M” often for malicious or middle-person (Mal). There’s a few more im forgetting now.

Is this that “waterfall method” I’ve heard so much about?

Pick a library you already use with many sub-dependencies. Make a new library with your evil code. Name it in line with the step 1 library. Oh hi there “Framework.Microsoft.Extensions.DB.Net.Compatibility” you couldn’t possibly have anything bad going on in you, plus you sound really boring to review, I’m sure it’s fine.

Makes the error a little too frequent, but does obscure any performance penalty and is some truly evil genius work!

If I can’t be a number, none of you can!

(See also cascading nulls)