This is one of my things I go off about. People sometimes tell me they want to move out of the city “for their kids” and I’m like are you crazy? The suburbs were hell as a kid. Can’t go anywhere because you don’t have a car and walking is dangerous and slow. I was always so jealous of my friends that lived in the city. They could just go do stuff

I really dislike calver for like libraries and apis. For something like Firefox it doesn’t matter as much. But for a library? I want to know if this version has breaking changes.

That’s what I always say. Targeted advertising should be illegal. Contextual advertising is acceptable.

If I’m on the star trek wiki, serve me ads for star trek, sci-fi, and whatever. You don’t need to know anything about me specifically.

We’d still need to do something about like ads that take up too much space, hurt page performance, or introduce malware, but removing the stalking would be an improvement

Friend of mine never got their driver’s license. They live in NYC and don’t need one. They also were concerned about safety- they have ADHD and are prone to inattentiveness, and they didn’t want to be driving a car when that manifested.

I have a license but I also live in NYC. I don’t need to drive. It’s pretty great. It’s expensive in time money space and externalized costs, and it’s often less effective than just taking public transit.

Unfortunately most of the US is resistant to investing in mass transit and density, so it’s going to be shitty car-first spaces for a while.

A verbal secret passphrase to identify yourself to your family would be pretty smart.

Most of the subway smells fine.

I am going to get a lot of use out of that URL.

I’ve been telling people they need to put a dollar in the jar when they do that, but I haven’t actually been enforcing it.

I understood that reference

Opportunity cost is a pretty well understood concept.

Like, inagine you have 100 gallons of water. You could use all of them to water a single water intensive plant that will feed one person, or you could use them to water a whole farm that will feed a community, and also let people drink and bathe and stuff.

The resource is limited.

Sure, we could try to get more of the resource and make it less expensive, but we should also not squander what we have.

I’ve done a lot of “then go get approval from the stakeholder to go ahead with this bug/problem”.

If product wants it out now now now they can sign off on it not working on mobile, so when their boss has a fit about it I can point to the conversation where Ryan said it was fine.

I’ve mostly worked at smaller companies though.

I was a full time test engineer / QA person for a while. My motto quickly became “nothing ever works”.

Pretty much any ticket behind a static copy change would have some problem or oversight. Sometimes even those would (did you account for very narrow view ports?)

Good developers would take this feedback gracefully. “Shit, you’re right, I need to account for mobile users.”

Bad developers would get defensive and upset. “We barely have any mobile users (me: did you check?). Alan already approved so I’m merging. I don’t want to waste time on this”

I worked at a place where all the DB column names were like id_user, id_project. I hated it.

Been seriously thinking of switching to linux for my desktop. I mostly use it for games. Today I was looking at mods for Mass Effect, and the mod manager says in all caps - LINUX IS NOT SUPPORTED :(

There’s probably going to be a lot of that sort of annoyance for years.

It’s strangely satisfying when the “this will probably never happen” test case finds a problem during development.

I had tests for deleting that were like

• create item a
• create item b
• delete item a via the code under test
• assert item a is gone
• assert item b is still there

I thought maybe the whole bit with item b was excessive, but sure enough one day I accidentally fucked something up and deleted all the items, and the test pointed it out before the bad code left my local machine.

I remember being annoyed back in the 90s that ICQ was better than AIM, but everyone just wanted to use AIM. On ICQ you could message offline people, change your display name, and other stuff I don’t remember. It kind of was a big influence in my “wow, people are a bunch of lazy morons” impulse I need to push against even now.

It was a gift from an old partner. I think she bought a nice bathrobe and then put all the stars on it herself.

T-shirt. Boxers. Sometimes a wizard robe. I work from home.

You can buy music from Bandcamp. You get it drm free. There may be other sites that sell music too, but Bandcamp is the one I’ve been using.

You can also still buy CD/vinyl and rip it yourself.

I mostly work in Python, but we use types at work. For a hack day project I skipped typing stuff for like an hour, and then went “wait this sucks” and added types. It was easier overall.

Here there’s main. You branch off. Do your work. Make a PR to main. Build passes and someone approves, merge to main. Production release is done by tagging main.

The branches are short lived because the units of work we select are small. You have like one pr for an endpoint. You don’t wait until the entire feature with 20 endpoints is ready to merge.

Seems to work fine. I think this is different than trunk based development but honestly I’m not sure I understand trunk.