Looks pretty neat. I like that it shows the commands it’s issuing!

Trunk based, eh? Yeah, we do that on a couple teams where I’m at, too. I like the philosophy, but force pushing the same commit over and over as you’re incorporating review feedback is antisocial, especially when you’ve got devs trying to test your changes out on their machines.

I’ve only tried the VS code hunk stager thing, and found it cumbersome compared to command line, but if you can make a GUI work for you ya go for it. I’ve never found it worth the trouble personally

Highly recommend throwing --patch on any git commands you’re used to using. You will have the prettiest, most atomic fkn commit, I’m serious people will love you for it.

I mean many people won’t care, but the quality folk will notice and approve.

I know some Java folks, but my sampling is biased because I meet them where I work - places that predominantly use the younger languages. Actually, I happen to know that the MoH in particular (and probably lots of other institutions) wrap their COBOL/JCL in a lot of Java, so that most devs never need to dive into the “real backend” if they want to just stay at the Java level.

Java people seem like family people. But from what I’ve observed, their job doesn’t seem any different. You can work in javascript, or python, and still insist on clocking out at 16, 1700. But I only work at startups or seat of your pants kinds of places, so I know about what I hear. 🤷

Okay that is getting up in years. I was about there when I started to get more aggressive with the salary I was asking. You could probably start on the developer I -> developer II -> senior developer career path.

Do you look at other jobs much? Do much networking? Talk to other devs about their salary? Even just grabbing a lunch with some workmates from time to time can help get you in the right mindset of recognising your worth.

So move fast and break things, 60s edition.

Once you get into it you’ll wonder how you ever programmed without “divisions”! I mean honestly, just declaring variables anywhere? Who needs that. Give me a nice, defined data division any day 😌

In Canada, the Ministry of Health pays colleges to teach kids COBOL and JCL. It’s a steady job, pension, good bennies. I know a handful of people who went that route, rather than the riskier private sector.

How many years experience? It took me a few years before I started making a decent wage.

Definitely keep honing your skills and applying around for different jobs, and taking jobs that you can use to “leapfrog” to other, even better jobs.

Yeah but we’re all learning, so a certain amount of grace is called for.

Anyway, not to counter my own point. There’s a line, is what I’m saying, and it’s blurry.

I like that idea, and it actually did work for our Marketing guy (Salesforce has a kind of SQL). Near the end there, I just had to debug a few of his harder errors, or double check a script that was going to be running on production.

Never thought of it for Postres or Mysql, etc, but I suppose there’s got to be an easy enough way to get someone access

Also that urgency is rooted in job insecurity, not even customer impact. They just don’t want to look bad.

E: which I mean fair enough, me too, but still.

If it’s regular, I recommend cron + mailutils. Have the cron job call a script with a variable sleep in it if you want to make it look more manual.

Man I don’t regret leaving this behind at my last job. You start out by doing someone a one-off like “sure I can pull the top 5 promotional GICs broken down by region for your blog article - I love supporting my co-workers!”

Then requests become increasingly esoteric and arcane, and insistent.

You try to build a simple FE to expose the data for them, but you can’t get the time approved so you either have to do it with OT or good ol’ time theft, and even then there’s no replacement for just writing SQL, so you’ll always be their silver bullet.

Give you public kudos for moving fast and breaking things. We need more fearless cowboys like you around here

Peer reviews can catch bugs that tests can’t catch.

I won’t disagree that peer reviews are overrated, but they’re a great way to train and onboard less experienced devs (who are just more fun to work with, anyway). Like I’m a platform dev, so I don’t have a “home” project - if I had to know every project before I opened a PR for it, I’d get hardly any work done. Review help other knowledge experts weigh in on my changes.

Anyway, one case for being pro

Yeah that’s a good way to put it. It’s like so close to the thing you were dreading, that it’s a sort of sick relief when it actually happens.

It’s like…

Ah reminds me of the time (back in the LAMP days) when I tried to apply this complicated equation that sales had come up with to our inventory database. This was one of those “just have the junior run it at midnight” type of shops. Anyway, I made a mistake and ended up exactly halving all inventory prices on production. See OP’s picture for my face.

In retrospect, I’m thankful for that memory.

I also hate math, and am jealous of people who are good at it. I get anxiety just doing simple multiplications, and have to look everything up. That said, I’m a senior platform developer, and earn more than anyone else in my family, so like… math helps a lot, but you don’t neeed it to be a real dev. Certainly not to be a hobbyist/hacker, like yourself.