Hahaha! They don’t write tests. They are unfamiliar with the concept of unit testing.

I had to explain to them the concept of “you import your function and call it with different arguments to make sure it returns what you expect”. It took a couple tries.

Meanwhile, the head of the “quality” team keeps telling me that I should stay in my lane and not tell the developers how to do their work.

This doesn’t spend much time on the scenario where it’s not two peers in the review, but like a junior dev and senior dev.

I recently did a code review for someone who is very junior ¹ , and after spending like two hours fixing all the syntax errors and low level goblins, I realized I couldn’t see the forest at all. I’d been staring at the “this variable is undefined in this case” trees so much. And then they were getting antsy and management was getting antsy…

¹ They’re not actually junior. They’ve been in this role for years. Unfortunately, this org has like no mentorship and no standards, so they haven’t actually learned much in all that time. They’ve just been copy-pasting code until stuff works.

Still on Linux. Updated to the new pop!_os LTS. It’s been pretty good. The new desktop environment has had a few quirks where I had to fuss with hitting alt+enter to get some games appropriately full screen, but generally it’s been good.

Worth it to be free of microslop

It would take an incomprehensible set of changes for me to consider going back to Microsoft. They can fuck off.

Many people take the idea that “everyone is entitled to their opinion” too far, and it turns into “everyone is entitled to their facts”

Humans are feelings driven, so they’re more likely to go with what their friend says than some mean scientist who makes them feel bad. The inability of people to put aside their feelings is part of why we’re in this mess.

People (all of us) are emotional creatures. Logic and reasoning is a hacky patch on top of that, and some people seem to be running older versions.

The “all authority is illegitimate” might generate some friction with some people who might overwise be an ally. They might stop listening and lose any nuance.

Reminded of that quote

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’

People need to admit they don’t know shit and stop believing crap from YouTube.

Where I work, it’s under staffed. The leading hypothesis is management is frothing at the mouth waiting to replace everyone with AI.

They’re really pushing AI, even though this org doesn’t have software fundamentals down. The tech lead on my team is nice enough, in a distant sort of way, but by his own admission has no knowledge of unit testing.

Do the other ones have forums? I don’t remember even seeing them.

Is the steam forum supposed to be moderated by valve or the developer? I always assumed the developer.

I did some webdriver stuff for reasons I don’t remember anymore.

I also made a simple Django app to track job applications.

Unsolicited advice:

• use type annotations. You’ll thank yourself later when your IDE tells you “hey this can be None are you sure you want to call .some_func() on it?”
• use an ide. Don’t just raw dog it in notepad. You should have syntax highlighting, red squiggles for errors, the ability to go to definition.
• learn to use a debugger. Pdb is built in and fine.
• don’t write mega functions that do a thousand things. Split things up into smaller steps.
• avoid side effects. You don’t want your “say_hello” function to also turn on the lights

The other contenders mostly are bad.

Drm-free still exists.

They provide a lot of value without charging the end user very much.

Microsoft could have done this except they’re run by idiots and assholes. Nothing technical stopped them from launching a good store platform. They just didn’t want to.

I didn’t personally find it difficult, but I have thousands of hours in video games.

There’s also the class of comments that explain strange business decisions.

# Product guy said to return January 1st if the user doesn't have a birthday on record

Kind of arbitrary but someone with decision making power decreed it.

I wonder what the “I’ll never vote for a socialist!!” types are doing now to resolve their cognitive dissonance.

Furthermore, if you are being paid the same but your productivity goes up, and the owner keeps all the new profits, you’re being robbed.

Even if it was dirt cheap, I don’t want to give microsoft my money. I don’t want to rent games or get stuck with a subscription.

Labor should organize. There’s no cosmic law that says we need to use AI and treat labor like shit. It’s just a handful of rich assholes, and they’re just people

I’ve known several people who moved from QA and testing to developer roles, but usually as an internal transfer.

Most recruiters and management don’t know shit about fuck when it comes to technical details, so it’s not surprising a lot of them think “Oh the guy who knows how software works and how to handle edge cases? No, we don’t want him”

Fuck test automation, it’s a fucking trap get out of it as soon as you can

lol.

Meanwhile, the org I work at has no test automation, so things that should be trivial require hours of tedious, error-prone, manual testing. Also they break stuff and don’t find out until after it’s merged.