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I, (a British developer), just had to explain how American Zip Codes work to my US-based colleague...6
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Craziest bug, not so much in the sense of what it was (although it was itself wacky too), but in what I went through to fix it.
The year was 1986. I was finishing up coding on a C64 demo that I had promised would be out on a specific weekend. I had invented a new demo effect for it, which was pretty much the thing we all tried to do back then because it would guarantee a modicum of "fame", and we were all hyper-ego driven back then :) So, I knew I wanted to have it perfect when people saw it, to maximize impressiveness!
The problem was that I had this ONE little pixel in the corner of the screen that would cycle through colors as the effect proceeded. A pixel totally apart from the effect itself. A pixel that should have been totally inactive the entire time as part of a black background.
A pixel that REALLY pissed me off because it ruined the utter perfection otherwise on display, and I just couldn't have that!
Now, back then, all demos were coded in straight Assembly. If you've ever done anything of even mild complexity in Assembly, then you know how much of a PITA it can be to find bugs sometimes.
This one was no exception.
This happened on a Friday, and like I said, I promised it for the weekend. Thus began my 53 hours of hell, which to this day is still the single longest stretch of time straight that I've stayed awake.
Yes, I spent literally over 2+ days, sitting in front of my computer, really only ever taking bio breaks and getting snacks (pretty sure I didn't even shower)... all to get one damn pixel to obey me. I would conquer that f'ing pixel even if it killed me in the process!
And, eventually, I did fix it. The problem?
An 'i' instead of an 'l'. I shit you not!
After all these years I really don't remember the details, except for the big one that sticks in my mind, that I had an 'i' character in some line of code where an 'l' should have been. I just kept missing it, over and over and over again. I mean, I kinda understand after many hours, your brain turns to mush. and you make more mistakes, so I get missing it after a while... but missing it early on when I was still fresh just blows my mind.
As I recall, I finally uploaded the demo to the distro sight at around 11:30pm, so at least I made my deadline before practically dropping dead in bed (and then having to get up for school the next morning- D'oh!). And it WAS a pretty impressive demo... though I never did get the fame I expected from it (most likely because it didn't get distributed far and wide enough).
And that's the story of what I'd say was my craziest bug ever, the one that probably came closest to killing me :)5 -
Today I'm ranting about Windows. No, it's not "WiNdOwS sUcKs!", it's more like "But why!?"
See, I'm an IT guy for the year, and in my office they use Windows. Now once upon a time, they had Active Directory and all that (well, actually, they still do) but then they got some new computers running Windows 10, and for some reason they just couldn't join them to the domain!
Why can't they, you ask? Well, Microsoft only allows Win 10 Pro and up to join a Domain, and since these computers came with Win 10 Home, that wasn't possible.
Long story short, I now have some 30 computers that need to be upgraded (possibly from 7) to Win 10 Pro, and joined to the Domain.
Thing is, I would like to do that all in one go, so I look into how to automatically setup Windows.
"Ah! Got it, provisioning packages!"
Lest you think they work let me spare you now: they don't. Just like real computers where everything is different, provisioning packages failed to work twice, and after wasting about a week trying to make it work, I gave up.
So now I realized that I need to try a different method, a custom windows image. Issue is, I've got no clue how to make one. See, microsoft decided to go all in on the provisioning packages thing (they do have advantages in certain use cases), and seemed to decide that making custom images was no longer necessary, so they documentation was nearly impossible to find.
But after a lot of searching, I figured out how to do it:
1. Install Windows in a VM.
2. Put it in audit mode.
3. Install your stuff.
4. Create an unattend.xml file with certain customizations.
5. Put the unattend in Windows\System32\Sysprep
6. Generalize the image.
7. Boot WinPE.
8. Open the console.
9. Capture the image.
10. Wait an hour or two.
11. Done!
I'm over simplifying, it was a huge PITA, and yet there were still issues.
Maybe another time I'll talk about those.27 -
My biggest dev regret is that I did not intervene when we decided to use WP for a huge website.
1 year after going live I had to add new features and translations; imagine the PITA-level!
Young me was too reluctant.2 -
Installing my company's microsystems architecture to run locally is a pita because it is 60 GB of docker containers. With my 256 GB Macbook, that's a scaling problem for the years to come.6
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Salesforce.
I mean I hate to be a predictable broken record, but it really is the biggest PITA thing I've come across. Proprietary stuff across the board, arbitrary limits, ridiculously tedious to get sane debug logging turned on and boy, if you've ever had to go through their process for listing an app...5 -
WTF Apple!? Yet another update? I use the iPad mainly to catch up on some light reading while doing a number two. But as of late, I've spend more time watching that line grow under your logo. I blame you for my haemorrhoids, you stupid piece of fruit!!1
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Daghhhhhhhh Kafka.
Set it up, seems to work fine.
Oh no...! Take a broker down, then messages go missing - hmm, that's not right. Fine, I'll just look into... Ah, bad replication factor, my fault. So then it's all fixed! Woop. Wait, no. Some messages still going missing occasionally. Oh, only set to "at most once" delivery. My bad, fix that, and... now everything is out of order. Oh, ok, partitions setup wrongly. Wtf, now the whole thing stalls when there's a network blip until a restart. Right, ok, looks like commits have to receive acks in the library I'm using before continuing. Switch to a library that uses CommitWithoutReply. Brilliant....
Apart from said library seems to have commits failing all over the place because it keeps trying to commit during a rebalance 🙄😒😤
The frustrating thing is I KNOW for a fact that Kafka is a fault tolerant, resilient, horizontally scalable thing capable of handling stupid amounts more than I'm throwing at it without missing a beat. But damn,configuring it, and checking you've configured it sanely is a royal, monumental PITA.5 -
I have an interview tomorrow, but I kinda feel like a dick about it.
A former coworker asked for a reference for a job and told me about the position.. I agreed, and a recruiter dealing with them calls to get it. While on the call I leave them a brief blurb about my skillset and we agree that I'll keep his details on file just in case (I wasn't looking to move on, but I do like to keep in touch with recruiters who don't seem to be a pita)
A month goes by and my position is suddenly ending soon, so I call him and ask if there is anything new.. no, but.. the same employer I gave a reference for would like to talk with me about that same position.
I'd never have heard about the job without my former coworker asking for a reference, but on the other hand, if they are still looking after a month, surely my former coworker wasn't really still in the running, right?
Anyway.. awkward conversation ahead should I get the job.
Also, wish me luck 😁7 -
I want to explain to people like ostream (aka aviophille) why JS is a crap language. Because they apparently don't know (lol).
First I want to say that JS is fine for small things like gluing some parts togeter. Like, you know, the exact thing it was intended for when it was invented: scripting.
So why is it bad as a programming language for whole apps or projects?
No type checks (dynamic typing). This is typical for scripting languages and not neccesarily bad for such a language but it's certainly bad for a programming language.
"truthy" everything. It's bad for readability and it's dangerous because you can accidentaly make unwanted behavior.
The existence of == and ===. The rule for many real life JS projects is to always use === to be more safe.
In general: The correct thing should be the default thing. JS violates that.
Automatic semicolon insertion can cause funny surprises.
If semicolons aren't truly optional, then they should not be allowed to be omitted.
No enums. Do I need to say more?
No generics (of course, lol).
Fucked up implicit type conversions that violate the principle of least surprise (you know those from all the memes).
No integer data types (only floating point). BigInt obviously doesn't count.
No value types and no real concept for immutability. "Const" doesn't count because it only makes the reference immutale (see lack of value types). "Freeze" doesn't count since it's a runtime enforcement and therefore pretty useless.
No algebraic types. That one can be forgiven though, because it's only common in the most modern languages.
The need for null AND undefined.
No concept of non-nullability (values that can not be null).
JS embraces the "fail silently" approach, which means that many bugs remain unnoticed and will be a PITA to find and debug.
Some of the problems can and have been adressed with TypeScript, but most of them are unfixable because it would break backward compatibility.
So JS is truly rotten at the core and can not be fixed in principle.
That doesn't mean that I also hate JS devs. I pity your poor souls for having to deal with this abomination of a language.
It's likely that I fogot to mention many other problems with JS, so feel free to extend the list in the comments :)
Marry Christmas!34 -
It is a PITA, when you have to triple escape single and double quotes in strings in order to get your stuff working.1
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If you've ever tried using Go plugins raise your hand.
If you've ever tried doing plugins in Go, raise your hand.
If you think that the following rant will be interesting, raise your hand.
If you raised your hand, press [Read More]:
This is a tale of pain and sorrow, the sorrow of discovering that what could be a wonderful feature is woefully incomplete, and won't be for a very long time...
Go plugins are a cool feature: dynamically load pre-compiled code, and interact with it in a useful and relatively performant way (e.g. for dynamically extending the capabilities of your program). So far it sounds great, I know right?
Now let me list off some issues (in order of me remembering them):
1. You can't unload them (due to some bs about dlopen), so you need to restart the application...
2. They bundle the stdlib like a regular Go binary, despite the fact that they're meant to be dynamic!
3. #2 wouldn't be so bad if they didn't also require identical versions of all dependencies in both binaries (meaning you'd need to vendor the dependencies, and also hope you are using the right Go version).
4. You need to use -trimpath or everything dies...
All in all, they are broken and no one is rushing to fix it (literally, the Go team said they aren't really supporting it currently...).
So what other options are there for making plugins in Go?
There's the Hashicorp method of using RPC, where you have two separate applications one the plugin, one the plugin server, and they communicate over RPC. I don't like it. Why? Because it feels like a hack, it's not really efficient and it carries a fear of a limitation that I don't like...
Then we come to a somewhat more clever approach: using Lua (or any other scripting language), it's well known, it's what everyone uses (at least in games...). But, it simply is too hard to use, all the Go Lua VMs I could find were simply too hard to set up...
Now we come to the most creative option I've seen yet: WASM. Now you ask "WASM!? But that's a web thing, how are you gonna make that work?" Indeed, my son, it is a web thing, but that doesn't mean I can't use it! Someone made a WASM VM for Go, and the pros are that you can use any WASM supporting language (i.e. any/all of them). Problem inefficient, PITA to use, and also suffers from the same issues that were preventing me from using Lua.
Enter Yaegi, a Go interpreter created by the same guys who made (and named) Traefik. Yes, you heard me right, an INTERPRETER (i.e. like python) so while it's not super performant (and possibly suffering from large inefficiency issues), it's very easy to set up, and it means that my plugins can still be written in Go (yay)! However, don't think this method doesn't have its own issues, there's still the problem of effectively abstracting different types of plugins without requiring too much boilerplate (a hard problem that I'm actively working on, commits coming soon). However, this still feels to be the best option.
As you can see, doing plugins in Go is a very hard problem. In the coming weeks (hopefully), I'm going to (attempt to at least) benchmark all the different options, as well as publish a library that should help make using Yaegi based plugins easier. All of this stuff will go (see what I did there 😉) in a nice blog post that better explains the issues and solutions. But until then I have some coding to do...
Have a good night(/day)!14 -
I'm lucky enough to be able to work with an extremely competent yet down-to-earth and generous senior engineer that it's a pita to write his review abt "area in which he can improve" - the dude already wrote 1/2 the codebase to keep the team running.1
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Why would anyone use -1 for true and 0 for false in a database.
Booleans people!!! FFS
Making migration of old project a real PITA4 -
So I was reading a comment where someone said that Windows is sure as hell not polished, just 'psychologically pleasing.' I get that, and I've tried to main with Mint Cinnamon/KDE for a while, and I've tried so many distro, but I have too many issues with Linux to make it a true daily workstation and personal os.
For example, Windows apps typically have installers, graphical ones, which allow you to choose an install location and stuff. Does apt or yum do that? Not unless you use some crazy parametets or some shit.
Okay, fine, what if you DON'T CARE about everything being open source and you just want your 3-monitor Nvidia setup to work without vsync issues? Also a PITA, need to do either cmdline driver install and co fig or some other complicated shit.
I may be considered a power user, but damn if Linux isn't friendly to windows users. Don't get me wrong, I don't like windows, but so far it's the best option for me versus aillion Linux issues. Get me something that functions like Windows on multiple levels (Aesthetic not completely required, but core functionality of programs is.) and only then can I attempt a full migration.6 -
My past 16hours activities
Woke up > destroyed a healthy running environment while trying to setup dual monitor on my manjaro kde > found out the nvidia driver was the culprit the whole the > the whole thing was a PITA > reinstalled the kde with windows dual boot > did the previous task 4/5 times till I felt satisfied ( call be a dumb but it is what it is ) > and now after wasting the whole fucking day I am setting up the environment finally.
Still I'm not sure if I'll be able to finish this shit before 4 am in the morning . It's now 1.26 AM .
Life is an interesting loop of hell .4 -
I decided i wanna, so i learned C, then i realized OOP was a thing so i had some fun with Java and Android, then i realized Web was useful, and easier to make actual products so i had an affair with RoR, but it was confusing AF, then i got a job where i have to work mainly with Python and Django, but frontend was PITA and i hated it.
In the end, since im only dev at the company and had to do it i started to like it (stockholm syndrom much) and now Im Javascript dev trying to move our stack to Node...
No regrets! -
~rant
I think we need to change way how websites deliver themselves to its users. This HTML CSS JS clusterfuck is just a huge PITA in the ass.
What is a website?
It's an application where users find, communicate or share information, can buy or sell their penis pumps and loads of shady stuff.
Why must a website (the delivered application) be split into multiple languages/scripts and lots of HTTP requests?
In my opinion, PWA is a start to make us look at websites more like apps as we are used to on the machine, but they don't solve the mess.
Per my experience, many people working on websites regularly confuse what's executed on the server and what is on the client. They send data to the client via XHR, for example full DB tables of private data, just to then filter it in their beloved Array.filter function.
You can tell those people again and again and this is why I start thinking that the Web, as we know it, needs a big change.15 -
let me preface with the fact that I'm now known at my new job for being the resident cli hipster. I can't lay any claims to knowing if it's "better" but I like it, I don't care if you do or don't, it just works for me and my flow
so at my job, we generally squash all our commits into one commit and delete the source branch upon merging; i accidentally committed all my work to an old, already merged branch, so my boss tells me it would be more of a PITA with the weird references we would encounter by merging the branch again, rather than just cherry pick the commits into a new branch, which i'm like "eh, fine.".
HIM: "You want to share your screen so we can resolve this?"
ME: "k"
HIM: "Oh, you won't be able to do this in a terminal, you are going to have to load up a GUI of some sort"
ME: "lawlz, no you don't"
HIM: "i highly doubt you will be able to accomplish that, but if you wanna make an ass of yourself, i'll humor you"
ME: "yeah, watch this"
> git log > log.txt
> git checkout <new branch>
> git cherry-pick <copy-paste-full-commit-hash-here>
> git push
ME: "done"
HIM: "what? there's no way you did it that easily, where are all your other commits???"
ME: "i usually try to amend my commits since we squash them anyhow. it really helps in situations like this"
HIM: "well, you go girl"
roll that up in your fancy degree and smoke it, why don't ya?2 -
I think I'm obsessed with Docker. Started off as a PITA and now I can't seem to do a project with out it :/3
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Ffs, I just spent the whole weekend setting up our new storage server. Moved it into the rack. Entered the UEFI to enable idrac. And BAM! The uefi decided to load it’s own raid config over the raid controller.
Raid controller bios doesn’t let me load it’s own config after that. So I have to reset the controller and setup raid, os and the whole shot again.
To make it even better. Debian doesn’t load the firmware for the broadcom chip, since it’s a non-free driver. Making me have to do lots of manual config after the install just to get it on the internet.
I wish I could’ve just bought a new server instead of working with this shit.
I would’ve used FreeBSD with ZFS, but our server only has 8GB ram, and I need about 120GB extra to work smoothly with all the storage.
It’s just a pita working with this. One step forward, ten steps back. -
using new web technologies with incomplete documentation is a PITA. Well... time for a guessing game then!2
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Took over a project where a dev created a table with no primary key and enforce a unique constraint in code. Wtf? He also always selected top 1 so if you added a record directly in the table it completely fucked the expected data.
So, when I took this piece of shit over I didn't realize what the table was and when I tried to convert it to EF it barfed since there was no PK. Was a complete PITA and had to create all new tables.
Some people shouldn't develop software!!!!!!!!! -
Who the fick asks for BPMN diagrams, Disaster Recovery diagrams and Business Continuity Plan for a SaaS product that is deployed in cloud (Azure) ??
This is a simple app/dashboard that just showcases some data in fancy charts. It shows the data YOU feed. Why do you need BPMN diagram? What am I supposed to put? "Client loads data" and "user sees data"?
I already linked Azure's page on DR. Do yiu want me to copy-paste the contents from that link?
Clients are too much PITA!!!1 -
I'm not sure if I have made devEnemies so far, because nobody has pissed in my good-morning-office-coffee yet. But I think my tendeny to perfectionism in syntax and code structure may have been a PITA in the ass for some coworkers sometimes...3
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I called the hack "blow up bunny", was in my first company.
We had 4 industrial printers which usually got fed by PHP / IPP to generate invoices / picking lists / ...
The dilemma started with inventory - we didn't have time to prepar due to a severe influenza going round (my team of 5 was down to 2 persons, where on was stuck with trying to maintain order. Overall I guess more than 40 % ill, of roughly 70 persons...)
Inventory was the kind of ultimate death process. Since the company sold mobile accessoires and other - small - stuff.
Small is the important word here....
Over 10 000 items were usually in stock.
Everything needed to be counted if open or (if closed) at least registered.
The dev task was to generate PDFs with SKUs and prefilled information to prevent disaster.
The problem wasn't printing.
The problem was time and size.
To generate lists for > 10 000 articles, matching SKUs, segmented by number of teams isn't fun.
To print it even less. Especially since printers can and will fail - if you send nonstop, there is a high chance that the printer get's stuck since the printers command buffer get's cranky and so on.
It was my longest working day: 18 hours.
In the end "Blow up bunny" did something incredibly stupid: It was a not so trivial bash pipeline which "blew up" the large PDF in a max of 5 pages, sent it to one of the 4 printers in round robin fashion.
After a max of 4 iterations, bunny was called.
"bunny" was the fun part.
Via IPP you can of course watch the printer queue.
So...
Check if queue was empty, start next round with determined empty printer queues.
Not so easy already. But due to the amount of pages this could fail too.
This was the moment where my brain suddenly got stuck aft 4 o clock in the morning in a very dark and spookey empty company - what if the printer get's stuck? I could send an reset queue or stuff like that, but all in all - dead is dead. Paper Jam is paper jam.
So... I just added all cups servers to the curl list of bunny.
Yes. I printed on all > 50 printers on 4 beefy CUPS servers in the whole company.
It worked.
People were pretty pissed since collecting them was a pita... But it worked.
And in less than 2 hours, which I would have never believed (cannot remember the previous time or number of pages...)1 -
Implementing my own PHP library for Station Playlist Studio, mainly for grabbing the list of songs and requesting songs to be played.
Such a legacy connection... Bad command scheme...
Having it succesfully request songs when UTF-8 ain't even supported properly, is a pita.
Luckily there's been an update to SPL about 2 years later, and my code still works. (:
(Not my biggest accomplishment so far, but those are under RMA..) -
Fuck, there‘s this cool tool react-admin. I want to use it as generic CRUD UI for my framework. Basics work already.
But fuck it this fucking react crap a PITA. Who for fuck‘s sake invented that shit? Damn facebook crackheads ..
JSX ... the worst idea ever.
I worked with vue before and then .. easy, just awesome.
But this crap is utterly unproductive, way too complex, ugly syntax, needs an unholy shit if dependencies, let alone the build system ...
Fuck u react fuck u ...3 -
Is it just me, or is form autofill in the browser just a major PITA for shop owners when people get to the checkout screen? I've had two clients in the past week with problems where users didn't pay attention to their autofill outcomes, or where the form absolutely has to keep a certain value that we've autofilled for them but gets overwritten by their browser. Now there is a shipment of product out in the wind that is going to return to sender and be delayed in a correction cycle. If you've been able to halt this type of nonsense, I'd love to know how you did it.
function ignoreAutoFill() {return browserSitDownAndShutUp;}10 -
I just had to update a package on Pypi after a number of years. It's kind of a PITA.
And then I realized, it's still better than npm. Wild. -
Alright, here we go again with issues on Vector. (My home server that we're transitioning our website, infiniit.co to.)
I'm trying to get the email server up and running. It's a PITA which is evident by the fact we are now on attempt number 6, at least on the 6th VM now. At this time I'm installing a Ubuntu 16.04 LTS ISO and I'll be installing IRedMail unless someone else has any recommendations. So far I've had nothing but problems doing it manually, installing dovecot and postfix, trying to get them linked, and then the last failure was sending a test email locally.
Also, a continuation of the last issue that I had here, now my VMRC isn't working anymore for some reason. Ive forwarded websockets but it won't work unless I use local IP since everything (except direct local IP connections) is running through an apache VHost setup... My head hurts. Help pls.2 -
Turned up on customer site yesterday to do a says SME work for them like I have done every week for last 3 months..
As I walk in they took a decision 15 mins earlier to power off the platform I'm working on to do a backup ( on a big data platform?) and its down till 13. 30...
Irony? The minute they finally let me turn it on New data arrives in the platform so their backup is out of date and they wouldn't need backups if they'd followed my original design and distributed it over two data centres....
Oh and they 'forgot' I was coming so there was little / nothing to do for the rest of the day either
Clients can be a PITA but I can't really complain.... Easy day though! -
Alright! I'm starting to like DietPI.
I liked Raspbian before, but setting up a headless system really was a PITA.
And with DietPI... it seems as if it was made for headless setups.
Finally, I'll have my proxy hub.5 -
RIP my fucking dog laptop. And FUCK Asus. The solution to fixing the fucking laptop is to get a new MB and display. But the motherboard is so God same expensive because you obviously have to solder every fucking component on it so that it's much more of a PITA.
PS yes I'm fucking angry but I hope y'all having a nice day.4 -
I have not been able to work for quite some time already due to a chronic condition getting worse. Even when I have been at work I wouldn't get anything done due to chronic pain (a literal pain in the ass), so this year hasn't been very fun so far. I cannot sit nor stand for extended periods of time. I just want to be able to work again! :C5
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Dammit, why can't the Android SDK use enums!? Figuring out which int constant in which class/interface is relevant to which parameter can be a major PITA...
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Nothing quite like having your source control system deciding which files you want, and which should be deleted.
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Working with Python, one annoyance is, it does not have a solid dependency management. Sticking to hand writing requirements.txt and manually maintaining and upgrading dependencies and also manually updating requirements.txt is a horrible pain in the ass.
Wish there was a better way to do this similar to npm and gem.3 -
So let me start by saying I get so much more done when I am not in the office, so I have my top annoying co-workers
-The number one person. This person was a "developer" but I say that loosely and now she is a Agile champion / Scrum something. She is the biggest PITA constantly going around talking about how great Scrum is.
-This other developer, I actually like the guy, but he just walks over all of the time to ask me stuff. He will grab his laptop and just pop it on my desk to ask me stuff.
-I will go ahead an lump a few together, the ones that have "been doing it a long time" but don't understand the architecture of their own systems. <smh> -
Been using a MBP the last 5 years. I would like to move to pure Linux laptop. Any recommendations on laptop brand?
Back in the day it was always such a PITA getting Linux to run on a laptop due to non existent drivers for sound and wifi. Has any laptop manufacturer filled this gap yet?
I don't want to spend all my time getting the laptop to work, which is why I went with MBP. Reliability is my first requirement, followed closely by performance.5 -
Created my first CentOS virtual machine to test code locally and at every step it seemed like SELinux was working against me. Has anyone else here spent hours trying to get just the right settings to run a webserver on an OS with SELinux or is it just me?
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If you are falling to stored procedures for every performance optimizations
Concludes You haven't started well.. -
This guy nails it!
https://youtu.be/5Sl5C-5fX1M
A talk about (semantic) versioning and breaking updates which make you spend countless hours to just adapt to a new library upgrade and how we can do it with a bit less PITA.
tl;dw: The answer is codemods. -
Wrapping applications is PITA. It would be cool and all, but the app outputs debug(ish) messages into stderr, which just makes me write more spaghetti :'(
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