FUCK LEGACY CODE.

I’ve been crocheting … a lot.

Fuck, I'm now supposed to lead a team.

Cat on the table.
It knows it’s not allowed to.
Swiftly runs away.

age++ 😎

Latest crochet projects

Programming

Programming

Inspired by this rant:
https://devrant.com/rants/10314669/...

WTF? I've been laid off more than a month ago, AND THIS EXTRA-STUPID ACCOUNTING BRAT TEXTS MY PERSONAL PHONE TO COMPLAIN THAT SOME REPORT IS BROKEN.
(she still works for my former company, if that wasn't clear)
Bitch, you fucks literally told me this shit wasn't my problem anymore. Seriously, where do they find those complete morons? Don't they know how "being sacked" works? Or how you cannot expect any work from someone who was sacked?!?
Especially some sheila that only has a job because it is literally illegal to use a pocket calculator instead of an "human" accountant.
Fuck, now I'm kinda happy I'm out of that nuthouse.

Get back to work today, see a mail from yesterday when I was off sick

"Mr Colleague has tendered his registration. His last day with Company will be 31st Jan 2024"

Do they think we're stupid or something? We all know the guy got sacked. We're required to give a calendar month's notice. So when there's a same day resignation, we all know

Just deploy your crappy code and enjoy your weekend

Update on job hunting in the first world:

1- Tens of rejections
2- Had one HR interview last week, seemed to have went well and claimed to check with techlead for a technical interview so fingers crossed
3-interview tomorrow with another company

Also January weather sux balls

When he busts out this bad boy, you know he’s either a hardware prodigy or a complete noob.

"Kiki, I want you to, for the first time of your career at %company%, quit worrying about deadlines and just wander free. Forget about due projects, forget about everything, and just do your crazy experiments till the end of this month."

This was the one-to-one with our CEO today. Yes, I'm being paid to do whatever I want without time restrictions, as long as it is related to my field.

And you know what? At this stage of my life, I don't even want to exploit that, to weasel my way around definitions and justify doing nothing. I legit have three AI experiments to run, I have money to run them, I have time, and I for sure have motivation.

Good workplace is when doing nothing isn't the most desirable thing to do.

my pronouns are vi/vim

Deleting code and cutting out half the loc in a file and eliminating complexity is the best feeling in the world 😎

Daylight savings time is one of the most malicious concepts ever foisted onto mankind.

Damn... I like VS Code and at the same time I fucking hate how slow this garbage "editor" has become.
Can I haz rewrite in Rust? 🥺

I commit directly to the main branch ☺️

Buy a $2000 suit that you will wear once or twice a year and nobody cares.

Buy a $120 keyboard that you will literally use everyday and people lose their minds.

Playing around with Bard:
Me:Who called me from ...?
Bard: <blah blah blah> Would you like me to run a reverse phone lookup on that number for you?
Me: Yes
Bard: I'm just a language model, so I can't help you with that.
Me: Then why did you ask?
Bard: "I understand that you don't need me to run a reverse phone lookup, and that's perfectly fine. I just wanted to offer the service in case you were interested."

I tweaked the question and Bard responded with a Python script and a phone number regular expression.

Our jobs are safe for now.

Title: The problem with "good enough" code

Body:

I'm a software developer, and I've seen my fair share of "good enough" code. You know the kind of code I'm talking about: it works, but it's not pretty, and it's not very maintainable.

The problem with "good enough" code is that it's a slippery slope. Once you start writing "good enough" code, it's easy to fall into the trap of always taking the easy way out.

Before you know it, your code is a mess of hacks and workarounds. It's hard to understand, it's hard to maintain, and it's a nightmare to debug.

I've seen projects go down in flames because of "good enough" code. The code was so bad that it was impossible to fix, and the project had to be scrapped.

I'm not saying that you should never write "good enough" code. Sometimes, you just need to get something working, and you don't have the time or resources to do it perfectly.

But if you're going to write "good enough" code, you need to be aware of the risks. And you need to make sure that you're only writing "good enough" code for a short period of time.

Once you have a working prototype, you need to start refactoring your code and making it better. You need to make it more readable, more maintainable, and more testable.

If you don't, you'll eventually regret it. Your code will become a liability, and it will hold you back.

So next time you're tempted to write "good enough" code, think twice. It might save you some time in the short term, but it will cost you in the long run.

Docker is a scam.
Git is garbage.
The cloud is a scam.

I hate it all now.

Maybe I should try roofing.

Fun fact: WASD keys are actually named after their directions
W — Wupwards
A — Am going left
S — South
D — Definitely right

Job hunt update:

- Rejected by one via email
- Applying to two more today
- Ghosted (?) by the other 5 so far

but hey, it's only been over two weeks for those 5 others! why should i expect efficiency from a company that wants a TeN X DeVeLoPeR? I'll bring my decade+ experience and you can just get around to it... you know, when you feel like!

🤡

TIL that ~50% of the population don't have an internal monologue. That voice inside your head that's reading this.

Mom come pick me up, I'm scared.

We've been trying to hire a greenhorn, fresh-faced intern from India for like a month now.
Plenty of applicants, most with very nice curriculums, a few even can think on their feet while grilled by my questions.
I've sent to talk to HR three almost college-graduating candidates, who convinced me they know the subject of data engineering enough to be working with me and that they are actually gonna do the tasks assigned.

The fucking tweep at HR, an old fart who I had to convince that HVAC maintenance is not the job of the IT department nor the data team, calls my approved candidates "too junior".
WTF, I ask. - "Not professional enough", says the human toad.
Yes, they are to be interns! - "But they do not show professionalism", answered the hag.
Yes they do! They were very professional on the interviews! - "That is for me to say!" barked the reptile.

A week pass by while I try to find more just as good candidates who are also "more professional" when the hag has the audacity to say "here, I found someone. He knows everything about computer things and is very professional".
I took like 20 seconds to find out that the kid she'd given my number to, and was now messaging me IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING NIGHT, was her niece's fiancee and wasn't even in uni! He was just a high school graduate!
Seriously, nepotism kids, delete your Instagrams, tiktoks and every single piece of social media.

I scaled the issue to my VP, who contacted the HR VP for India, who gave the worst possible excuse for her behaviour: "She knows nothing about computer things!" for what my own boss said "so why was she assigned to oversee the data team's new hires?!". The HR slug mumbled something and then doubled down with "well, the kids you sent her were all girls! she had never hired a girl to a technical position, she wouldn't know what to look for in an interview!"

What. The. Fuck.
My boss, my VP of a very strategic technical area, happens to be a woman who lives in a place where women's rights are for real. I had *never* heard she swear on a non-football-related context. She did. Loudly. On camera. As if the HR boss was a referee who just disallowed a goal for her team due to an very ambiguous forward pass.

Shit is still flowing, but it seems that the hiring process of the entire company is being restructured because of that.
I guess I've just sped up this process in about one hundred years?

Team Lead: "Today we're going to discuss how we can be more inclusive with getting people on board with XYZ organization. StackODev, what ideas do you have?"

Me: "Uh. Not really sure. I mean, it's not like we're being 'exclusive' in any way. People can join the XYZ organization without any restraint or discrimination. They just sign up on the website and they're done. There are no litmus tests of any aspect of their demographics or beliefs."

Team Lead: "Yeah, but how do we make sure we're getting more of Wanted Group A so that it's not as much of Less Wanted Group B?"

Me: "Well, that's a different question, isn't it? That would maybe meet the diversity and equity goal, but wouldn't that defeat the inclusion goal? Isn't it 'exclusive' to put more effort into attracting Wanted Group A people and less effort into attracting Less Wanted Group B people? And at what point do we draw the line between creating an enrollment system that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive and one that favors Group A over Group B explicitly?"

Team Lead: "Why don't you shut up now and we'll get ideas from some other team members."

Dev: We have a data quality problem. Combined with data silos, we can't trust the numbers. We need to agree on metric definitions as a company.

CTO: (Points a PM)Help him on the metrics he has defined. We'll discard any other alternate definitions inside the company.

PM: You can start with these. (Throws a bunch of metrics without their definitions. Doesn't respond to questions regarding definitions.)

After a week of generating aggregates,

PM: The numbers seem wrong.

Fuck I know the numbers will be wrong. Because you didn't give me the definitions and I'll have to deduce them myself.

Seriously guys, how do you deal with PMs who don't cooperate in the requirement analysis?

Best code performance incr. I made?

Many, many years ago our scaling strategy was to throw hardware at performance problems. Hardware consisted of dedicated web server and backing SQL server box, so each site instance had two servers (and data replication processes in place)

Two servers turned into 4, 4 to 8, 8 to around 16 (don't remember exactly what we ended up with). With Window's server and SQL Server licenses getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the 'powers-that-be' were becoming very concerned with our IT budget. With our IT-VP and other web mgrs being hardware-centric, they simply shrugged and told the company that's just the way it is.

Taking it upon myself, started looking into utilizing web services, caching data (Microsoft's Velocity at the time), and a service that returned product data, the bottleneck for most of the performance issues. Description, price, simple stuff. Testing the scaling with our dev environment, single web server and single backing sql server, the service was able to handle 10x the traffic with much better performance.

Since the majority of the IT mgmt were hardware centric, they blew off the results saying my tests were contrived and my solution wouldn't work in 'the real world'. Not 100% wrong, I had no idea what would happen when real traffic would hit the site.

With our other hardware guys concerned the web hardware budget was tearing into everything else, they helped convince the 'powers-that-be' to give my idea a shot.

Fast forward a couple of months (lots of web code changes), early one morning we started slowly turning on the new framework (3 load balanced web service servers, 3 web servers, one sql server). 5 minutes...no issues, 10 minutes...no issues,an hour...everything is looking great. Then (A is a network admin)...
A: "Umm...guys...hardly any of the other web servers are being hit. The new servers are handling almost 100% of the traffic."
VP: "That can't be right. Something must be wrong with the load balancers. Rollback!"
A:"No, everything is fine. Load balancer is working and the performance spikes are coming from the old servers, not the new ones. Wow!, this is awesome!"
<Web manager 'Stacey'>
Stacey: "We probably still need to rollback. We'll need to do a full analysis to why the performance improved and apply it the current hardware setup."
A: "Page load times are now under 100 milliseconds from almost 3 seconds. Lets not rollback and see what happens."
Stacey:"I don't know, customers aren't used to such fast load times. They'll think something is wrong and go to a competitor. Rollback."
VP: "Agreed. We don't why this so fast. We'll need to replicate what is going on to the current architecture. Good try guys."
<later that day>
VP: "We've received hundreds of emails complementing us on the web site performance this morning and upset that the site suddenly slowed down again. CEO got wind of these emails and instructed us to move forward with the new framework."

After full implementation, we were able to scale back to only a few web servers and a single sql server, saving an initial $300,000 and a potential future savings of over $500,000. Budget analysis considering other factors, over the next 7 years, this would save the company over a million dollars.

At the semi-annual company wide meeting, our VP made a speech.

VP: "I'd like to thank everyone for this hard fought journey to get our web site up to industry standards for the benefit of our customers and stakeholders. Most of all, I'd like to thank Stacey for all her effort in designing and implementation of the scaling solution. Great job Stacy!"
<hands her a blank white envelope, hmmm...wonder what was in it?>

A few devs who sat in front of me turn around, network guys to the right, all look at me with puzzled looks with one mouth-ing "WTF?"