Mediocre pop star.

Visual Basic isn’t dead … it’s just resting!

I forewent (?) skin-washing instead. Now I take a shower like once every two weeks. I ask people periodically if I stink and nobody says I do, so I dunno. TBF I also forego most of my tasks and most of my unconsciousness as well.

OK, which one of the things I mentioned do you think is vastly and objectively superior to all others? Genuinely curious here.

I’ve worked professionally on Windows and Mac; using Visual Basic, C#, Java, Objective-C and Qt Creator (which is C++ and Javascript); for web apps, desktop applications, and mobile apps (iOS, Blackberry and Android). I have my personal preferences but they’re all viable platforms/languages/frameworks/devices and anything that needs doing can be done on them one way or another. The idea that one of these is vastly and objectively superior to all others is just pseudo-religious nonsense.

Windows Phone was great. I’d done Windows Mobile since 2005 and it was nice to be able to continue developing with C#/.NET and Visual Studio (back when it was still good) in a more modern OS. One thing that really spoiled me permanently was being able to compile, build and deploy the app I was working on to my test device effectively instantaneously – like, by the time I’d moved my hand over to the device, the app was already up and running. Then I switched to iOS where the same process could take minutes, also Blackberry where it might take half an hour or never happen at all.

Funny thing: RIM was going around circa 2010/2011 offering companies cash bounties of $10K to $20K to develop apps for Blackberry, since they were dying a rapid death but were still flush with cash. Nobody that I know of took them up on the offers. I tried to get my company to make a Windows Phone version of our software but I was laughed at (and deservedly so).

so you can focus on what really matters… meetings! collecting unemployment!

That would be incredibly ironic given that they completely fucking gave up on mobile devices when the iPhone came out.

It’s kind of funny how eagerly we programmers criticize “premature optimization”, when often optimization is not premature at all but truly necessary. A related problem is that programmers often have top-of-the-line gear, so code that works acceptably well on their equipment is hideously slow when running on normal people’s machines. When I was managing my team, I would encourage people to develop on out-of-date devices (or at least test their code out on them once in a while).

That’s obvious. I’m pointing out that your logic doesn’t support your opinion.

Reminds me of asking operations to help me move furniture in my office: “ya wanna move something, ya gotta move it with yer mind!”

My girlfriend once asked me how I knew she liked me when we first met. I told her it was because she would lightly touch my arm when we were talking. She said she didn’t remember doing that, and also that she didn’t actually like me when we first met.

Tales from the Crypt

It would have been cool if they’d renamed themselves “Calloway”.

run our design past a focus group before implementing it

once you’ve built something, you’re not asking users for whether it’s perfect

I once ran afoul of our UX guy for suggesting that we run our design past a focus group before implementing it. Dude literally said “users don’t know what they want”.

I had a job like that back in the day (circa 2000). I remember one stretch where for a solid month around 50 developers did nothing but call in to Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? to try to become a contestant. Ironically, one web app I wrote for them (with Visual Basic and “Classic” ASP) is still in use today – and it was a front end for a mainframe system that dated to the 1980s, which means that’s still up and running as well.

Lol I found the only less competent people than the managers were the consultants they hired.

With one hilarious exception: at my first real programming gig I was left alone and I had created the sort of vastly overcomplicated, unmaintainable mess that newbie programmers always manage to create. My company brought in a highly-paid consultant who correctly identified the problem: me. Since I was a rock star, my managers laughed and sent the consultant packing and I was allowed to keep fucking things up for another year or so.

I had a boss once come to me with an article he had just read about how APIs were the next big thing in programming. He told me I should incorporate some APIs in our software and I told him I would research it. This was in 2010.

I interned at IBM in the late '80s at the TJ Watson research facility. I have no idea if that’s still around or if it’s still what it used to be, but at the time it was a pretty amazing place, filled with brilliant people doing stuff that may or may not have been directly related to the corporate bottom line. Benoit Mandelbrot (the chaos theory guy) had an office there. There was an unused scanning electron microscope parked in the hallway outside of our lab because there was nowhere else to put it. I learned to use CADCAM on enormous monitors; it was a blast to design something, send it electronically to the machine shop for fabrication and have it delivered on a cart the next day (sometimes the same day). I worked on a project repurposing these miniature electric punches that had been designed for ceramic green sheets (the way they built their mainframe cores back then) and then got to experiment creating a new hole-punching technique using pressurized fluids. They let you do whatever you felt like doing even if you were just an intern. There were no corporate idiots anywhere in sight there.

As far as I can tell, that part of IBM (the actual innovation) is gone.