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

I do a lot of rice and (canned) beans, which is pretty cheap and satisfying.

I don’t have any experience with lentils. My parents never had them because , the story goes, the last time they did my father farted himself out of the bed.

I don’t have an emotional attachment to meat. I’d like non-meat stuff to be cheaper, and the real costs of meat to be accounted for.

The parents sued, calling it a “secret gender transition plan” and arguing the school violated their constitutional rights by withholding information about their child’s gender identity.

These parents are bad. If they were reasonable people their child would feel comfortable talking to them.

Honestly that’s much more respectable. Someone who says “Yeah, I had a hamburger at the bbq. I know eating meat is bad for lots of reasons, but it was already there, and I can’t always live my ideals” is so, so, so much better than “No fuck you meat is good for the environment actually I’m a good person shut up”

So, to clarify, veganism was a separate example of things that cause a strong emotional reaction.

Second of all, I don’t really believe you but I don’t especially care.

Many people have as an immutable axiom “I am a good person”

When you suggest they are doing something bad, like contributing to climate change, this clashes with that axiom.

That clash causes discomfort. Most people are, frankly, lazy cowards. They could accept that they are not being a good person all the time, and update their axiom. But that’s scary and feels bad. They could also try to do something about climate change (or whatever the topic is. see also: veganism), but that’s also hard. It’s far easier to just lash out at the source of discomfort.

The oatmeal did a comic on basically this topic: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

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

People mandating in-office without a very good reason (vibes based “good for collaboration” don’t count) are climate criminals and should be treated accordingly.

There was someone a while ago who was trying to get a web ring going for like nerd stuff. They said so many of their friends and people they talked to loved the idea, but no one made a site of their own.

I posted it in a local community group, and everyone said the same thing.

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.

There was a meme the other day that was text over a screenshot of final fantasy tactics. It was like

Trans person: “are you helping us because they’ll come after you next?”

Protagonist: “I’m helping you because they’re coming after you now”

I liked that one.

People who pollute the earth should have to fix the damage they do. Failing that, they should pay heavy fines.

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.

I have no regrets from setting my editor to save-on-blur

We used to do retrospectives at one of my old jobs, because everywhere loves cargo-culting agile and scrum stuff.

I quickly realized that a lot of the problems were largely outside the team’s control. It was shit like “The CEO doesn’t believe in designers or UX, so he won’t hire one, so we spend a lot of time doing that work badly ourselves.” Or, “management is making us spend all this time in ‘planning meetings’ so we don’t get anything done”

Stuff that has easy solutions, but we can’t do because some idiot or powerful cry-baby is in the way.

My last job was pretty good about code reviews, when people actually spent time on them. My front end code got much better when the front-end expert actually reviewed it.

My current job, code reviews are a rubber stamp farce and I’ve seen total garbage sail though. The code base is a tire fire. These things are related.

I suggested at my current job that we adopt a policy of fixing things as we go. Boss wasn’t interested. He said his boss said “he doesn’t want people gold plating things”.

Okay. I guess we’ll keep this tower of bash scripts that breaks once a month.

Well, yes, though my direct manager isn’t the worst. He’s trying to protect me from other teams that might get pissy.

One of my friends is a product manager type and his analysis was basically “if stakeholders don’t care it’s not a problem, even if by any reasonable metric it is a problem”. So. Here we are.