I remember when I first read about AGILE. I was like “this is pretty cool - but there’s no way corporations will actually adopt this methodology without completely turning it into just a set of new names for the same shit they’ve always done.” Naturally, that’s exactly what happened.

I recently learned that a web app I wrote in 1999 (for Internet Explorer lol) is still in use by the company I wrote it for. And this app was basically a graphical front end sitting on top of a mainframe application that dated to the 1970s, so my app’s continued existence means that mainframe POS is still running, too. My app was written in Classic ASP and Visual Basic 6 - I truly pity whatever poor bastard has to keep supporting that shit. They probably have one ancient PC in a closet somewhere acting as the server for it.

That’s the definition of tragedy: a great pizza ruined by literalism.

Last year I planted some pepper plants, jalapeno and (what I thought was) jabanero. The peppers on one of the jabanero plants had these tiny little bumps on them and they eventually turned red instead of the usual orange of the jabaneros. When I ate the red bumpy ones, it wasn’t so much that they were hot as it felt like I’d just been punched hard in the lips. I thought that they were just some kind of weird mutation, but it turns out they were actually Carolina Reapers that had been mislabeled at the plant store. I like hot food, but that shit was too much for me.

I’m ready.

So you’re bulletproof as well? lol, we’re all fucked.

I think you want to be overweight so you can survive the famine times. I’m in great shape right now and ripped, but if we face food shortages I’m either going to die quickly or have to start eating the fat people.

Maybe George Lucas can buy the rights to the movie and change the ending to that giant sphere. GOD DAMN U2 ALL TO HELL!

I think you’re trying too hard to defend a shitty movie. :)

GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!

I like how the only thing left of fucking New York City is made of iron and thin sheets of copper.

My parents each have a Kindle but they share the same account and are always reading the same book at the same time. I made the tragic mistake of trying to get them to use Airplane mode so that they don’t keep getting popup messages about the read progress on the other device. I have now heard “so should I be in Airplane mode or not in Airplane mode?” one million times.

My parents never know whether to single-click or double-click anything. So they hedge their bets and click everything twenty times.

I remember when “make it obvious what can be clicked on and what can’t” was a basic design principle. That one got tossed a long time ago.

Helping my octogenarian mom with her iPhone is the most painful experience. She often calls me about something that has “popped up” in some app that she’s using. I tell her to just close it and she says “how?” I then say something like “just click the OK button … or the Done or Close buttons, that will be some unknown color … or click the X in the upper right or maybe the upper left corner … or click “Done” or “Close” in the toolbar, on the left or right sides … or maybe the thing has slid up from the bottom and you need to swipe down to get rid of it … or maybe you need to click the Home tab on the app’s bottom bar.”

I’ve actually been an iOS mobile developer for 15 years now. Anybody who thinks there’s any sort of consistent, intuitive design principles behind Apple products is insane.

Anthropology is another bad choice.

The most efficient use of my time as both an engineer and a people leader

My last company had the most efficient standup meetings possible. We always did them by phone since 4/5 of the team was in India, so I was able to shower at home during them and then catch the bus in to work.

I would actually like to work at a place like that. I’ve worked with a very wide variety of languages and platforms and I don’t much care which one I use now. I’m much more interested in what the project is than in what tools are being used to produce it.

Just kidding - nobody has interesting projects any more.

I like the ones where the tech stack is literally every language/framework in use by anybody anywhere. Maybe you guys should try picking the stuff that’s best suited for whatever it is you’re doing.

This reminds me of how much “fun” it was to write Blackberry apps back in the day. Whenever you compiled your app, not only did the entire app need to be signed by the RIM servers, each individual module of library code you incorporated into your app had to be signed, so the more shit you added the longer the process took (and signing a single app sometimes took 30-40 minutes or never happened at all because the signing servers were down). I remember once I needed to use the sin() trigonometry function, which forced me to incorporate one of the cryptography library modules, which in turn doubled the amount of time it would take to compile and sign my app - so I ended up writing my own custom sin() function for no good reason at all.

There was a whole website back then called isthesigningserverdown.com (long gone now) devoted to telling you whether the RIM servers were working or not. The only good part about this was that if I ever felt like blowing off work, I would just tell my bosses that the signing server was down and go home.

“Down” was awesome.

Seems like a situation rife with abuse.

Just like leetcode - where you’re helping train the AI that will replace you while not getting a job.