Software engineer, nerd, ttrpg lover, cat enthusiast
If an individual contributor doesn't have any choices about which task in a sprint to work on, you have in no meaningful way implemented Agile. That - not breaking work into two week increments - is the defining feature of Agile. Management MUST be detached from task assignment for it to not be sparkling Waterfall.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for a new generation, in a good way.
One thing that the Perl6/Raku project got right is: The test suite is the spec. If it passes the test suite, it's a correct compiler.
I think this is the right answer for nearly any software project. Especially in the days of AI. The test suite is the spec. If it's not in the test suite it's irrelevant. If your vibe code passes the test suite without changing it, it's correct.
New projects start with a failing set of tests that get approved.
This is the way.
I don't think Hasbro is prepared for the backlash if they make a D&D book with Terf IP. They'll survive and probably sell a fair bit, but the C-Suite has no idea how much reputational damage this will cause among core fans and will be surprised that people care as a moral issue.
Aha, now my Claude is a real junior developer. A unit test is failing and it's reporting "works for me!”
Keep in mind when people talk about Claude failures: Unless you give it explicit permission to go nuts, Claude asks for permission for every command or edit before it runs it. You absolutely should be reviewing every single one. Never hit the button to give it blanket edit permission on a directory. You need to review all the changes anyway, right? Right?
Good news: I decided to be honest in work slack with my experiences with claude and feeling like I'm faster but not learning anything, and the sentiment was echoed and supported, so I feel less stressed and free to experiment on how to use the tool without undermining my brain next time.
Yup, did a mini-project with Claude AI because work is pushing us to use it.
It was fast. The answer it came up with seems good. I made it generate unit tests. It's probably okay.
The next day I retain only a vague idea of how this project works. Because I didn't write it, I code reviewed it.
This is a trap. Developing a deep knowledge of a codebase is a core job skill and this circumvents that learning entirely. Sigh.
1000 days from now, Trump will not be President, barring a Constitutional apocalypse.
Things I can say at both work and in my hobbies: I working on building a new Wizard.
Okay, if I have to use AI, I figured out how to make it work for me.
I'm using it to create failing test cases at the beginning, and then doing the actual work to get them to pass. AI-assist on test driven design! I don't actually hate this and I'm not going to de-skill myself in the process.
Claude is pretty good at it so far.
Well, I got Claude working, and it did indeed successfully write the code I wanted. In this case I could've done it pretty easily, but at least I understand it enough to know it's not wrong.
I guess my career as a software developer was fun while it lasted, now I'm a fucking prompt engineer until I can retire or die.
Got busted for never using the company Claude AI, oops. Boss actually looked at the usage reports.
Saved for now by the fact that Claude is absolute garbage and the invite link doesn't work.
Yes, speed of writing code is not the bottleneck! This rant focuses on code review, but if you're at a place with a functioning QA department, that dwarfs code review.
I've definitely intentionally slowed down at jobs to not overwhelm QA. Everyone is much happier. The company was not staffed to handle my potential output, long before AI existed.
Code writing speed is never the problem at professional shops.
I'm hitting the point of 'old' where I'm spending less and less time online, because my old places for communities are now dominated by people so much younger than me that we don't share cultural touchstones any more.
I don't really know where to find cool 50-somethings that aren't all anti-woke but also aren't all activist-24-7 either.
I didn't really see this coming, the Internet has always been my haven. Now it's kind of not.
One of the reasons ThinkGeek's April Fools products worked so well is that we spent the entire month of March doing little else other than preparing for April 1.
The majority of the joke products had physical prototypes. The photography was real, which is why they didn't look like photoshops. They weren’t. They were handcrafted.
It wasn't something someone did on the afternoon of March 30th. You can't be epic unless you spend the time to do it right.
One thing to discuss in a session 0: How much are we prioritizing this game slot?
Because it deeply sucks to commit to a game and turn down invites for fun things because that slot is taken, and have other players casually cancel once a month or so for things like concerts and movie nights.
Get on the same page on day one. What is an event you will skip the game for?
But you know what's genuine great? Illinois primary is over and I no longer am getting multiple texts a day about it!
I hate how Netflix refuses to integrate with the Apple TV interface. I’ll watch shows I specifically am seeking out there, but if I just want to watch something, they're the last place I look because of this.
And the worst part is they don't care because they still get my subscription fee because they do put out enough stuff I seek out.
I basically vote as if Ranked Choice existed. I can look at the polls and see who the top two are, and I eliminate those early rounds myself and vote for the best of the top 2.
Sure, Kelly was better than Stratton or Raja. but Stratton is better than Raja and so that's who I supported in the end, and I'm really hopeful she might win!
I'm still genuinely surprised by how many of my peers have answered the question "Do you want increased productivity at the cost of reduced quality?" with yes.
My entire journey as a senior software engineer has been about slowing down, trading off quantity of output for quality. That's the entire point. That's what makes it good.
Our entire industry has gone insane for the new shiny.
Once again, I get stressed and my problem solving ability goes away, I take a lunch break and clear my mind and solve it almost instantly once I’m calm again.
I don't know how I did anything before remote work, offices do not let you calm down.
Boss provided a Claude report on its take on my latest project.
It was mostly correct, but had a subtle but brutal bug that would've been bad if we were idiots and just vibe-coded it.
Thankfully I wrote test cases first and then wondered why they weren't passing.
It's not useless but it's not going to replace me just yet.
A lot of true things have been said about Apple’s UI being worse in the latest OS upgrades.
But for me, it's all worth it because it's putting political text spam in quarantine and not notifying me for each one.
That's a killer feature during an election year. Alas.
Spent like 45 minutes trying to get the time sync working on my Ubuntu VM running under parallels, which thought it was April of the year 2121 suddenly. Eventually I got frustrated and did a reboot and it's all back to normal now.
Sigh.
My team has figured out that I'm the person to ask when you need to name something. It's true that this is often a hard thing that I'm unusually good at, but it feels really good that they noticed!
I genuinely can't imagine pretending you don't poop for other people. Everyone has basic biology! It’s absurd this is a thing.
@fesshole@mastodon.social
Well, a year in, at least none of the people who said we were overreacting during the election year are saying that now!
(That's not actually a silver lining!)
It's about as long until we inaugurate the next President of the United States from now, as it was to the Wizards OGL Scandal of January 2023.
Personally, I find this hopeful. That doesn't seem like all that long ago. We’ll get there! This isn't forever!
Okay, this is brilliant.
Fortunately I do not live in a world where I talk to people who ask for my deadname, but it never occurred to me to weaponize the question like this!
@fesshole@mastodon.social
We're starting to forget, but techbros are not the natural state of things. The term was invented when these outside forces with MBAs and abhorrent lack of values started to invade tech, as a caution for companies to avoid working for.
Silicon Valley in the 90s and early 2000s was a bastion of progressive values and people took slogans like ‘Don't be evil' very seriously.
It's not inevitable that they win and we can build things of value without them still.
Trans people and credit, this is something people don't talk about much. When I transitioned, the credit bureaus did NOT transfer my long, excellent history to my new name. It all restarted at zero, which cratered my credit rating. It took years to fix the 'length of time with accounts' metrics. Nothing I could do about it.
Our systems aren't designed with trans people in mind and nobody makes accommodations. You suck it up a lot.
@mxsparks@social.treehouse.systems
Look, I find the anti-car people to be close to the worst group of advocates on the planet. They really deeply suck to listen to.
But ignore them. Improving public transportation improves life for when you're driving, too! Good train and bus systems, safe bike paths, they take cars off the road and free up parking spaces for people who often have great reasons to be driving instead. And most of us are not permanently one or the other.
Both is the answer.
I'm really worried about the world ten years from now, when so many people have turned off their brains and used LLM AI for an extended period of time, especially "students" who never studied anything. This is going to be a catastrophe. And I do not think it’ll ‘get better' enough to make a difference. It's not intelligence, it's very good at finding patterns that fit together. That'll never do anything that hasn't been done before, by it's nature.
This is how we lose the future.
I hate going viral on Mastodon with a stray thought that people want to turn into my life's work. It's just a stray thought.
@datarama@hachyderm.io Aw, that's too bad, Denmark was completely right!
Humanity really needed librarians to own Internet Search, not venture capitalists.