• 1 Post
  • 129 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle
rss

  • What kind of non-agile bottom-up software projects have you experienced? Bottom-up waterfall? I guess it’s possible in theory but that would be a sight to behold.

    My only point is that in most situations, upper management are fools that should be left to their devices and should never get a say in development methodologies. By definition if upper management imposes Scrum, it’s a self-defeating prophecy.

    Waterfall Agile Scrum
    Top-down Can be great (esp. with rigid requirements like fintech, for safety-critical systems, or integration with traditional engineering processes with rigid schedules and feature sets) but will probably be more expensive Bad managers trying to make-up for their own lack of foresight Can’t exist (but some companies pretend very hard)
    Bottom-up Probably can’t exist (but I haven’t seen anyone try) Yes Yes

    Your average tech company should be somewhere in the bottom-right, but bad managers are trying to pull the needle upwards to justify their existence or make up for their incompetence. But they still call that “Agile” (which can be true by some definitions of the word) or “Scrum” (which that isn’t, by definition).


  • Good software does not come out of companies without a bottom-up approach to software development. Top-down approaches are either terrible or extremely expensive.

    Agile development is something that at my company we fought for, not against. It’s literally impossible to fight against actual agile development since it has to come from the workers. Agile is not scrum, and neither are a collection of ceremonies. It’s just a framework to give agency to developers.


  • Scrum is not the be-all end-all, but in organizations that cannot implement scrum effectively, no system could hope to achieve anything meaningful either.

    Scrum aims at empowering workers to remove power from clueless MBAs and meritless CEOs, if they don’t want to play ball then the idiocracy will win every time regardless.



  • I think that is the most controversial take I have read in my entire life.

    What good has Microsoft done for Mojang/Minecraft? They kneecapped development by splitting the codebase and tying most features to their ability to run on mobile hardware, slowed development to an absolute crawl to increase long-term revenue (these motherfuckers openly develop three new features for minecon every year, then delete two of those for no reason other than “we can”), turned the console/mobile versions into garbage microtransaction boxes, started policing private speech in private servers hosted on private hardware, turned the mod-supporting version of the game into a second-class citizen, basically made for-profit private servers illegal, etc.

    Minecraft was a great game that stood on its own merit when Microsoft bought it. Everything they did only brought it down, and the few good features the game has gained since then were long overdue and done despite Microsoft’s meddling.


  • Villains are stereotypically older fat queer bald men (e.g. Vladimir Harkonnen). These are all factors people have little-to-no control over.

    Media will sometimes subvert those expectations, but most of the time the iconography matters more to the filmmaker than decency. It’s quite fucked up the insecurities these portrayals breed, no amount of positive affirmation will make up for the fact that some natural body types are fundamentally associated with villainy in the Western visual canon.


  • I’ve witnessed similar corporate screwups from the inside, I know the greed and political games and misaligned incentives that allow for such an obviously and catastrophically badly scoped project to be pushed dead-on-arrival in production, against the advice of literally anyone with a pair of eyes and literally any honesty.

    Intellectually, I understand. Yet my heart doesn’t, because it refuses to believe the sheer amount of collective stupidity and outright malice at every level of management, consistently for years on end, required to achieve these outcomes. How anyone can sleep at night with “Product Manager for New Outlook” on their resume is beyond me.





  • I mean, bad programming sucks regardless of the “paradigm” (and vice-versa, mostly). But as someone whose job it often is to sift through production logs hunting for an issue in someone else’s component, at least I have a chance with OOP, because its behavior is normally predictable at compile time. So with the source and the backtrace I can pretty reasonably map the code path, even if the spaghetti is 300 calls deep.

    Now where shit really hits the fan is OOP with dependency injection. Now I’m back to square 1 grepping through 15 libraries because my LSP has no idea where the member comes from. Ugh.


  • Anyone who praises FP is either a student, works primarily in academia, or otherwise never had to look at a deep stack trace in their life.

    Every time a production system spits out a backtrace that’s just 15 event loop calls into a random callback, I lose 6 months life expectancy. Then I go look at the source, and the “go to definition” of my LSP never works because WHY WOULD IT, IT’S ALL FUNCTIONAL hapi.register CALLS

    I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it. I support UBI because the people pushing functional programming in real production systems should be reassigned to gardening duties.



  • You don’t need a data plan to call emergency services. Any protocol-compatible device can dial 911/112/etc. for free.

    This is why in remote areas your phone may say “Emergency Calls Only”. Your carrier isn’t available, but someone else’s is and they are legally obligated to route emergency calls.

    Of course if your car has a modem and a computer, adding a data plan isn’t a huge leap. But it’s a recurring expense and plenty of cars sold today do not have internet connectivity, at least on the cheaper side.



  • One thing I’ve learned as a non-French francophone: whatever you think is going on with the relations between Paris and overseas France, it’s about 100x more complicated than you think.

    Generally these populations want (and in the case of Nouvelle Calédonie I believe have regularly and recently reaffirmed via referendum) to remain part of France. However, the socio-political situation of each of these overseas territories is unique, complex, and often tense and dividing even for the locals.

    For complete strangers to pass a harsh judgement such as “imperialist pigs” based on this article alone would be an ironic form of imperialism/paternalism. If the democratically-elected local government asks for national help, then I would very (!) cautiously agree that it makes sense that they would receive this help.


  • It makes sense… until you learn about the 13th/14th month of the year. Having to multiply the monthly salary by 13.x (depending on the collective agreement of course) to get the taxable income makes imperial measurements sound logical.

    Give me yearly or give me hourly, but monthly makes no sense under the current system.