A software developer's experience life cycle:

0 - 5 years: attempt to replicate what your current senior is preaching, assuming that's the right way. Reading "Clean code" and preach it as gospel, even though you don't practice any of it.

6-12 years: gained the belief that you are better off coming up with solutions yourself, usually "sophisticated" and "elegant" which to everyone else (and also yourself a few years later) is an over-complicated inheritance ridden shit show. You have realised the "Clean code" movement is actually a cult but still believe code reuse is the holy grail.

13+ years: finally realized that simplicity and pragmatism is the most sensible way for most software development. Code is now readable, maintainable and functional. You took the few good bits from "Clean code" and ignored the extremism. These are the golden years.

The problem is most developers jump ship and stop developing before reaching the golden years, thus resulting in most software projects looking like shit.

Unpopular opinion, but it doesn't make it untrue.

Always amazes me how as soon as someone is given the "tech lead" hat, they tend to argue for an alternative implementation for the sake of having last say instead of listening to those with more domain knowledge.

🤷‍♂️

Copilot - not convinced. My experience after a few months is that the suggested code disturbs my line of thought, and for complex code I'd rather it just fucked off and stopped "helping".

It will dumb down developers, mark my words.

Wow.. back from a two week holiday and feeling absolutely no drive to start work, no motivation to attack anything.

That's the effect of being surrounded by a couple of toxic colleagues for the past 9 months.

OKR

What a god damn waste of time. 🤡

Just got told by our designer that I was wrong about the "mobile first" approach when designing web applications. She insisted that creating unique pages for each platform was the best way.

I must have missed that memo.

Why the fuck do some developers insist on over-engineering even the smallest of tasks? I'm not paying their salary, but they eat into the budget giving the rest of us less time to finish bigger and more important tasks!

I just had a new employee, barely out of school, question whether or not we are ready to start a big refactor of an aging legacy system. She knows nothing about the system we are about to attack, barely has 12 months experience as a developer and knows nothing about the past 6 years of countless meetings, discussions and experience leading to the decision to refactor. Still, she's not "convinced" we are ready to get started.

Gen Z - they sure are something different. God damn it, I know it sounds old but where's the fucking humbleness? Spoilt little shits, the world is fucked.

Everyone's on annual leave. Except me.

Productivity is up 500%.

Weird.

".. after all, I'm the one with the longest experience here" is NOT a valid argument to win a technical discussion.

With an attitude like that, please piss off in the opposite direction. I hope we never cross paths again, you arrogant prick.

On today's episode of Fucked Up Office Drama-Rama: useless project manager finally gets her desired outcome after 6 months of whining to her boss about a team member being "difficult to work with". She has only been with us for a year and is the only one that has had any "issues" with him, and the problem has simply been that he has called her out when her lack of planning, lack of effort, lack of common sense and lack of technical understanding has caused the team extra work and pressure. His contract gets terminated, she stays on, and on top of it all she's managed to hire a replacement without consulting anyone and therefore has the complete wrong skills compared to what we need. We needed someone with frontend skills, she decided on a senior backend / architect arrogant fuck that after only a few weeks is already showing us it's not going to be fun.

Fuck my life. Time to look for a new client.

Well played, Bard.

How the fuck does that retard Zuckerberg manage to spend this much money on his metaverse and hardly have anything to show for? What are the developers actually working on? I mean, if you had that many people working that long on something you'd expect at least a product that looked all right, even if no one wanted to use it?!

I bet you could put a team of 20 top shelf developers, designers, QA and project managers together and give them 2 years to build almost anything we see today. A facebook clone, a Twitter clone, some sort of virtual reality look-at-my-perfect-but-empty-life-click-to-like piece of social shit-verse.. What the hell are they spending their time on?!!

Most useless premium laptop feature: touch screen.

For my new Lenovo I saved hundreds of dollars because I opted for the second best screen option. Lower resolution WQXGA (2560 x 1600) 165Hz, beacuse the 4K touch enabled fancy schmancy screen of my current Dell XPS 15 has barely been used. I keep Outlook open on it FFS, and I can probably count on one hand the number of times I have used the touch feature 😖

Is it just me?

Fuck this, I'd rather be kitesurfing. 😖

Get a bachelors degree or higher from a decent uni or college. It's gives you a solid foundation teaching you stuff that you wouldn't otherwise spend time on because frankly it's shit boring. Like compiler technology and low-level programming languages. I believe this broader understanding which eventually allows you to become a better developer and architect.

Yes, the first year at a real job will teach you a ton more relevant stuff than 3 years at uni. But that's just not what it's about. Ignorant people just think it is.

Don't buy the "We're bleeding edge, agile and embrace devops.". Those who proclaim that the loudest are the ones that think they do, but don't.

Oh, and any place that refers to employees as "tech ninjas" or "superstars" or anything cringy like that. Stay away.

This was more how to avoid shitty places. So to find a good place to work, use this statement in your search:

if (!<this_rant>)
{
... // maybe you're lucky
}

>1 year of living and working with a sluggish, overheating and possibly throttling XPS 15.

Finally setting aside 20 minutes to pop the panel off, ripping the fans out and blow out the choking cakes of dust.

It's like new again now. FFS, when will I learn not to postpone things eternally.

Kitesurfing

Monkey Island 3 (the true 3rd in the series) will be released in 3 hours.

Old schoolers like me are unusually excited.

https://mixnmojo.com/countdown/

Don't just blindly do what's asked to be done by superiors. Be critical, suggest alternatives and take ownership of and participate in processes beyond your own scope.

Best decision: becoming self-employed.

Worst decision: not doing it 5 years earlier.

.NET

!rant

Just completed Monkey Island 1 and 2 again, 30+ years after I last played them.

1. What an awesome blast from the past
2. I am getting old.......
3. Can't wait for Monkey Island 3 (the real third)

If refactoring scares you, fuck off out my team.

If you keep code in the codebase simply because it took you ages to write it, fuck off out of my team.

Some people must be wishing pain and suffering upon themselves and their colleagues.

// todo: refactor this!

Advice from me to my future self.

I am looking at replacing my Dell XPS 15 from 2019, but because I work 100% remote I am considering building a desktop developer rig instead of getting a new laptop. I have only had laptops since early 2000s, but thought it would be fun building something from scratch again. The problem is I have fallen tragically behind on everything hardware, and therefore looking for some pointers.

I don't want an RGB rainbow unit with 6 loud fans requiring a noise cancelling headset to work on. I want a top spec, stealthy thing that has all the goodies but also runs quiet. A decent graphics card that can run the latest games at a decent frame rate, but not the top of the line either.

Any tips on cases, motherboards, RAM, drives, fans and grahpics cards appreciated. The budget is roomy, comparable to a top spec Dell XPS 15 or ThinkPad X1 Extreme.

Take the leap and become a self-employed contractor years earlier.

All right, I am not one to criticize people based on their looks but I will make an exception. Mark Zuckerberg er one weird and extremely untrustworthy looking human.

Maybe it's preconception, maybe not.

Read 1/5 of the requirements and then fire up VS and start coding.