SoyViking [he/him]

I’m the guy on that airplane at the moment.

I get specs for an external API to use in a new major feature. I begin implementing, the specs doesn’t add up because nobody paid the eastern European gig programmers to document anything. Eventually I derive plausible specs from a frustrating process of emails and trial and error.

I implement the major feature to the specs provided by the client. The client tests in staging and requests several adjustments. I implement those, client tests again and accepts.

The feature is pushed to production. The client finds a ton of errors because of course the rudimentary specs I managed to wrestle out of the client and the big-shot corner-cutting third party API developer didn’t describe half of the ideosyncratic data structure they send. Stuff like sending completely empty posts and expecting empty rows to be inserted in the database, sending text comments in fields intended for storing numbers instead of in the dedicated comment field. That sort of bullshit. They want to pour garbage in an have garbage coming out.

So I had to do a ton of hotfixes directly to production. Everything have to be fixed yesterday because it is a business critical feature. It sucks. It’s a clusterfuck of cherry picking and it becomes impossible to do any sort of quality control.

A ton of errors got introduced because nobody explained to the Eastern Europeans what the API should do or gave them the time to do it properly. I am the lead engineer on the project and I have to rush to make emergency bug investigations all the time. Most of the things the bug is that the Eastern Europeans didn’t set up their system like they were asked to or that nobody told them how it should work and just assumed they would know. I wrote more emails than code. The client pays a ton of money for all of this and nothing gets done because they rushed into this feature without planning it properly.

Potatoes, rice, rye bread and dry pasta.

So what does the full stack dev look like?

Traditional family Christmas: Tonight we have my mother in law and her husband over for Christmas dinner and a ton of gifts for the kids. Tomorrow on Christmas day we will have the traditional “food hangover” and total relaxation day while the kids play with their presents. Yesterday we went for dinner and presents at my father in law’s house and the day before that we had my parents over for presents and sweets. On boxing day we go to a combined family lunch and my mother in law’s birthday which usually involves sizable amounts of smoked fish.

They still put the powerful magnet behind the license plate though so it will be pulled up right behind the car in front of them.

I remember how everyone in my country who have opinions for a living were clutching their pearls saying “war in Europe” as if it was orders of magnitude worse than war everywhere else.

George Washington. This thing should have been nipped in the bud.

I’m used to driving old shitboxes but a few years ago we rented a completely new car. It was almost driving itself, making sure I stayed in my lane, it had automatic beam selection, a big screen for playing music and navigation, tiny little plastic thingies that pops out when you open the door making it harder to dent adjacent cars. It was a fucking spaceship. I’m not going to lie, I would love to have all of those fancy features.

So breaking things up aggressively into small components you can reason about in isolation tends to be the best way to write reliable code you can maintain over time.

This is so true. Something that has really improved my coding has been having a linter that whines to me about assignment branch condition size. Compared with learning how to properly stub methods in tests it has helped me break tasks down into simple manageable chunks with little room for error.

All these newfangled high-faluting AI tools are ruining the software industry and making developers go soft. Back in my day we didn’t need no robot to get things done, we knew the value of hard work and wasn’t afraid to pull up our sleeves and copy/paste the code from Stack Overflow ourselves.

This has been my entire last week. Our client has a tight deadline for this feature I’m working on, in part due to their own indecisiveness and in part due to an external API developed by a big corporation being late and buggy. This means we’re doing testing and bug fixing simultaneously with doing new development and even with speccing and estimating new subtasks. And with this client, this close to the deadline, every little bug is critical and needs to be fixed right away. Meanwhile, a junior developer is being onboarded to the project and another developer is working on a different feature derived from an architecture I made. There’s always a fire I need to put out, a question I need to answer or a feature I need to describe. I’m writing more emails than code these days.

I normally go “what the fuck did I even do yesterday?” five minutes before daily standup and look at my git commits and calendar for the day before to piece together a plausible version of my workday (I do my timesheets the same way as well btw). Very little serious information gets passed on but somehow it makes my boss happy and he has told me that he likes the way I do standups.

I work at a small company where most projects only have one or two developers so standup meetings are usually a lot of completely irrelevant information. It’s very boring. “Yesterday I worked on the thing on the project you barely know what does.”

One would hope work would be significantly less miserable under socialism though

Never trust anything you read on the internet

Under capitalism workers have to put up with jobs that makes them miserable. Otherwise they will become unemployed and even more miserable.

This is the best, most efficient and most rational economic system ever.

Ruby gems

Memory leaks

Layers of abstraction

Master branch

Void function

We have sold the same glass of lemonade back and forth between eachother 8 million times so somehow we both have negative tax rates now!

The closest I can come is blackletter or fraktur scripts that were once used for generic languages. As far as letters go they are silly and overcomplicated, with Latin scripts being far easier to read and more adaptable to different visual styles.

With that being said, they do have their own old-timey charm and there is something satisfying in being able to pick up a old book in blackletter and read it when you know that most people can not.

Fun fact: Blackletter was only used for Germanic languages. If a text contained non-Germanic passages it was normal to set those in Latin letters while the rest was set in blackletter.

I love the idea of a modern runic script, suitable for contemporary Scandinavian languages. Would you care to elaborate on your thoughts on this?