rlamacraft @rlamacraft@qoto.org
Software engineer by trade. Programmer by hobby too (in addition to basketry and spoon carving). Personal website: https://rlamacraft.uk/. Gemini capsule: gemini://gemini.rlamacraft.uk
Joined Jan 2020
rlamacraft
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I keep hearing and reading that working remotely will ruin a junior developer's career because they'll miss a lot of important learning without those "water cooler moments" and I can't help feeling that any profession which relies on random social interactions to instill the foundations has bigger problems.
Also, when are we going to let go of the assumption that working remotely = working alone?
Today's XKCD is a doozy, although it takes a moment to click https://xkcd.com/2911/
rlamacraft
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As we do our silly Chicago tradition of dyeing the river a violent shade of green, I think it's a good time to remind people that our ancestors *reversed the flow of the river* to provide safe drinking water from Lake Michigan and earlier, in the 1860's, *lifted the entire city* to improve drainage and public health.
Remember that any time someone says heat pumps and renewable energy are hard.
rlamacraft
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The #RSS spec was released 25 years ago on this day. Happy birthday, RSS! 🎂 🎉 🎁
rlamacraft
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This should be a viral national story in #US. After this team unanimously unionized, Google refused to come to the bargaining table.
A resolution supporting the workers was brought to the city council. The day the workers showed up to testify on the resolution, Google laid off the entire team.
This was the precise instant when YouTube Music employees became aware that we had lost our jobs, as we were addressing the City Council.
> When taking out a new phone contract, she failed the credit check because 29 February didn't appear as a date on the system.
...
> "Quite often I have to put in 28 February, which rankles, because that's not my date of birth," she says of the problematic dropdown forms.
-- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68404617
Software is, as always, garbage.
rlamacraft
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On post-mortems:
It’s fine to say “who did what” to understand the context, but any system that catastrophically failed due to a human mistake, is a brittle system.
The blame sits with the system, not the human.
rlamacraft
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XKCD cartoon.
WE FIGURED OUT THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT CLOSER To THE START OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTiON THAN To TODAY.
rlamacraft
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"Engineers hate writing tests". I don't know who you're talking about, but they ain't software engineers.
How is introducing a smoke free generation not straight up age discrimination? The way that this isn’t even getting a robust debate makes me feel like a radical libertarian.
"The use of the Gregorian calendar as the wire format in this specification is an arbitrary choice resulting from the cultural biases of those involved in the decision." -- https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/common-microsyntaxes.html#dates-and-times
I’m yet to form an opinion on HTMX, but one thing it does make clear is how neglected HTML has been by the standards people compared to CSS and JS.
rlamacraft
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TIL Girl Scout cookies are manufactured by multi-billion dollar conglomerates, with American girls simply acting as middle-men. No wonder MLMs and franchisees are so common in the States when girls are taught that entrepreneurship is just reselling…
rlamacraft
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“Give someone a program, you frustrate them for a day. Teach them how to program, you frustrate them for a lifetime.” – David Leinweber, Mathematician and Berkeley Computer Science Professor
#computerscience #programming
rlamacraft
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@simon_brooke Not sure about that. If #Fujitsu represented to #PostOffice that its system was accurate (knowing that it was flawed) and it was aware that people were being prosecuted based on that representation (hard to believe they were not aware), then it seems like Fujitsu is also at least partly responsible for the prosecutions.
rlamacraft
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The lesson from the post office scandal that nobody seems to be talking about is that it's about time that the software industry faced proper regulations akin to other engineering disciplines. Software fails all the time and yet despite that people feel a sense of trust in a machine founded on logic. Software needs to be held to the standard that people expect from computers, or else more lives will be ruined.
Software engineer by trade. Programmer by hobby too (in addition to basketry and spoon carving). Personal website: https://rlamacraft.uk/. Gemini capsule: gemini://gemini.rlamacraft.uk
Joined Jan 2020
