The OFFICIAL programming thread

Gators1

SME = subject matter expert. You are the one with all the knowledge that the company needs to keep running in your area, but you normally don’t get compensated for the value you contribute. Fortunately I do more or less.

We had a reorg and the new management isn’t great. My new boss is a complete moron, not having the technical knowledge to do the job or even any management skills whatsoever. He basically delegated day to day management of the group to me and has no clue what we are doing. A couple weeks ago after hours right before we were both about to go on vacation, we had a teams conversation where he announced he was going to delegate this massive cloud migration/rebuild/refactor project to me while he “concentrates on the big picture and governance”. As you would expect I had a lot of filthy language to say about that, but didn’t respond on the chat. We have not discussed it but my answer is going to be no given that’s his fucking job and it’s too big an ask. So it might be coming to a head for me and at this point I really don’t care if they fire me. I would like to make to to November because they gave me a nice equity bonus that vests then. After that I will probably just quit on my own. If I had just STFU from the start and just asked him what he wanted me to do all the time, then he would be fired already and maybe I wouldn’t be in this position.

Kilemall

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

Oh you fucking dodged a bullet there Mr Expert. Never give them ideas or you will end up owning the rewrite because you know so much about it. That’s my own particular hell right now and probably will lead me to leve the company before the year is over.

You can never leave the IT SME ghetto.

You can if you learn to STFU, which I apparently can’t do.

I’ve had SME fuck me over with oh I don’t remember how to do that. I consider it shitbag behavior.

I just say I don’t want to cover X. I get consideration because many things I do pony up and save the company thousands.

Gators1

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

Oh you fucking dodged a bullet there Mr Expert. Never give them ideas or you will end up owning the rewrite because you know so much about it. That’s my own particular hell right now and probably will lead me to leve the company before the year is over.

You can never leave the IT SME ghetto.

You can if you learn to STFU, which I apparently can’t do.

I’ve had SME fuck me over with oh I don’t remember how to do that. I consider it shitbag behavior.

I just say I don’t want to cover X. I get consideration because many things I do pony up and save the company thousands.

Yeah, agree. Though I am kind of in a unique situation where my boss is incapable of doing his job and is relying on me to do everything and advise him on what he should be doing. He needs to be fired and am not sure why his boss hasn’t come to the same conclusion yet. It’s not just about withholding knowledge, it’s about me being asked to do his fucking job. Had I not engaged and effectively extended his tenure, we would have been done with him and moved on by now. I should have gone to his boss with this but I have no relationship with her to speak of and honestly don’t really like her. So I will have to find a new job and the company will be fucked because I walk out the door with all the knowledge they need to execute on this project.

tigger

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

Last year the client I’m working for had one of the big IT managed services firms build them an app. They spent I don’t know how much on it but it would have cost a lot. However, It never got through UAT because it ran like shit - like minutes to open and minutes again to do some small task in it.

This year, I’d been asked to look at what could be done to optimize it. Fortunately or unfortunately I’ve been way too busy and was told to focus on my other tasks. Anyway, it came to a head recently where they had to make a call to let the same programmers have another go at trying to get it to run, rewrite it from scratch using basically similar technology or write it in something else altogether. They decided to my great joy they were going to rewrite it altogether in another technology. The first reason for the joy is that, despite not having been given time to actually look at and optimize the existing app, I keep getting dragged into dozens of meetings about the fucking thing, the time cost of which just puts more pressure on me for my assigned work. The second reason is that if they’d got it working, I’d have to integrate its functionality into several other apps that I’m currently responsible for and, having briefly looked at the code, I knew it was a fucking mess. Plus, my existing deadlines are fixed and it would cost me more time I don’t have. Rewriting it from the ground up in some other tech would free me of the fucking thing forever.

Then today, while solving a completely different problem, I learned a technique that could potentially resolve the biggest cause of the above apps slowness. I wrote a message to my boss saying “I don’t want to open a can of worms, but I’ve learned this thing today…”. When I saw that it was sitting on unread a couple of hours later, temptation got the better of me and I deleted the message.

Faarrrrrk. I was off the hook. I don’t have time for this bloody app to keep sucking away time and energy while my I run smack into my own deadlines.

You’re working for the wrong company…

Why I use Vim in 2022

At work, I alternately have to use VS Code which does have vim key bindings and Eclipse which doesn’t. So I’ve been switching between the two for over a year and get reminded daily that I am, without exaggeration, 2x to 10x faster in VS Code. Not because of the editor, but because I can use vim mode in it.

Seriously, learn vim even if you don’t use end up using the vim editor. You need to commit to it and it will really suck for a week or two but it’s like the difference between “hunt and peck” and touch typing for the productivity boost it will give you. That’s assuming you already touch type that is; if not, you should learn that first anyway.

Gators1

notepad.exe doesn’t have any stupid keybinds to remember. Now that’s efficient!

Best program Microsoft ever developed

Lob12

I also use vim :

Lob12

Good soap.

Tough on dirt!

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

Fucking Gates! This was a vim killer!

Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows after 28 years

Microsoft announced today that it will deprecate WordPad with a future Windows update as it's no longer under active development, though the company did not specify the precise timing of this change.

I read that earlier and my first thought was “they hadn’t killed that already?” I don’t know why I haven’t even come across it in years.

Gators1

Yeah, I don’t think I have even opened it since windows 95

Kilemall

Wordpad is lethal for the invisible coding that sneaks in. Notepad all the way for plain text.

Urgh. I shouldn’t talk to people today. A dev that was brought in to assist me is breaking shit that was working weeks ago. Regressions happen but when I pointed out that four values entered in the Create form were no longer being persisted, I was told the user could correct them in the Change form (i.e., enter the data again). Wtf? The below was my calm response to that but I don’t know how long I can keep feigning sanity.

Developers React to Unity Price Changes

Unity really shit the bed.

Edit: article:

msn.com: Game developers are furious about Unity’s new installation-based fees

Gators1

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

Urgh. I shouldn’t talk to people today. A dev that was brought in to assist me is breaking shit that was working weeks ago. Regressions happen but when I pointed out that four values entered in the Create form were no longer being persisted, I was told the user could correct them in the Change form (i.e., enter the data again). Wtf? The below was my calm response to that but I don’t know how long I can keep feigning sanity.

Sounds like your client is my company.

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

Developers React to Unity Price Changes

Unity really shit the bed.

Edit: article:

msn.com: Game developers are furious about Unity’s new installation-based fees

It’s hard to overstate how much of misstep this is. It’s not just a “price change” as the above video stupidly calls it in the title, they’re effectively retroactively changing the license and charging a fee for something the game devs and publishers have no way of recovering. And that’s really just scratching the surface of it. Despite the bad title, the above vid explains the depths of it pretty well.

Or you can scroll through the Twitter handle @fuckedbyunity and you can see the universal condemnation for the move by game devs and publishers:

FuckedByUnity

I understand Unity were already on the verge of bankruptcy and they definitely won’t recover from this. It will take months for devs to switch game engines and that will only be for new releases so it won’t happen overnight but Unity well and truly fucked themselves with this breach of trust. They’ve made Hasbro/WotC look like beloved and benevolent stewards of their customer’s best interests by comparison.

Game maker’s toolkit is a pretty influential voice in the indie games scene (1.5 million YT subs). Loved this quote:

Basically: I’ve never been so embarrassed to use a piece of software and I have an Adobe CC license for god’s sake.

https://x.com/gamemakerstk/status/1702563835310211120?s=20

tigger

I assumed the Unity business must be going well… Apparently not. What was wrong with the decades old approach to try to make more money by starting a social network of your users?

I mean except that it never worked, but that isn’t the point, you can get promoted by making stuff even if it doesn’t work. What’s a better CV element for a director than saying “I’ve increased the user count of company X’s product by 1000x?” without specifying that it was from 1 (you) to 1000 (company employees and a few lost bots).

Blanks

Unity done pissed off everyone it seems. Most people I know are working in Unreal anyway, or some proprietary engine.