Developers are full of wit and wisdom. I’ll start sharing their quotable notables in this series.
javascript is a neverending hell of critical security flaws that are constantly being updated
Author: Robert Harris
It takes more than engineering skills to grow in an engineering career
Camille Fournier presents a brilliant list of soft skills for growing engineers. My favorite and the one I struggle with the most:
11. How to give up your baby, that project that you built into something great, so you can do something else
New DBAs be like
begin transaction
select * into dbo.TranSACTIOnAlLoGwilLNoTgrOWAlldbsAreINsImPLERECOveRy from dbo.ActivityLogs
while 1 = 1
begin
insert into dbo.TranSACTIOnAlLoGwilLNoTgrOWAlldbsAreINsImPLERECOveRy
select * from dbo.ActivityLogs
endTime to hit F5 and go to lunch…
Naming Stuff is Hard #0, Even if you’re Amazon
Per the Amazon Comprehend Developer Guide:
Multi-Class Mode
In multi-class classification, each document can have one and only one class assigned to it.
Multi == one. Got it.
Where are the empty calories in your coding diet?
Brandon Smith’s post Write code. Not too much. Mostly functions. is small in size but high in quality, with no artificial fillers, just like a good program should be.
Code, like food, has value…Just be aware of your project’s “appetite”: write what needs to be written, and then try not to over-indulge.
UI Fails #2, SSMS Dropdown Button
Using the “generate scripts” wizard in SSMS, I always have to stop and check my eyes on the last step.
Clicking a row in the dropdown performs the action you would expect the button to do. It’s bizarre the form doesn’t use checkboxes or option buttons for picking the output format, since both are already in use.
In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor inconsistency. But…this is from Microsoft, and a lot of developers just starting out will unconsciously emulate the look and feel of the tools they use most often. We need better examples than this to start out with.
UI Fails #1, trying to find a COVID test edition
The “shot”:
The chaser:
I hope they receive another bath soon…
Cloud Skeptic #0
Split your codebase, split your teams, create a lot of opportunities for mediocre coders to grow into mediocre engineering managers, everybody was happy. Including your hardware vendor, because suddenly you needed much more hardware to run the same workloads… The feedback cycle is truly broken – testing a microservice is merely testing a cog in a machine and no guarantee that the cog will fit the machine – but we just throw more bodies at the problem because Gartner tells us this is the future.
Cees de Groot goes Back to the 70s with Serverless.
UI Fails #0
I’m going to start chronicling UI fails that I find in the wild, and marvel/despair that people paid money for this.
And…
Best for last..
And the Rule 17 Lifetime Achievement Award goes to…COBOL
The sheer age of those COBOL systems is, oddly, actually something that works in their favor. Because they’re old, they have been relentlessly debugged. When a program is first written, it inevitably has problems…But those COBOL programs that run the world? They’ve had decades for coders and users to uncover all the problems, and to fix them…They’ve been debugged more than just about any code on the planet. This idea — that older code can not only be good, but in crucial ways superior to newer code — is at odds with a lot of Silicon Valley myth making.
Legacy == Proven.
Clive Thompson on the enduring fitness and necessity of COBOL https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazine/cobol-controls-your-money
The Lair of Leaky Abstractions 
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