I’m not dead! Sadly, neither is Rails…

My main website languishes, having no significant updates in over a decade. I repeatedly give up on my attempts at building even simple new games. And now even this crappy blog goes nearly two years without any updates. Why? Because I’m pretty much in an abyss of hellish real-life stressy balls of shit. A huge part of my lack of motivation (I think) is my day job. Continue reading “I’m not dead! Sadly, neither is Rails…”

Go’s success with the “gofmt” tool

I just ran across a discussion of gofmt, and I feel like the author definitely gets it, but there’s one piece to the puzzle he (or she? “Chris” is pretty ambiguous) neglected to mention. Laziness, pure and simple. He mentions that laziness wins when an opinionated person is trying to fight the convention in the context of the community, but what about those of us who don’t care about the community? Continue reading “Go’s success with the “gofmt” tool”

Ode to bad devs, part 3: It’s more than just writing code

There are so many things a good developer has to do that nobody really understands. Especially bad developers. I’d love to say, “you know who you are”, but most bad developers have somehow managed to skate through life with no fucking idea how bad they are. I’m not sure how this happens.

A good developer isn’t just sitting around churning out code to get the job at hand done quickly. In fact, if that’s all you do when you work on a project, you’re a shitty developer. And you know what else? You’re slower than me. All that time spent rushing around is slowing you down, dumbfuck. Yes, you will finish a discrete task faster, but you will never discover better tools. You’ll never think about what you can automate. You’ll never adapt your workflow. Leaving you wasting time you don’t even know you’re wasting.

You’ll stick to what you know and you’ll call it a job well-fucking-done. You’re a complete waste of my time because you ruin shit you don’t even understand you’re ruining because you refuse to even attempt to learn a better approach. Continue reading “Ode to bad devs, part 3: It’s more than just writing code”

Ode to bad devs, part 2: Docker

Continuing my discussion of stupid developers who are dumb, just a few more words about the problems with software “engineers” these days. There is a general trend among devs lately to just skim documentation, copy some Stack Overflow code, and call it a day. Hell, maybe this “trend” was always a problem and I just didn’t notice it. But it’s definitely a problem and the devs who do it are probably a good part of the reason outsourcing can be a very good idea.

If you are going to do a job, at least pretend to half-ass it. I see developers around me constantly learning the bare minimum of a given tool or process to get the job done so they can move on. Sometimes they do nothing more than refer to a “cheat sheet” so that they never have to understand anything at all. Oftentimes they have no understanding of the inner workings of whatever it is they’re using, which leads to a great deal of the Git hate I see out there.

Git is not today’s topic. Docker is. Continue reading “Ode to bad devs, part 2: Docker”

Ode to bad devs, part 1: Harmony Central

I’d like to discuss shitty developers. Because there’s a rule that’s being violated out there by more than half the devs I’ve ever worked with, and it goes like this: developers are lazy, so we try to find ways to make our work easier.

The problem is some devs are so god damned lazy, they just churn out shit and don’t bother to even notice they’re wasting a ton of time. Continue reading “Ode to bad devs, part 1: Harmony Central”

Kik is wrong, but so are nodejs devs

Did you hear the one about the dev who broke nodejs?

Once upon a time there was a nodejs developer. He built stuff for the community that many people used. Then a side project, “kik”, got owned by a dick-company called Kik who refused to not be dicks. Then the developer pulled down a bunch of packages that ended up breaking the world. And everybody lived happily ever after. Continue reading “Kik is wrong, but so are nodejs devs”

Why PHP will never give way to Go, Rust, Ruby, Python, etc….

PHP is an incredible language I fell in love with sometime around 2000. It simplified my Weblibs, which I had originally written as a bunch of Perl CGIs. I can’t recall the details, but I assure you that PHP was an amazing choice which improved the app tenfold. It definitely wasn’t due to my Perl skills being atrocious, or the benefit of hindsight when doing a code rewrite.

And then I was able to get fairly decent at PHP as I built more and more of my site on it. It’s truly an icon in Nerdbucket history! Continue reading “Why PHP will never give way to Go, Rust, Ruby, Python, etc….”