Posts

So I’ve been spending a lot of time in the midst of a situation that leaves me feeling very angry. Today I got more angry than usual and since that is becoming a more common occurrence I thought it might behoove me to delve into why. I’m going to start off explaining why I am angry. The core issue is that I am expected to accomplish a task that is by all rights impossible to accomplish. My roadblock isn’t a technological one but rather a cultural and organizational one. I want to change the world in which I live for the better. My mandate is to provide the tools that will enable us to do exactly that. But with each passing day it becomes clear that the tools aren’t enough. Tooling can’t combat apathy. ...

So in an effort to diversify my hobbies a bit I’ve recently decided to spend some time getting to know Chess a bit better. While I have casually played Chess all of my life, the reality is that outside of knowing how the pieces move and the conditions under which a game is completed, I didn’t know much else. While this might come as a shock since I was part of the Chess Club throughout high school, the harsh reality is that there were no clubs oriented towards my primary interest (any and all things computer related). Thankfully I was not the only person who joined Chess Club as a last resort. In that most of us had something in common. ...

This week we are taking a break from our regularly scheduled tech related posts/rants to delve into a subject that is near and dear to my heart: Absinthe. Anybody who knows me, knows I like to indulge myself with a snort of liquor now and again. Though I tend to stick mostly to whiskey (all kinds, no whiskey is beneath me), I do enjoy other things as well. Chief among that group is a little thing known as absinthe. ...

Anybody who has ever bothered to read my resume has probably thought to themselves: “This guy sure likes to switch jobs.” Well I can’t fault them for making that observation as it is at least half true. While I do switch jobs fairly often, the painful truth is that I don’t like doing it. Interviewing as a developer is an intensely painful process rife with reciting answers obtained via rote memorization and concocting inventive answers to cute but ultimately pointless logic problems. Despite those misgivings, I still change it up every few years. Full disclosure: I’m thinking about what my next position will be as I write this. Ping me if you want to chat about that. ...

One of the most disturbing trends I have seen over the last few years is the interchangeability of the terms Agile and Scrum. Most people believe that Scrum is a form of Agile. A lot of employers will advertise that they use Agile when in fact they actually use Scrum. If this doesn’t infuriate you, it likely means that you have no idea what Agile actually is, so keep reading. ...

Yesterday at work I was finishing off an extremely productive week. After spending the previous week on a spike, everything was really starting to come together for the feature I’m building. It was a good day. But then during a team demo somebody made a comment that turned things a bit sour for me. Later on I ranted about this during sprint planning. While the ultimate end result wasn’t a big deal, I mulled it over in an attempt to determine why any of this ticked me off to begin with. ...

So I’m going to start off this post by being extremely blunt: I don’t like Windows. In fact when it comes to Operating Systems (aka OSes), I consider virtually any other OS a superior choice. The only exception is situations in which some piece of critically required and irreplacable software mandates that you must use Windows. Despite these feelings and the fact that my house contains only two Windows machines, only one of which belongs to me (the other belongs to my current employer), I spent quite a few hours mucking about in Windows this past weekend. ...

I’ve been doing a lot thinking regarding the overall state of my trade. Of course that should be obvious to anybody who follows my posts. Much of it has been a deep dive into what can only be described as a creeping depression regarding the state of the trade from my viewpoint. Much of it is birthed by the sum of my experiences over the last two decades. Some might even go so far as to speculate that this constitutes the beginning of a mid-life crisis. There is likely some truth to that. I’m close enough to 40 that my perception of what constitutes old age has already begun to radically shift. So much so, that I often wonder if I’m mentally equipped enough to continue doing this sort of work for the next twenty to thirty years. This is not something I would have actively found myself thinking about ten years or even five years ago. ...

So here is something that has been on my mind as of late: The plague of shitty software. My goodness, there really is a lot of it floating around nowadays. That’s not what I’m really concerned about though. What concerns me is that our ability to accept shitty software leads us to create even more shitty software. I am not talking about end users here. I am talking about software developers. Most software developers spend a huge portion of their lives suffering through shitty software just like non-developers do. Now in some cases, we suffer through different kinds of shitty software that is specific to our profession but in a lot of other cases we suffer through the same pieces of shitty software that you do. A couple of examples that come to mind are: Windows 10, Microsoft Office, Visual Studio (not Code) SQL Server, Eclipse and PHP. Those are just a few examples. Most of my examples are products produced by Microsoft. That’s mostly a reflection of the fact that I’m still stuck using a lot of proprietary Microsoft software as part of my day job despite the fact I stringently refuse to use it outside of work. While I’m going to pick on Microsoft for the majority of this post I want to be very clear: Microsoft isn’t the only company producing shitty software and feeding this beast. They just happen to be producing the vast majority of the tools that happen to drive me insane on a daily basis. ...

This week I wanted to chat about a syndrome that I have experienced a few times over the years as both an amateur and a professional developer. What syndrome am I referring to? One of my favorites: The syndrome of “Code Mode”. What is “Code Mode”? The term refers to the scenario in which you planned on accomplishing X number of things in a given coding session and end up accomplishing X^2 instead largely due to bursts of sustained inspiration and abnormally long periods of consistent lucidity. Why do I call it “Code Mode”? My father, who is also a professional developer, called it this for years. So for me this term has become synonymous with this state of mind. I should start off by saying that this is generally considered to be a good thing. For me this syndrome tends to manifest in response to particularly frustrating coding sessions in which I either did not meet all of the goals I had going into it or I literally had to fight tooth and nail for every win. ...