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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I can certainly symphatise. I’ve been pushed to temporarily take management roles, either client-facing or reporting directly to a C-level. Been encouraged by the team to take on the roles permanently.

    What they don’t see is how mentally exhausting it is to actually shield the team from the BS on the other side, when you genuinely care about the people in your team. Yeah, I could use the money, but I don’t trust myself to not act on the homicidal thoughts that pop up once in a while during those times…




  • grep is your very best friend.

    This. And also, in many cases, an ‘adjacent’ grep may help. Say you want to move the “OK” button on one screen. Searching for the string “OK” would be overwhelming as that would be all over the shop.

    But you notice there’s a “Setup…” button next to it. Searching for that could potentially cut down your search results by orders of magnitude. The more obscure the text, the better.




  • …what the code does, not why it does it

    This is my issue with “it’s self documenting code!”. I’m a maintenance coder. I deal with people’s code long after they’re dead (or ragequit). Some are for control systems.

    if (waterPressure_psi > 500) raise PipeMayBurstException. Okay, we’re dealing with water pressure, in psi unit, and if it’s too high, it may break the piping. Self documenting!!

    Except that our pipes are rated for 1000psi. SO WHY THE 500?! Do we have one or two sites - out of hundreds - with lower rated pipes? I can double performance if we raise the threshold to 700, well within the safety tolerance, but AM I GONNA KILL SOMEONE when they upgrade to our latest controller??




  • The meme refers to the old adage “C lets you shoot yourself on the foot. C++ lets you shoot both feet and gives you a shotgun to do it” - referring to the how C allows you to perform memory-unsafe operations (causing corruption, or worse, security vulnerabilities), and C++'s complexity, potentially obscuring such unsafetyness.

    Rust’s memory safety tries to save you from doing (un)intentional bad stuff, by giving you compile-time errors. It’s also the bane of everyone so used to C/++'s ability to just pass around and modify whatever memory they want.