Nerd, professional solver of imaginary problems

  • 2 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I joined a team years ago where everyone would catch exceptions then throw a different exception in the catch, swallowing the original. Sometimes these were nested many layers. Troubleshooting was a nightmare.

    I spent a week deleting all of them and told everybody that “try” was now a forbidden word outside of entry points.




  • I’m amazed at how many professionals use Macs because Apple seems to hate power users. I had to use a Mac briefly recently and was amazed to find they still don’t have window snapping.

    It also had no idea what to do with my monitor, couldn’t even detect the correct resolution. I’m guessing if I had bought a $3000 Apple monitor it would have worked immediately. But had to dive into “advanced settings” just to set the correct resolution.


  • If they wanted to make browsers less secure, they would do so in much more obvious ways.

    The new proposal demands browsers automatically trust government created root certificates. That means any EU government can do a man-in-the-middle attack on any end user running that web browser, even users in other countries. There is no reason to do that other than to spy on people or to manipulate the content that they’re viewing.

    If any government, or company for that matter, wants to make their own root cert and deploy it to all their users/machines they can already do that easily. A lot of companies that work with sensitive data already do this, and some companies (ex: symantec) provide solutions to do it very easily, so the IT team can see everything the users are doing.














    1. Teams should be self sufficient. Team A shouldn’t depend on Team B. Coordinating across teams takes up so much time.
    2. Teams should be flexible and change organically. If you suddenly need the expertise of another person, they should be able to join your team without filing a bunch of paperwork. If you’re no longer needed on your team but another team could use you, same deal.
    3. Product doesn’t get to solution. I know, everybody should get to have an idea and voice it. But devs have to actually build and deal with the thing. Product can make requirements but don’t get to say “you have to use bigquery” or something.

    Edit: I almost forgot the two statements that I put in every team working agreement.

    1. You’re number one objective is to not burn out. Limit your number of hours. Schedule a week of vacation for every two months at least. Work a 4 day week if you can. Work the hours that make sense to you. You can have some core hours where everybody should overlap on most days, but the goal is to deliver something not sit at a desk from 9-5.
    2. You are allowed and encouraged to make mistakes. This is how we learn. You will only get in trouble if we, as a team, keep making the same mistakes.