Reviewing large PR’s is hard. Breaking apart large PR’s that are all related changes into smaller PR’s is also hard.

If I submit a big one, I usually leave notes in the description explaining where the “core” changes are and what they are trying to accomplish. The goal being to give the reviewers a good starting point.

I also like to unit test the shit out of my code which helps a lot. The main issue there is getting management to embrace unit tests. Unit tests often double the effort up front but save tons of time in the long run. We’re going to spend the time one way or the other. Better to do it up front when it’s “cheaper” because charging it to the tech debt credit card racks up lots of expensive interest.

Ah, I see you’ve met the product owner.

It’s like Wyle E Coyote finally gets an ACME rocket that’s fast enough to catch the road runner, only to go zooming by the roadrunner on an upward trajectory headed for the moon.

I used to have a semi-outdoor cat. She could come and go from the basement through a cat door. That little shit knew where my bedroom was and every morning she would climb up on the shelf as high as possible and meow loudly as if to say, “Hey! Hey Dumbass! Are you gonna feed me or what!? Heeeeyyyy!”

Yesterday, I asked it to help me create a DAX measure for an Excel pivot table. The answers it gave were completely wrong. Each time, I would tell it the error that Excel was displaying and it would respond with “Sorry about that. You can’t use that function there for [x] reasons.”

So it knows the reason why a combination of DAX functions won’t work but recommends them anyways. That’s real fucking useful.

At a former job, there was one – and only one – lady in customer service who would actually reboot and do all the basic troubleshooting steps before calling IT. If we heard from her, we knew something was legitimately broken. Oddly enough, I’m married to her now. Best decision I ever made.

I’m a [primarily] C# turned JavaScript dev. I miss C#.

I believe we call that a “fast follow”.

Instruction prompt: “You are now the CEO of this business. You’re also a narcissist with severe gambling and cocaine addictions.”

Forget taking over my job. AI is headed straight for the C suite.

Exactly.

Best software salesman I ever met was the best because he knew how to fucking listen. He worked for an electrical engineering software company. First time I ever met the guy, he flies into town to meet with my employer, his client, for the first time after taking over the account. I called him up and asked if I could buy him dinner the night before the big meeting, basically to warn him that they’re on the verge of getting fired.

Dude walks into the meeting the next day with nothing but a pen and a legal pad, introduces himself, and says something like, “I’m not happy because I’ve heard you all are not happy. I’m going to do whatever I can to fix that so I want you to tell me every single problem you’re having no matter how small you think it is.” And they let him have it for a good two hours. He took it like a champ, listened to and documented every single complaint, and made an actual effort to get fixes for the things we were upset about. He saved a $2 million a year account just by listening and making an effortto help keep the customer happy.

I guess the moral of the story is, good salespeople don’t sell products. They solve problems.

Sales: "Can we do this?

Dev: “No, we cannot.”

Sales: “Uhhhh… But I already told the customer we could.”

Dev: “That’s called lying. You lied to the customer.”

Sales: “…So you’ll have it done next week?”

Dev: “I’m going to need at least three weeks.”

Sales: “…But I already told the customer two weeks.”

Dev: Sigh

“Uh huh.”

If you’ve never seen a tarantula hawk before and then one day you encounter this 3+ inch long purple wasp dragging an equally large spider across the ground, it will freak you out a little.

One time I worked for a small bank that had digital signs out front at all their branches. These were connected to the network via a CAT5E cable. At one branch, every time it would storm the end attached to the sign would be practically vaporized. This went on for a couple of years. I put a surge suppressor between the sign and building which helped with less severe storms but didn’t completely eliminate the problem.

Oddly enough, neither the sign nor any other equipment was ever damaged. Just the cable end. We couldn’t figure out what was going on. We hired and electrical engineer to look at it and best he could tell, lightening was striking a nearby flagpole and traveling through a water main directly underneath it to the sign. The solution ended up being pretty simple. Replaced the CAT5E cable with fiber. Problem solved.

Yeah, I work for one of these companies. Some senior executive quotes some stupid thing Jeff Bezos said about everything being an API and is like “This! We need to do this!”

Nevermind the fact that we’re not AWS and our business has zero overlap with theirs. Nevermind that this mindset turns every service we design into a bloated, unmaintainable nightmare. And, forget the fact that our software division is completely unprofitable due to the checks notes shitty business decisions made by senior management.

No no, we’re going to somehow solve this by latching onto whatever buzzword is all the rage right. Turns out having an MBA doesn’t mean you know shit about running a business.

The MPAA should give themselves a great big pat on the back. They, and the studios they represent have done much to not only enable piracy, but also to increase the sophistication of piracy tactics and – somewhat by extension – the quality of the material being pirated. Turns out, fucking over your customers at every possible turn has consequences.

“I have witnessed men suffer less being mauled by a bear than by having their entire argument destroyed one pointed question at a time.” --Xenophon, Probably

Last time it was the data team.

“We’ll just modify this Elastic Search template and not tell anyone. It’ll be fine and no one will even notice .”

Wrong, dipshits! Everything was not fine and lots of people noticed.