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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • You don’t even have a reliable way to keep track of your disk usage anymore. That was the final drop for me when they removed “Other locations” where I could see how much space was left. The Disk Usage Analyzer app is a complete mess and don’t give an easy “you got 10 gigs left mate.” I had to resort to the terminal to get good accurate measures. Now I have a percentage in my taskbar in Plasma.


  • I worked in software ops where part of my day was handling incidents and bring anxiety to the room when I came running to a dev team with an incident caused by their recent release. A few times it was caused by someone accidentally running a test scenario in prod. At one point I got enough and said “add a bright orange ‘test’ banner on your UI for dev environments.” Apparently that was a foreign concept to absolutely everybody, and the more I look around the less I see people actually trying to make an effort to distinguish the two to prevent such catastrophic failures. Especially when you’re handling tens of gigawatts of energy on a daily basis.






  • For a project I liked I saw that the translation of the UI was only about 1% complete for my native language. I decided to dedicate the weekend to get it above 95%. This was apparently the part that seemed too hard for most to make a dent in, but across several new versions my language is still 100%. I think my groundwork made it easier for some sporadic contributors to get a small bit of dopamine when updating the few new strings in a release to see it hit 100% again.





  • Difference is that vibe coding doesn’t create 20% more CPU usage or 30% more RAM usage because it doesn’t understand the underlying mechanics (or, it could but that is not the important part). LLMs will happily provide you with solutions that consists of plain text password storage, leaking personal information through open APIs, and business crushing vulnerabilities. A sharp developer should be able to catch that, but if you’re reviewing 5000+ line PRs daily that’s been spat out by LLMs it’ll be impossible to catch all failures. And for someone who doesn’t know all those nonfunctional requirements that a business absolutely must have it’ll become a nightmare for the receiver of the code.

    So to be clear: For functional requirements LLMs are a bit better but still needs hand holding. For nonfunctional requirements they’re dog shit as that’s the part that more often than not has to explicitly be mentioned. And being able to identify nonfunctional requirements and when they’re not met is the difference between a junior dev and a 10+ year lead.

    Slow app? Just add resources. Vulnerable app? Actual compliance and business risk.




  • What OOP refers to is not “writing code” but “designing the code.” Everyone can write a book. Even I can. It will be a fucking shitty book, because I don’t know how to create suspense, give depth to characters, or any of that stuff. But it’s still a book. Writing code is easy. Writing good code is hard. If you want a program to fetch the current outside temp from an API you could throw together random lines of code that vaguely does what you want that you found on stackoverflow and iterate until it works. Will it catch edge cases? No. Will it output in a pretty format? No. Will it be maintainable? No. Will it be the next Facebook? Hard no. But you did write code.

    Writing code is easy. Writing good code is hard. And that is why we have door stoppers called “Clean Code” to help us on our way. You might notice that the “how to code” books aren’t much thicker than a a pamphlet. But if it ever as much as touches on the topic of good code it will make for a door stopper worthy of a nuclear bunker’s entrance.



  • Danish here: This isn’t exactly a foreign concept. All of my project exams in University had a written part (ranging from 50-150 pages), sometimes a technical part, and then an oral part where we defended the report. That’s one per semester.

    Defending an essay would likely not take more than 15min, 3-4 hours was enough to probe a group of 7 to figure out who should get what grade based on contribution (or lack thereof if they just rode the other’s coattails). 5min to present the essay with a short summary, 5min for questions to probe the student, and 5 minutes for buffer.

    I could even see this be used as a combined written/oral exam where you get a grade for both in a language class. If the essay is shit but your oral articulation in the foreign language is excellent then you could get top grade orally while failing on the written exam part. That means no actual loss of time.

    The hard part is that most grades in our version of high school (gymnasium) are based on the teacher’s observations of your abilities in class. It is only some classes that are randomly selected for a end-of-year exam to save time. This idea about defending an essay wouldn’t work in the rest of the classes.