"Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork." - Sam Ewing

Today's bug fix; brought to you by uneducated guesswork.

“Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork.”
(Sam Ewing)

Software engineering gets more diverse every year with problems ranging from faking 3d shadows on 2d browsers to accurately mimicking chemical bonds on the electron level.

I guess we primarily will get advanced tools, to make more complex problems easier to tackle. Just compare manual punch card piercing pliers to the JetBrains tool chain.
Also I believe that the roles that developers embody will get even more diverse, people will have way more specific functions in their ecosystem.

While reviewing a PR from one of our newer FE devs, I ended up spending more time than I would like mulling over its composition. The work was acceptable for the most part; the code worked. The part that got me was the heavy usage of options objects.

When encountering the options object pattern (or anti-pattern, at times) in complex scenarios, I have to resist the urge to stop whatever I'm doing and convert it to the builder pattern/smack them in the head with a software design manual. As much as I would like to, code janitor is one of the least valuable activities I engage in daily, and consistently telling someone to go back to the drawing board for work that is functional, but not excellent is a great way to kill morale. Usually, I'll add a note on the PR, approve it, add a brown bag or two on that sort of thing, and make attendance mandatory for repeat slackers. Skills building and catharsis all rolled up in a tiny ball of investing in your people.

Builders make things so much cleaner; they inform users what actions are available in a context; they tend to be immutable, and when done well, provide an intuitive fluent interface for configuration that removes the guesswork. As a bonus, they're naturally compositional, so you can pass it around and accumulate data and only execute the heavy lifting bits when you need to. As a bonus, with typescript, the boilerplate is generally reduced as well, even without any code generation. And they're not just a dumping ground for whatever shit someone was too lazy to figure out how to integrate into the API neatly.

They're more work in js-land, sure; you can't annotate @builder like with Lombok, but they're generally not all that much work and friendlier to use.

Alright so I have to create an API that communicates with a web interface and three different back end systems. And I think my customer might have thought that I am actually Jesus because they didn't have any docs for their systems and their policy did not allow me to gain access to their internal testing environment (which. Drove. Me. NUTS) and expected me to create this API by pure guesswork basically. After teaching the customer's internal IT guy how to capture requests between the systems I managed to somehow got the prototype working. I am proud and sleepy. ... Mainly sleepy

When you find out you passed the exam in which you guessed half of the answers ! 🎆🎉🎊
The algorithms of my brain seem to work well 🤣
This is now my second best module and I didn't study a lot hahaha

A friend of mine asked me yesterday for help for his bachelor thesis.

He wants to write about MySQL internals in regards to BLOB storage / usage.

We had a veeeerrrry long discussion....

And found a loooot of scary internet pages.

It's so .... Insane....

What some people with doctor titles or higher education generate...

Isn't content. More poo...

Most "blogs" / "articles" or whatever the author named it were missing all kinds of relevant data (version, configuration, anything relevant) but full of opinionated / biased bullshit.

Highlights were:
- we store lot of BLOB data, Backups take long and require more space
(you store additional data in an database, whaddya expect???!!!!)

- interesting guesswork about locking without any reference (interesting since it was sometimes so far away from reality that it looked more like quantum physics)

- storing blobs means that _each_ blob entry will be stored in a separate file (without any reference, but if an RDBMs did that... It would end in an amazing fireball I guess)

- BLOB's bad since it can represent only the file content, the database cannot distinguish wether it's an MP3 / MPG or anything like that...

(Ehm. Yeah. And an database cannot distinguish if you store under "Name" an Name or gibberish?!)

I somehow think that some people made an doctor and post this gibberish nonsense so people stay dumb to give them a job...

Like the TV repair men who steals the batteries from the remote.

Even conspiracy theories were more convincing

90% of work as a developer is not development,
it's guesswork and communication, trying to make sense of requirements and third-party software documentation or filling in the blanks if both are missing.

After years of back-end development there's a thing which keeps bugging me: how little "interactive" the development process can be.
When I did front-end I took for granted that the application I was developing was easy to run so I could immediately test any little change I do on code but on back-end this is rare to see: you develop with tons of external dependencies (authentications, VPNs, databases...) so getting your application up and running can be an huge hassle and testing API controllers can be slow and frustrating since I have to continuously juggle multiple development environments, manually regenerate tokens, do guesswork to find which parameters you have to use for your API request, maintain my Postman/Insomnia HTTP calls collection to prevent it from turning into an unusable spaghetti mess... lots of repetitive tasks which kills my focus and makes me struggle in getting into a decent flow.

Automated testing has lot of potential in helping with that but its hard to introduce when you're rewriting a legacy sistem and you're already exceeded your budget.

I wonder if I'll keep doing back-end once I'm done with this project.

Hasn't technology become magic - and we ignorant sorcerer's apprentices who can perform a video call to the other side of the globe perhaps while we understand only some bytes of the thousands software snippets that were piled up by us code monkeys to perform the miracle? ...

This however has always been the state of software (for us developers): that this house of cards needs constant care by our hands to not collapse - in constant fear we may preserve the facades while the number of components that interact, the sheer mass of code only allow for guesswork and hotfixes accumulating the technical debt. Yes, we have all that terms for that. The problems are known since the 80s or 60s, so we might be relabeling it once in a while, but mainly it is just: complexity.. or entropy.

Portrait of Me, Writting Documentation -- a short french film:

The processes applied to any section of memory utilized for a given purpose should be strictly limited to those declared by the associated type that encapsulates the purpose in question until release or mutation.

That is to say, improperly encoding the intended usage of such a block by utilizing an identical type or alias thereof for a multitude of incompatible situations, giving place to guesswork to arise, constitutes the prostitution of an abstraction.

Such heinous acts of symbolical pimping have received strong condemnation from multiple digital rights organizations, as well as our own, prestigious office. Let it be made Crystal, Alizé and Hennessy clear, that we will not stand for this kind of degenerate practice, and that any heretical sects and cabals built around worship of the strange creatures that arise every eleventh night from the depths of the Black Mausoleum will be prosecuted with the full force of the law.

As a young, corageous man once said at the peak of his career: "it is only through the self-inflicted, hyperbolic discharge of smouldered, comminute perennial anadenanthera colubrina spermatic fluid that the cannonical transfiguration of our collective rectosigmoid junction can be brought to fruition". He was immediately violated with might and ire far beyond our wildest, most profligately depraved fantasies, yet his message lives on.

I leave you now to be ritually and figuratively blown by a posssessed mortician that is to become concubine to our dark master; the long journey to the old graveyard will be perilous, and my destination most assuredly fatal, as I depart to give my firstborn to our Lord Berzchjanzad -- a blood sacrifice meant to appease him from peeling off my skin and refashioning it into a bloodied scarf to be worn around his thumping, grandemonic cock.

And in this moment, as I stare blankly at this teleprompter, the president wishes to reassure you of his sacred vows of stalwart and promethean gayhood, and may __these__ nuts bounce on chins forevermore. Here's to *not* bleeding to death in retribution for this unending litany of sins...

Yet all predictions come to pass.

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