New developers(5-6 years experience) these days are so pathetic. They dont have any sense of code review. All they want is to put their opinion out without giving any thought.

I had a PR for review today which contains mock specification to match a regular expression and return the corresponding response

The regular expression I put was

104000(02|06|20|48)

Now, this guy comes and puts a comment that we could "simplify" as 104000\d{2}

I replied, the ending digits are not contiguous. The specific pair of digits have to match for these mocks.

Then this guy replied, then we could simplify as 104(0{4}(2|6)l0{3}(20|48)).

I said, I cannot understand how that is simplification. Why do we need such a complex regex to match something very straight forward.

And the guy replied, we should be writing proper regexes, otherwise we could just specify everything explicitly.

I was like WTF man. You try deciphering this next week without taking at least a minute to know which values are matched.

Anyhow, another senior person approved my PR, and I merged it.

Google Gemini API for Rest is horrible. I dont know if anyone else feels this way. If you want to know how API References and related documentation SHOULD NEVER BE written that way, go check that out.

No wonder Google's GeminiAI adoption is so much lower.

I never noticed the official name for git on the manual page is "the stupid content tracker"

The best keyboard for Developers

https://theverge.com/2021/9/...

Question.

Yesterday, I watched movie Moneyball yet again.

One particular dialogue caught my attention and I am kind of unclear on this. Can somebody explain?

"You get on base, we win. You don't, we lose. And I hate losing, Chavy. I hate it. I hate losing more than I even wanna win. There is a difference"

What is the difference?

One more reason to hate Windows - Changing default browser will be made difficult in Windows 11. Thank you Microsoft

https://theverge.com/22630319/...

Can I say Ubuntu installation has really gone messy lately(at least the last time when I installed back in 2009). Especially the part of disk partition and selection. You get only three options - Install alongside Windows(without additional customisation), Install on the whole disk, and then Custom.

Most times these days people will select Custom and configure the partitions. And then the crucial part is selection of Boot Loader. But it's not given much focus which is empirical because otherwise even if your installation is successful, without the correct Bootloader config, you will continue to boot into Windows and then debugging and fixing gets really tricky. Especially for somebody who wants to try it out.

And then you will be cursing yourself to have bought a laptop with Nvidia graphics card because the drivers are proprietary and sometimes they have you stuck in Blank Screens prior to login. Ubuntu is not at fault here, but then it makes the life of people trying out things so much more difficult that will force people to just give it up.

I had moved to CentOS(because of Gnome) back in 2015 after really squeezing everything out of Ubuntu 9.04 on my Intel Core 2 Quad. And today, I installed Ubuntu 20.04 after almost 11+ years and it was really not a good experience.

Are there any benchmark tests for testing out laptop capabilities for development uses? Like building an Android project to figure out if one laptop is better than the other?

Like Ads on digital world werent enough, now there will be billboards in space too. 🤦‍♂️

(SpaceX Launching Satellite to Display Billboard Ads in Space)

https://futurism.com/spacex-billboa...

After 17 years since I got my first PC, I have finally decided its now time that I should have my own laptop. Any suggestions?

PS: I have been an Ubuntu user since 2007.
PS-2: I am from India.

How do you share some feedback about certain things to your peers?

A little context.

Within our team, me and another person are two senior folks and we are the ones who are answering all the queries to external teams, product, issues, incidents. Obviously we are seniors so we tend to lead by example and try to handle as much as we can. But this is giving the junior folks a nice getaway to not pitch in and scale and handle things as well. They are happy to sit back and when me or the other senior person is not available, their response to all the queries is that we dont know because we havent worked on it and then when we come back, we respond to those.

Also for the work, what usually should take 1-2 days, takes 3-5 days for these guys. 3-5 days of work gets delivered by them in 2-3 weeks. And the reason again, this is new, i didnt not get this and i have facing this issue. In all of this, our lead is quite laid back as well and doesnt inquire more about why things are constant getting delayed from their side.

The side effect of this has been that more critical and time sensitive things gets pushed to us senior folks even more and we are seriously getting bogged down by the amount of work.

We want to question and point out to these junior folks that they need to scale up, but we feel a little helpless since it might make them more hostile and retaliate. Why are we saying these when our lead is not saying anything. That will be their argument. Plus it will create an unpleasant working environment which we dont want either.

We think of talking to our lead, but again, I am not sure if that would be considered as bitching about them.

I was contacted by a recruiter for a job in company where I am already employed.

🤷‍♂️

I feel searching for documentation of things is getting difficult day by day. The actual documentation sites get very low page ranks and they end-up on 2nd or 3rd page of search results, while all the first page search results are links to articles filled Google Ads everywhere. If you search for say Apache Hive String Functions, you will get 10 different websites talking about Hive String functions, and the actual documentation site is on Page 2. For less popular tools, the page rank can be even lower.

On top of this, none of those 10 articles have and reference link to the actual documentation page in case you read the article and want to just quickly glance at the actual documentation which is the source of truth.

I wore some new clothes after a very long time, and the smell of the new clothes was surprisingly very nice. I somehow forgot what it was like.

Stackoverflow bought by Prosus for 1.8 Billion USD. I somehow, dont feel good about it.

Whats the first package that should be installed on a fresh Ubuntu installation?

I, after a very long time, had to use Windows.

My Ubuntu system died yesterday with faulty hard disk. Good for me that all my data is on cloud and I dont lose anything apart from the software installations. I have ordered a new hard disk and it will come in 3 days time.

In the meanwhile, I wanted to continue my work and I have my wife’s Windows 10 laptop. She doesnt use it often ever since she got a Tablet last year. It was a good chance for me to try out Windows after a while.

The laptop hadnt been used for a while now(probably Dec 2020) and when I started it, I got all sorts of notifications for updates - Windows update, Browser Updates, other Application updates. Coming from Ubuntu world which has a single notification for all software updates, this was just too many notifications. Plus, for some applications you dont get the update notification till you open them.

And by far the biggest frustrating part of this is the Windows update which takes like forever to first install update after all applications are closed, and then installing and configuring some more when the system boots up. And all you do while this happens is watch the screen with progress indicator moving 1% every minute. The system is not usable and even more so, I dont know what application or package is updated.

I started this activity today at 10AM and its 11:53am now, and I still havent been able to use the system to actually do the work. Its a half an hour work on a Google Doc and I have been waiting for it for about 2 hours now.

Its so amazing that Windows system is so screwed still. I dont know what will it take for Windows to have a consistent package and release management. Its so frustrating to update each application on its own.

Why do the HR folks cannot be more passionate about their work. Everywhere I have worked, they don’t pay a lot of attention to how their processes affect their employees.

I had a Visa appointment along with my wife today. The appointment was scheduled couple of weeks back. The email with appointment schedule had the list of documents that we needed to carry.

There was one document which HR folks needed to generate themselves and share to me. Its basically the certificate of employment. Now, I had a Certificate of Employment from last year and I thought that would suffice. But then the Visa lady told me that they needed a latest one(generated in last 3 months). It was very weird for the Visa process since I didnt have to carry that certificate couple of years back. But anyways.

My issue with the HR people is that if there was a need to generate this document from their side, they could have already generated it and shared with me. But no, they will wait for something like this to happen. They will only do this when I had asked about it and then they would have generated the certificate and shared with me.

Similar experience in my previous company, when I moved to Germany couple of years back and the company had arranged for accommodation for me. The building where I had my initial temporary stay, had two entrances and only one of them had the elevator, which was at the back side of the building. My apartment was located on the 5th floor. Since there was no mention of the elevator in the email that I received from the HR folks, I had to carry 6 bags up 5 floors after my 12 hours of flight. It took almost an hour to get all of them up.

All of this could have been easily avoided if the HR folks were a bit more empathetic towards the people they deal with and tried making their life a bit more easy. A little note of elevator, or generating certificates automatically feels the lives of employees so easy and it really avoids a lot of hassle, both for employee and the HR folks themselves.

Appraisals are pretty insightful times. I wanted to check how much work I do as compared to others in the team. So, I tried to pull up number of pull requests created by me and others in the team. And to my surprise, I create 4x(I created about 850 pull requests) more pull requests than the next contributor(200 pull requests). I knew in general I was doing more work and much faster, but this is just too much.

I know number of pull requests is not an indicator for the amount of work done by anybody, but I had this feeling as well that I was doing more than others. I often see other members of the team not putting that much effort, and rather have a relaxed approach to getting work done. They pick one ticket and take the whole week to complete it slowly. While I hustle to get as much done as possible.

As far as the appraisals go, I am kind of laid back in terms of contributing towards overall organization which is now getting more weighted for my appraisal. So, despite me doing quite a lot of work, I am getting the appraisal at par with others in the team.

So, its kind of feels a little bit uncomfortable.

I don't know why but the default settings in Ubuntu have changed quite a lot. There was once a glorious time when if your Ubuntu got stuck, you could press Ctl + Alt + F2-F6, login to a console, run top command to see which process was taking too much time and kill it, and you can go back and start the process and again.

I remember days(~15-20 days) between restarts of my laptop, because I could do that. But now, my Ubuntu gets stuck, and continues to get stuck for about 5-10 mins, and then just restarts.

I have run the disk checks to see if my hard disk is creating issues, but no issues there. Maybe, there are times when the processes execute some buggy code and cannot get out. One fine moment, one of the processes(probably a browser or Eclipse), starts using too much memory or cpu, and the whole worlds seems to be crashing down.

But, my control to kill it promptly without crashing my other applications, was so good to have. And now, every time this happens, I feel 2016-17 and earlier days were so much better.