@kamen It sure does, unfortunately :(

@retoor Sometimes the "simplest" of tasks really does turn into "OMFG WHERE'S THE ALTAR I NEED TO SACRIFICE MY FIRSTBORN ON TO GET THIS F'ING THING TO WORK?!?!"

...and because we know it's "simple", it makes it not working that much more galling.

@cprn I think that's the right attitude. Do it for you first, and let whatever happens, happen. Every work is valuable, even if it doesn't lead to riches - but you can never be sure which might lead to riches either. So good luck, and most importantly, enjoy the experience!

@jestdotty Wow. Haha, just, wow. Have a nice day.

@jestdotty I think you may have misunderstood what I said.

I 100% support people writing books or games. Especially games I'm a strong proponent of. In fact, nearly every one of my books has a project that is a game because I view it as such a valuable exercise for any developer.

And if writing a book is something someone truly wants to do then I 100% encourage them to do so because it, too, is a valuable experience for the writer, and may well wind up being the same for readers.

What I was saying though is that if money is your PRIMARY motivation for doing either, which means you're going to judge your success on how much money you make from your efforts, then the odds are you're setting yourself up for a big failure because MOST books don't make much money and MOST games don't either.

So, if the non-monetary benefits are what you're interested in, then absolutely do it! I'm all for it! But if money is all you care about, then there are better ways to use your time.

My thought: if you're doing it for the money, DO NOT WRITE A BOOK!

I've had 13 tech books published (well, 13.5 - one of them was a second edition), and I assume that's the type of book you're talking about... to put it bluntly: even if I had written them all in a single year and got paid for them all at once, it wouldn't have been enough to pay my bills.

Unless you manage to write an absolute hit book - which almost never happens with tech books - money should NOT be a motivating factor (at least not a PRIMARY factor).

Actually, two thoughts...

I've also written over a dozen games over the years. Great, GREAT experiences all, I always highly recommend game programming to developers for many reasons, but I've made nowhere near enough to live off of from them. You of course can hit the lottery and have a real hit that makes you rich, but the odds are NOT good.

Books and games are fantastic things to do for many reasons, but money IS NOT one of them for MOST people.

@jestdotty Because many companies do proper background checks (often by third-party companies that specialize in such matters), and those will very often turn up court cases, unless they get sealed, which is probably unlikely in a case like that. Hell, in this day and age, all it REALLY takes it a decently-crafted Google search since most legal matters are public record.

If it's any consolation at all, keep in mind that your POS manager probably just made himself unemployable forever. Not many companies are going to hire someone who sued his previous employer. His only hope is a pre-hire screening doesn't turn it up. Granted, he has a decent cushion from the settlement, but that's not exactly "retire forever" money in this day and age unless you want to have a low standard of living.

So sure, he's in decent shape now, but he probably just set himself up for a big fall even if it takes several years to materialize.

Take solace in that at least!

Pointers in and of themselves are simple, true. I bet people generally don't have much trouble with them fundamentally and conceptually.

But you can do some truly wackadoodle shit with them, and that's where the problems begin.

For example:

int var = 789;

int *ptr = &var;

int **ptr_to_ptr = &ptr;

printf("Value of var = %d\n", **ptr_to_ptr);

...or...

int x = 10;

int *p = &x;

int **pp = &p;

int ***ppp = &pp;

printf("%d\n", ***ppp);

...or...

unsigned long val = 0x1122334455667788;

unsigned char *ptr = (unsigned char *)&val;

*(unsigned int *)ptr = 0xAAAABBBB;

printf("val = 0x%lx\n", val);

I agree those are kind of convoluted examples, but the point(er) is that you definitely can write C code using pointers that is a real bitch to follow, and stuff ALONG THESE LINES isn't really super-unusual in large codebases because somewhere, someone at some time thinks "oh, this is clever!" and drops a nightmare in someone else's lap years later.

Because the Google UI engineers are contract-bound to implement SOME change every six months, no matter what it is, or they lose their jobs.

I'd have answered "oh, so you're just asking about what I did last month?" ... and, yes, it would clearly be an exaggeration... but you know, there have been months I can think of where I'm not at all sure it wouldn't be true.

Yep, it's shit.

But it does depend a great deal on exactly how shitty your organization makes it.

I use GitLab at home for my personal projects and even though one or two of them are orders of magnitude more complex than what I do on the job, the CI/CD setup for it is actually pretty terse, simple, and straightforward. I have no real complaints about it.

Contrast that with the utter garbage we have at work, where there are templates on top of templates that inherit this and integrate that and I'm looking at literally thousands of lines of YAML just to build what is, ultimately, a pretty bog standard Java webapp, and get it deployed.

I can do what it does by hand with maybe half a dozen commands at most.

In other words: they've taken what can be a fairly nice and elegant thing and turned it into a corporate nightmare of staggering proportions that I HATE dealing with every time I have to.

So, to a large degree, it's about how much enshittification has set in.

@retoor Agreed. Like most things, it's not the perfect answer for every situation. But I DO think it could have been the right answer for a whole lot more situations had Sencha not screwed the pooch.

@retoor I'm not sure if you're being facetious or not, but I'll go on record and say that's my actual, unironic take.

I've built several massive projects with ExtJS over the last 15 years and it's interesting to me how none of them had any of the problems people always seem to enumerate about other frameworks/libraries/toolkits. It just gets the job done.

No, it's not the sexiest thing, not by a longshot. And shit developers can make an absolute mess with it, but that's true of almost anything. And it certainly has its own problems because what doesn't?

But I've been a fan for a long time based on a ton of experience with it.

It's just a shame that Sencha shoots themselves in the foot at every turn, starting with the exorbitant cost (paying for quality is one thing, having to fence blood diamonds to be able to afford it is another). They probably could have been the top of the heap for years if they had not been worried about maximizing profit over building mindshare.

@TheBeardedOne Agreed. I think it's better for experienced developers who can spot the mistakes. I've definitely encountered some. But the benefits seem to outweigh the costs, as long as you don't treat the answers as gospel and have the existing knowledge to do so.

The beauty of ChatGPT and its ilk is that you can ask as many "stupid" follow-up questions as you need to without fear, because everyone has holes in their knowledge.

You may be asking the most complex question imaginable because you're a rock star, but the solution it gives you might contain some language feature you've just never encountered, maybe some function call you've never seen before, and it's nice to be able to ask "hey, what the hell is that?" without risking being attacked for not knowing something "obvious".

Being able to go off on tangents without worrying about toxic people hammering you over the head for not knowing every last little detail about everything is fantastic for everyone of all skill levels and makes these things worth using regardless of any negatives they may have.

The only codebase where the option for linting for profanity has to be turned off.

@ScriptCoded It's the only thing we all have in common, really :)

Well, they didn't play the game right: you just make every ticket 100 story points... even if they're REALLY only 4... and then you do 3 per sprint. Bang, you're a "10x-er" and effectively unfireable!

Angular: for when the Brazen Bull doesn't seem QUITE diabolical enough and you wanna make sure someone REALLY suffers.

@electrineer Right, and I didn't say anyone was claiming it was illegal. This is clearly a "good citizen or not" situation, so to speak. But I'm not seeing why they're a bad citizen in this case. Isn't the whole point of open-source, one of them anyway, to "build on the shoulders of giants", in a sense? I think it is. But does that automatically mean you HAVE to contribute back? As I said earlier, unless we're going to give EVERY project out there that builds on the work of others a hard time for not open-sourcing their own work then I don't see why we'd make a stink about it this time.

However, I concede the security point is a good one. I think it's a separate issue, but a very valid one.

@Fast-Nop Yep, I get that, I just don't see it the same way. Again, as I said earlier: we don't scream and yell about every person that doesn't open-source something they built on top of other open-source, right? So then why is Vivaldi being assholes for doing that when no one else is?

@chaosesqueteam You really feel the need to start with "hey moron", and think it doesn't make YOU look like the moron right off the bat, huh? Man, some people.

So, did anyone actually read the blog post?

The part they aren't open-sourcing is the part they themselves wrote. No one is ever under any obligation to open-source something that isn't derived from an OSS source, which their UI layer isn't. And it's not hypocritical to not do so just because it's built on top of something that IS open-source in the same way that we don't bitch and moan about literally every company on Earth not open-sourcing what they built just because it runs on, say, Tomcat, which is itself open-source.

If they aren't pushing any changes they might make to Chromium back then yeah, that's a reason to complain because it's literally a license violation. But that's not the case.

And if their justification for not open-sourcing what they built is they don't want others to fork their work then that's no better or worse than literally any other reason anyone could give because... say it with me... NO ONE IS EVER OBLIGATED TO OPEN-SOURCE THEIR ORIGINAL WORK.

@Demolishun Oh sure, they existed since, what, Dartmouth BASIC I think, in the 60's maybe? But usage of them before maybe the early 90's was, generally speaking, the exception, not the rule... and FOR SURE they were nowhere near the level of aid and automation they are now, which is really the point that matters. Before maybe the mid-90's or so, roughly, they were little more than glorified text editors with a little bit of added knowledge of said text, and project organizers.

@netikras You'll get no argument from me. I remember when IDEs started to become a thing, I definitely had that "get outta here with that shit" mentality... but that was, I don't know, 20 years ago or so maybe? I was obviously wrong then, and my tune has changed completely. I'm definitely not one of those "just use a text editor" people... I know -I- don't just want to use a text editor... but by the same token, my point is that some people literally can barely do their jobs without an IDE and all the tooling we have today. We have all these tools for a reason - and they for sure are valuable and definitely should be used - but if you are DEPENDENT on them, that's where I have a problem, and I've seen that A LOT, unfortunately..

Seemingly most devs today: "Hey, I can't work today, my IDE is messed up, not doing what it's supposed to, and my workspace is corrupt!"

Older lead devs: "Well, how about you just drop to a command prompt, re-clone the repo, and work in Notepad or some other basic text editor for the day?"

Seemingly most devs today: "What?! You can't do that! How would you know what to type without intellisense and Copilot and all the things an IDE does for me?! That's impossible! You can't even do a simple refactor without an IDE!"

Older lead devs: "Oh my sweet summer child..."

Same thing we do every weekend, Pinky...

@lorentz I wouldn't be looking for anything too in-depth. As long as you can tell me it's a tree, that's probably all I need to hear in terms of strructure. That said, I expect any web developer to know basic things like getElementById()... I have literally asked candidates "let's say you have a div that you want to insert content into, and you know it's ID, how do you get a reference to it in JS using that ID?" and I get blank stares. I mean, there's GOTTA be a baseline of knowledge, and that for me is it (I'll even let it slide if they give me a jQuery-centric answer or something like that, which has happened a few times). Not sure if that answers your question?

@Oktokolo I know... but you'd be surprised how many devs I've seen get totally flummoxed by that situation.