Avatar

lysdexic

lysdexic@programming.dev
Joined
183 posts • 153 comments
Direct message

From the article:

“To spell it out why this conference generated fake women speakers,” Orosz alleges, it was “because the organizer wants big names and it probably seemed like an easy way to address their diversity concerns. Incredibly lazy.”

How hard is it for these organizers to actually reach out to women developers and extend an invite to talk about any topic they are interested in? In the very least, there are tons of high-profile bloggers who are vocal about things and stuff. Even though women are severely outnumbered, you almost need to go way out of your way to avoid actually extending an invite to a woman in the field.

permalink
report
reply

Java gets a bad reputation from proponents of FOMO/fad-driven development, but the whole Java ecosystem was built for the web. Anyone is hard-pressed to find a better tech stack than Java-based frameworks without resorting to hand waving and passing personal opinions as facts.

I love C# and the whole .NET Core ecosystem, but even I have to admit it’s very hard to argue against java.

permalink
report
reply

Eduards Sizovs, the DevTernity organizer accused of making up fake female speakers, felt it was the right PR move to post this message on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/eduardsi/status/1728447955122921745

So I’ve been called out (and canceled?) by listing a person on my conference’s website (who never actually made it to the final program). JUST A RANDOM PERSON ON THE CONFERENCE WEBSITE canceled all the good work I’ve been doing for 15+ years. All focus on that.

I said it was a mistake, a bug that turned out to be a feature. I even fixed that on my website! We’re cool? Nooooo, we want blood! Let’s cancel this SINNER!

The amount of hate and lynching I keep receiving is as if I would have scammed or killed someone. But I won’t defend myself because I don’t feel guilty. I did nothing terrible that I need to apologize for. The conference has always delivered on its promise. It’s an awesome, inclusive, event. And yes, I like Uncle Bob’s talks. They’re damn good.

When the mob comes for you, you’re alone. So, let it be. I’ll keep doing a great conference. With all speakers, half the speakers, or I’ll be speaking alone on all tracks and lose my voice. But the event will be a blast. Like always. I’ll die while doing great work. But the mob won’t kill me.

I don’t think that tone-deaf is the right word for this.

permalink
report
reply

Python is only good for short programs

Was Python designed with enterprise applications in mind?

It sounds like some developers have a Python hammer and they can only envision using that hammer to drive any kind of nail, no matter how poorly.

permalink
report
parent
reply

HTML is bad. The language itself feels unintuitive and is clunky compared to modern markdown languages, and let’s be honest, your webpage just consists of nested <div> tags.

My websites do not consist of nested divs. Your webpages might just consist of nested divs, but only if you are clueless about what you’re doing and are oblivious to basic stuff like accessibility support.

CSS is bad. Who knew styling can be so unintuitive and unmanageable? Maybe it made sense 25 years ago, but now it’s just terrible. It’s very clunkily integrated with HTML too in my opinion.

Being unmanageable is the output of the developer team, not the languages they use. Decoupling Presentation from the data and semantics never ceases to make sense. CSS has many issues but the way its integrated with HTML is certainly not one of them.

Frankly, you sound like you blame your tools a lot.</div>

permalink
report
parent
reply

Was this thing generated by a poorly trained LLM?

permalink
report
reply

The biggest news to me is that GitHub allows users to search code. Every single time I tried to search something in GitHub, search results were next to completely useless, and always a sure-fire waste of time and effort.

There’s hope, I guess.

permalink
report
reply

Here’s a way to convince a team to write unit tests:

  • setup a CICD pipeline,
  • add a unit test stage,
  • add code coverage calculation,
  • add a rule where unit tests fail if a code coverage metric drops.
  • if your project is modularized, add pipeline stages to build and test and track code coverage per module.

Now, don’t set the threshold to, say, 95 %. Keep it somewhat low. Also, be consistent but not a fundamentalist.

Also, make test coverage a part of your daily communication. Create refactoring tickets whose definition of done specifies code coverage gains. Always give a status report on the project’s code coverage, and publicly praise those who did work to increase code coverage.

permalink
report
reply

If GitHub changes terms of use to pay for basic stuff, or starts breaking compatibility or adding egregious bugs, I would start looking for alternatives.

A while ago I had all my personal projects on GitLab. I was a GitLab fanboy and advocated it everywhere to the point I convinced the project manager of a previous job to migrate the team’s projects to it and pay for GitLab ultimate. Without going into details, that goodwill ended the moment I stumbled upon a regression introduced by GitLab which affected my personal projects, and their customer support essentially said the issue was won’t fix but it was fixed in premium customers. I simply unblocked myself by moving all projects to GitHub, disabled GitLab CICD and shut down my GitLab runners, and onboarded onto a mix of GitHub Actions and CircleCI. I could still stick with GitLab, but why bother?

I would do the same to GitHub if I experienced anything remotely similar.

permalink
report
reply

Duplicate code can be a code smell, but it’s far better to have the same function definition or code block appear twice in the code than extracting a function that tightly couples two components that should not be coupled at all.

See Write Everything Twice (WET) principle.

permalink
report
reply