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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • The worst is when people don’t know how the system works, and then won’t listen to answers

    Like I was at a job and product was going on about “our system has no concept of project owner. We have all these projects but there’s nothing unifying them under a single owner. We need to build this!”

    I was like “… what? That’s just not true. There’s a “company” object that does that. It’s got a foreign key with project in the database. I guess it’s a weird name but it’s there”

    It took several back and forths over multiple meetings. They eventually got on the same page and I saved us doing a whole useless project, but they did insist I rename it to “account” in the database and code. I would’ve rather left it because that could’ve been dicey, but alas. (The rename did go out fine, but I had to go looking for every reference.)





  • No system will long survive players acting in bad faith. There’s no system you can come up with that is immune to conservatives and capitalists fucking with it. It might take them years, but they will never stop. They are the worst people on earth. If you could thanos-snap away conservatives, the world would become a better place overnight. Every problem we’re facing is either their fault, or made worse by them.

    And we’re never going to get rid of conservatives. There are always going to be shitty humans who believe their in-group needs to be protected and the out-group needs to be bound. Shitty, scared, little shit bags that will blame brown people or queers or whatever, anything, so they can think down familiar paths and avoid any hard introspection.

    So I don’t know. You don’t stop building a home because the elements are always trying to tear it down. But you can’t punch the wind in the fucking throat so hard they cry and vomit at the same time, so maybe it’s not quite the same as a maga hat.




  • Much of this slots into time outside work rather than the workday itself.

    • walk a different route to a destination
    • pick an algorithm and walk with no destination (eg: straight until you hit a light not in your favor, then turn. Works in urban envs)
    • go somewhere you don’t normally go. Eg: library, different coffee shop, that little art store you always see
    • go to the library. Walk along the shelf with eyes closed and pick a book at random.
    • pick a genre of music you never listen to. Listen to it.
    • cook or prepare a meal unlike your normal fare
    • go to a thrift store. Buy a cheap article of clothing you wouldn’t normally wear. Wear it. See how it feels
    • find free or cheap art (music, theater, whatever) in your area. Go.
    • journal. Spend a few minutes writing down your day’s details
    • hit wikipedia’s random article button. Read it.







  • Python.

    • It’s pretty easy to get going.
    • the debugger is very good. Being able to put a breakpoint and interactively fuss with it is so much better than print statements and crying
    • you can (and should) use type annotations, but they are optional
    • it’s on most machines already, but you don’t want to fuck with the system install of it. On Linux and Mac you can use pyenv or similar if the system came with a version you can’t use. (Don’t teach anyone python 2.)
    • the standard library is very good.

    You could also do JavaScript, as that’ll work on any modern browser. However, JavaScript is a deeply cursed language. It’s really bad at like every level.

    I don’t recommend it unless your top priority is “it is definitely available everywhere” and “these are future web developers”.