I dunno. You mean like a slap instead of a punch?

The most efficient use of my time as both an engineer and a people leader

My last company had the most efficient standup meetings possible. We always did them by phone since 4/5 of the team was in India, so I was able to shower at home during them and then catch the bus in to work.

I would actually like to work at a place like that. I’ve worked with a very wide variety of languages and platforms and I don’t much care which one I use now. I’m much more interested in what the project is than in what tools are being used to produce it.

Just kidding - nobody has interesting projects any more.

I like the ones where the tech stack is literally every language/framework in use by anybody anywhere. Maybe you guys should try picking the stuff that’s best suited for whatever it is you’re doing.

My bus is 35’ long so it fits in (most) parks AFAIK. It’s fine for BLM of course, but I don’t really want to live that isolated.

I used to dream of living on a sailboat. Then a friend of mine who owned one took me out for a ride and I was so seasick I had to jump into the water and be towed back to the dock. So much for that shit.

It’s probably a bit easier to live in a boat, since it’s common (and I guess legal) for marinas to allow people to live in their boats while docked there. I own a skoolie (used school bus converted into a motorhome) and it is nearly fucking impossible to find anywhere that I could legally live in it - especially anywhere near big cities. Ironically, I’ve even tried contacting marinas to see if I could live there in my skoolie and they’re all like “hell no you fucking hippie”. I wonder if I could buy a barge, park the bus on it, and then live in a marina.

I have the same experience driving around the Philly suburbs (mostly west and southwest of the city proper). Like, what the fuck do all these people do that they can afford these places?

My mom grew up in the '40s and '50s and she told me many times about the surplus PT boat her dad had bought at the end of WWII which the family would take out for boating trips. I was like holy shit a PT (Patrol Torpedo) boat! These things had three Packard engines and could make 45 knots. Later on as an adult I discovered that it was actually just a pontoon boat, one of the things the army would use to make temporary bridges over rivers and that could only go about 3 mph. My mom had just thought “PT” stood for “Pon Toon” so that’s what she called it. It turns out she had always wondered what the hell John F. Kennedy had been doing in the Pacific fighting the Japanese in a pontoon boat.

Later on, I then learned that my mom’s uncle had actually bought a surplus Air/Sea Rescue boat after the war. This boat was basically a PT boat, just with two of the Packard engines instead of three; since it was 15 feet longer than a PT boat it could also do 45 knots. So it turns out my mom did have this childhood experience of rocketing around the ocean at unbelievable speeds. Her uncle ended up selling the boat after the engine room caught fire for the third time (something these engines were notorious for) and we have no idea what happened to it after that. These boats cost about $190K new and he had somehow acquired it for $10K - I expect there was some shady dealing going on there.

The best part of Blackadder was the Christmas special, where the lead character starts off as a great guy and then the ghosts visit him and convince him to become a right bastard, culminating in a hilarious scene where he kicks Tiny Tim’s crutch out from under him. Just amazing that nobody else ever thought to do a reverse take on the Christmas Carol cliche like that.

This reminds me of how much “fun” it was to write Blackberry apps back in the day. Whenever you compiled your app, not only did the entire app need to be signed by the RIM servers, each individual module of library code you incorporated into your app had to be signed, so the more shit you added the longer the process took (and signing a single app sometimes took 30-40 minutes or never happened at all because the signing servers were down). I remember once I needed to use the sin() trigonometry function, which forced me to incorporate one of the cryptography library modules, which in turn doubled the amount of time it would take to compile and sign my app - so I ended up writing my own custom sin() function for no good reason at all.

There was a whole website back then called isthesigningserverdown.com (long gone now) devoted to telling you whether the RIM servers were working or not. The only good part about this was that if I ever felt like blowing off work, I would just tell my bosses that the signing server was down and go home.

The body language just says “we’re all here to blow Elon”, except for Trump who is allowed to nap after a hard day of golfing.

Well, I was WFH at the time and they didn’t give me anything to do so it was effectively that anyway. And really they had given me almost no work to do for the four months prior to that - which of course is why I was not even the least bit surprised by the layoff. My severance was to the penny exactly what I would have gotten from unemployment, so it effectively meant I got unemployment benefits without having to pretend to look for work. Also, they randomly sent me a check for $6K that I have no idea what for (not PTO or sick time compensation) and I used it to buy a school bus. So overall I can’t really hate them too much. Years later I found out my mother had thought I was working for Sysco (the food supply conglomerate) instead of Cisco.

I worked briefly for Cisco because they acquired my company (a much smaller competitor) to help eliminate competition. The only good thing I can say about them is they gave me (and everybody else from this smaller company) two months’ notice of the layoff and didn’t have us escorted out of the building or anything.

“… so we can be sure to avoid ever actually implementing them.”

Damn, I wish I’d thought of that back then.

I used to be a mobile developer (mainly Windows CE, Android and iOS) but once in 2010 I got put onto a project producing a TV-guide-like app for Blackberry. I was absolutely blown away by how fucking awful the developer tools were. Even during the development phase, an app had to be fully signed before it could be deployed to a device and tested and the signing servers were almost always down or operating under a severe delay. Even worse was that the framework code was divided up into umpteen billion different modules, each of which had to be separately signed, so the more modules you made use of the longer your app took to be signed (I often found myself writing custom functions that should logically have been handled by the framework, just to avoid the inclusion of one more module). Some days, even a one-line change to your code took 30 to 40 minutes to get onto your device - or else it was impossible because the signing servers were completely down. They did have emulators but they were worse than the physical devices and everything still had to be signed anyway. I just got in the habit of making hours of changes and then deploying while I went to lunch and testing everything afterwards; definitely not a programming best practice but the only way to make it work.

The built-in UI tools were horrible and there wasn’t anything that could be used for a TV guide, so I ended up having to do literally everything with Graphics primitives - although that was actually the fun part of the project. The most annoying thing was the 16-bit graphics, which probably made a bit of sense in 2003 but certainly not in 2010. And of course Blackberry was crashing and dying at that point anyway, so my work was pretty much useless.

The scroll wheel was awesome, though. It allowed for a super-precise UI controlling aspect that just isn’t possible with touchscreens.

“Down” was awesome.

Third panel: “No Donald, you’re supposed to call me that.”

then proceeds to recklessly dismantle huge parts of the US government

Just give him a few more weeks.