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Companion writing: 109 management mistakes sinking your business. 
It Is The Absolute Verifiable Truth & Proven Fact
That Your Belly-Button Signature Ties
To Viviparous Mama.
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Yeah, that was the feeling I got throughout this article. But it was late in the day, and my brain had already checked out.
TTFN - Kent
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Kent Sharkey wrote: But it was late in the day, and my brain had already checked out.
So, congratulations for your promotion from developer to manager!
* CALL APOGEE, SAY AARDWOLF
* GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
* Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game.
* I'm a puny punmaker.
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"We have less of a clue than we lead you to believe"
I've mostly experienced the opposite. I bluntly tell management that I've never done what they want, but will try. They they say something like "yeah, but you're smart and will figure it out."
"We’re obsessed with the flavor of the month"
This drives me crazy. Off the top of my head, I can't count the number of project issues I've had to deal with due to a previous developer using "the hot thing." And don't get me started on Microsoft's damn obsession with COM.
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It isn’t meant to be a full production framework like Flash or Silverlight, but rather a test to see what’s possible. Because we will never learn
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Maxim 14. "Mad Science" means never stopping to ask "what's the worst thing that could happen?"
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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If you watch the presentation he links to it's not as horrific as you might imagine. It's quite slick, although at this stage, I can't see why you would want to do it. But I often think that about "new" stuff until someone describes a compelling scenario.
Kevin
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The tedious PowerPoint slide deck has become a well-worn cliché of numbing office life, the communication equivalent of a jammed copy machine, and the program has been blamed for everything from dumbing down university education to crippling the US military. Next slide, please?
I was shocked, SHOCKED to read that this study was funded by a competitor.
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Quote: When compared to Prezi, a cloud-based presentation startup that allows users to zoom in and out of a presentation, PowerPoint is...
Here's to zooming out of presentations - specifically, that one!
It Is The Absolute Verifiable Truth & Proven Fact
That Your Belly-Button Signature Ties
To Viviparous Mama.
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“They will be offended, believing you’re trying to put them into a box,” Barlow, a French-Canadian, tells Quartz. “And they just don’t think it’s interesting to work for a living. There are other things they’d much rather talk about.”
The French got something right? 
The ironic thing is, with the right audience, I love talking about tech, and as well some of the more colorful jobs I've had in tech, but there are definitely jobs, like the current one, that basically requires a temporary lobotomy every morning so I don't bore myself to death, given that for usually 7 out of 8 hours in the work day I'm the only one I'm talking to.
Marc
Latest Article - Create a Dockerized Python Fiddle Web App
Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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An entire generation of PCs, most only three or four years old, are now unable to receive new feature updates to Windows 10. If Microsoft doesn't deliver a patch within the next six to nine months, those PCs could be cut off from security fixes. Does this mean they'll stop asking them to upgrade?
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Quote: The compatibility check that's part of the Windows Setup program gave this system a clean bill of health, but after downloading more than 3GB of setup files for the Creators Update, the upgrade failed, with the error message shown above.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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The C programming language is terrible. I mean, magnificent, too. Don't forget to free up the memory it's using
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Which usually c#er's do if they miss it was IDisposable 
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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Nah, smart_ptr is good.
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Replace "C" with "Rust". Hmm. Rust isn't yet mature or stable enough, me thinks. Besides, with a name like "Rust"... gives a new meaning to code rot...
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Weird logic; instead of spending the time learning to write secure code, the suggestion is to learn a new language with a very iffy set of tools and which will probably die when all the cool kids move onto the next latest, greatest half-baked solution "which will solve ALL your problems."
ADDED: And after you port all of your stuff to Rust, or whatever lame language you come up with, have fun hiring people to maintain it for you.
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But the article does say to proceed incrementally, not just rewrite everything in Rust.
Joe Woodbury wrote: instead of spending the time learning to write secure code, the suggestion is to learn a new language
Every operating system and web browser, for example, has C-derived security vulnerabilities related to buffer overruns and use-after-free errors.
But I bet these errors are caused by a mixture of two things.
- Those who don't know what they're doing and thus don't know how to write secure C.
- Those who do know how to do it but just make mistakes, because humans make mistakes all the time.
Moving to a safer language that can still do the job means that errors of these types cannot be made or are more difficult to make. But other types of errors will be made, of course.
Why does almost every new programming language abstract away memory management issues of this sort? After all, we could all just take better care and stop making mistakes right?
Kevin
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One problem with the article is that it conflates C and C++.
Even that said, going with a new language is full of hazards, especially when that language isn't fully mature and lacks many tools and a strong user base. So, while mistakes of one kind won't be made, other mistakes will be.
Kevin McFarlane wrote: Why does almost every new programming language abstract away memory management issues of this sort?
Primarily because the inventors are obsessed with garbage collectors. Ironically, over my long career, I've rarely had issues with memory leaks in C and even more rarely in C++ (same with buffer overruns.) The bigger issue has been resource leaks (and poorly managed resources) and I've seen many more of those in .NET than in C++ code.
Plus, while buffer overruns can be a security vulnerability, the most dangerous and exploited vulnerabilities are independent of computer languages.
(The elephant in the corner is still--where are you going to get the experienced developers in these side languages? This is a major issue which is all to often ignored.)
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Joe Woodbury wrote: Even that said, going with a new language is full of hazards, especially when that language isn't fully mature and lacks many tools and a strong user base. So, while mistakes of one kind won't be made, other mistakes will be.
But if we never try anything new because it's new and immature we'll never progress will we?
Joe Woodbury wrote: Primarily because the inventors are obsessed with garbage collectors. Ironically, over my long career, I've rarely had issues with memory leaks in C and even more rarely in C++ (same with buffer overruns.) The bigger issue has been resource leaks (and poorly managed resources) and I've seen many more of those in .NET than in C++ code.
You may be an exceptional coder. But I assume that the likes of Microsoft and Google are filled with smart developers, yet their products are riddled with C security vulnerabilities. I do almost all .NET today. But I spent many years doing C++ and in my experience almost all projects I worked on (inherited) had non-trivial memory management issues.
Anyway, memory management as I see it is about separation of concerns. Let the machine solve the problem so that the developer can focus on the business domain logic.
GC is one technique, but then C++, especially "modern C++", uses smart pointers.
I agree nothing is a magic bullet. But because a bullet doesn't solve all problems is not a reason not to use one at all.
Kevin
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Kevin McFarlane wrote: But if we never try anything new because it's new and immature we'll never progress will we?
Don't assume a new language is progress.
Moreover, that's the argument I'm making! Why jump to something "new" because of the refusal to adopt new features of an existing technology, or to exercise discipline when dealing with old features.
Kevin McFarlane wrote: You may be an exceptional coder
Again, it isn't about being exceptional or even smart, but disciplined. At the very least, it's about not being lazy, which I've seen as one of the biggest sources of software bugs.
Kevin McFarlane wrote: Let the machine solve the problem so that the developer can focus on the business domain logic.
Which can be done with a garbage collector, up to a point, or with RAII. However, even with languages with a GC, it is incumbent on a developer to understand how that GC works. The view of the lazy that "memory isn't my concern" is ultimately what causes problems--if they are that cavalier about memory, odds are they are also cavalier about other things. Switching languages may mask this, but it doesn't solve it and, in my experience, generally causes far more problems than it's worth (especially with tools and hiring.)
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Joe Woodbury wrote: Don't assume a new language is progress.
Moreover, that's the argument I'm making! Why jump to something "new" because of the refusal to adopt new features of an existing technology, or to exercise discipline when dealing with old features.
I was trying to make a general argument really. I certainly don't assume something is better because it's new. But I do reject the attitude of dismissing something because it's new. Even if we consider something and then conclude this doesn't get us any further then fine.
But, even without changing language, as you say, people can refuse to adopt new features or even consider them. Sometimes the new features are mere syntactic conveniences, sometimes they really are better, as in making it easier to write better code or whatever.
Kevin
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Long live /dev/null!
It Is The Absolute Verifiable Truth & Proven Fact
That Your Belly-Button Signature Ties
To Viviparous Mama.
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