nikhil.io

sixty-five things tagged “tech hell

“I Fucking Hate Jira” is a collection of people sharing their feelings about one of the worst pieces of software I continue to use every day.

Jira is middle-management-ware, a term I made up for software that serves the needs of middle management, or, at least, the needs middle management thinks it has, which comes to the same thing as long as you’re selling to them. (link) Jira is a tire fire. It should be condemned and officially des…

The Universal Estimation Table

Estimate Actual Time Very Easy 1 Hour Easy 2 Hours Quite Easy 4 Hours Looks Quite Easy 6 Hours Average 8 Hours Looks Average 12 Hours No Clue 16 Hours Seems Complex 24 Hours Complex 30 Hours Very Complex 40 Hours Can Take Some Time 48 Hours Fuck 60 Hours Yeah Looks Pre…

AppleTalk

“For all that we’ve been able to achieve while many of us have been separated, the truth is that there has been something essential missing from this past year: each other,” [Tim Cook] said. “Video conference calling has narrowed the distance between us, to be sure, but there are things it simply…

250 Bullshit Words

by Unknown

Here’s some Buzzword Bingo based on these words by the same company. accelerate accountability action items actionable aggregator agile algorithm alignment analytics at the end of the day B2B/B2C bandwidth below the fold best of breed best practices beta big data bleeding edge blueprint boil the oc…

We are Facebook. When a fascist, Hindu Fundamentalist government tells us their fee-fees are hurt by a hashtag, we Move Fast and Break Democracy to the pleasure of our shithead plasticine overlord.

Because the only thing that matters is delivering Value to shareholders. (cached) Incidentally, and to the “huh” of many Value-illiterate people, defending totalitarian governments is exactly how one gives “people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”…

On a Program’s Scope

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “Law of Software Envelopment”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolki…

Tim Kendall testifies

to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Facebook’s engagement practices and likens them to time-tested strategies used by Big Tobacco before they were somewhat regulated. And he would know. Kendall was the former “Director of Monetization” at Facebook and is currently the CEO of Moment, a c…

Disposable Software

The software industry is currently going through the “disposable plastic” crisis the physical world went through in the mid-20th century (and is still paying down the debt for). You can run software from 1980 or 2005 on a modern desktop without too much hassle, but anything between there and 2-3 ye…

Always be leveraging

On tech culture’s obsession with quantifying and optimizing every single moment of one’s existence1: I hate this framing. It is pressuring, dehumanizing as it contextualizes human endeavor in transactional terms, usually in a market. I know this goes against the ethos of high-tech, but humans don’t…

On De-Duplication

I’ve usually heard this phenomenon called “incidental duplication”, and it’s something I find myself teaching junior engineers about quite often. There are a lot of situations where 3-5 lines of many methods follow basically the same pattern, and it can be aggravating to look at. “Don’t repeat you…

JavaScript Delenda Est

Back in the second century BC, Cato the Elder ended his speeches with the phrase ‘Carthago delenda est,’ which is to say, ‘Carthage must be destroyed.’ It didn’t matter what the ostensible topic of the speech was: above all, Carthage must be destroyed. My opinion towards JavaScript is much like Cat…

Gandhi the Annihilator

At least in Civilization: [. . .] Gandhi tends to be the first to use nuclear weapons, and spares no expense on wiping your civilization off the map. You probably always thought you were crazy — how could a series that prides itself on historical accuracy portray Gandhi so wrong? Well, you’ll be ha…

Alan Kay on OOP

OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I’m not aware of them. – Dr. Alan Kay on the Meaning of “Obje…

11th Hour Panic

Shturmovshchina was a common Soviet work practice of frantic and overtime work at the end of a planning period in order to fulfill the planned production target. The practice usually gave rise to products of poor quality at the end of a planning cycle. It has three very, very familiar stages Spi…

Node Modules

For a single project I made the mistake of working on in my Dropbox folder: Wonder what the downsides are to hardlinking by default. And, fundamentally, why creating an amazing, Python-like standard library is such an intractable problem in the first place. […]  core-js is also utils library, qui…

It’s what they do at Google

In addition, engineers have commoditized many technical solutions that used to be challenging in the past 15 years. Scaling used to be a tough challenge, not any more for many companies. In fact, part of my daily job is to prevent passionate engineers from reinventing wheels in the name of achievin…

Telling People Things

What’s going on is that without some kind of direct experience to use as a touchstone, people don’t have the context that gives them a place in their minds to put the things you are telling them. The things you say often don’t stick, and the few things that do stick are often distorted. Also, most…