Programming as a career

I feel a new screename comin' on!

HI DERE!

Should probably post this in the macOS hoonja-doonja thread, but holy crap this was the best $3 I spent.
https://krillapps.com/patterns/

My point is really that product designers who can’t program struggle to iterate. They can make the design process feel glacial and cumbersome. If you can program, it’s possible to brute-force a solution and retain some creative momentum. I guess this is probably a better discussion for a different thread!

― Allen (etaeoe), Friday, November 4, 2022 12:09 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

ok i put it here

whats the nature of the block as far as iteration just not understanding how much work various changes will take / inability to design with flexibility baked in

the one good PM i've ever worked with came from 4th line tech support. PMs who start there career in non-technical roles are generally useless. MBA types are worse.

lol I had typed out a long comment responding to that in the other thread but gave up when it was moving too quickly

tl;dr version is that product ideas and direction can come from anywhere but you have to
1. Have someone running a project who can comprehend the nature of the work being done by people reporting to them, whether that's a management relationship or just a project coordinator
2. Have people who can successfully break that work down into digestible components, and explain to that management how they have value. Maybe that's an individual developer, maybe that's the person guiding a software development team

not all projects have easy first deliverable pieces and the terrible project managers are the ones who think a demo is going to "work" off the bat. and the really bad ones don't understand what completing something looks like and think that as soon as it appears to "work" you can just send it out the door

are we talking about project managers or product managers? i was talking about product.

I think product design (what is the thing being addressed, what are the working parts, how do people interact with this) is a different skill from product management or project management, for sure

one of the best project managers I had did work to learn all the jargon and how the pieces interacted but had absolutely no idea what half the things actually were. but they could run meetings very well, communicate with other groups to figure out if we were lined up with what other teams and stakeholders expected

yeah I kind of conflated the two, but I think in the twitter example (sleeping on floor lady) it sounded like those roles were also very conflated

They are often conflated. They shouldn’t be! I do think both are valuable, I just don’t think product designers who make web shit but can’t program are super useful.

I don’t know if we’re too easy on product designers (i.e., it’s fine you don’t know anything about technology) or too easy on engineers (i.e., it’s fine you don’t know anything about the product you’re writing). Maybe it’s both.

I've mentioned it before, but the one guy I knew in high school who was enamored with Google when it first appeared in the late 90s, then went to the nice school, did a non-programming course of study, and then went to work at Google was just heartbroken when he got there and found out that management wouldn't even consider product ideas if they didn't come from programmers

he quit that place and did ok later though

broke some tests that were asserting using the toString() output of an object containing other objects containing other objects containing other objects

I respect their confidence in their ability to maintain consistent string representations.

elsewhere we have tests that compare the md5sum of the (binary file) output with an expected md5sum. and if they don't match, then what? absolutely no way of debugging it. could be one bit out, could be complee garbage.

One bit out would be impressive, until your assassination by the NSA shortly after.

(i didn't mean we were generating clashes, more that the output could be a single bit different from the expected but the md5sum would be completely different and there'd be no way of knowing how close you are)

Oh yeah, sure!

I think it’s relatively affordable these days to generate MD5 collisions these days

Oh yeah good point!

these days!

The byline -- is he ours? https://github.blog/2023-03-23-we-updated-our-rsa-ssh-host-key/

wrong dude

spent the last week working into evenings, whilst ill, and through my last non-transferable holiday (meaning i lose it) to get something ready for monday.

today, friday, i find out that

a) i should be using the NEW new api and not just the new api.
b) i don't have the right permissions to use the NEW new api.
c) there's a bug in the version we currently have installed which means the NEW new api doesn't actually work. a working version was installed (on a different stack = config changes) this afternoon. not that i had permissions to use it until 17:15.

they've now moved the deadline back, to the other side of the Coronation, but only at lunchtime. has all been a waste of time.

filename or fileName?
pathname or pathName?

(i'll take the former every time)

also: https://history-computer.com/sql-vs-css-whats-the-difference-which-is-better/ (ai garbage or parody or what?)

generated garbage, yes

I was confused by the lack of obvious ads, but it's all amazon affiliate links on a number of the pages

b-but

About the Author
Liam Frady
Liam is a freelance writer with a passion for professional audio, cybersecurity, and information technology. Aside from writing, he can be found in his home studio moonlighting as a mixing and mastering engineer. Outside of work, Liam can be found spending time with his family, cooking up fun recipes he found online, or making music in his spare time.

Liam sounds cool

fun recipe requirements: velveeta and a butane torch finish

filename or fileName?

anything as long as it's not hungarian notation

path_name surely

if you can't choose between them go with path_Name

Path_Name

path-name

"path" and "name" are both types, and i too oppose hungarian notation, so i would recommend "x"

path-name

― butch wig (diamonddave85), Thursday, June 8, 2023 3:47 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Isn't this a FE/BE distinction? Javascript stans would go with camel cased, everyone else would go with snake case (personally I'd prefer pathname).

what is a "path name" anyway? it's just "path".

I frequently assign a path to 'dirname', which is very bad.

pathname is an entire path including the filename
as opposed to filename which is the filename part

path, to me, suggests the pathname without the filename

(don't get me started on aws s3 library that expects bucket and key)

this is java, so camelCase. does always raise questions when part of the name is something like API or URL or AWS or SQS or SNS though.

path-name

easier to type, harder to c+p

Surely that was a joek answer.

https://www.theserverside.com/definition/Kebab-case

Thanks.

Note that in python, options specified by kebab-case will be converted to snake_case in the actual code iirc.

(don't get me started on aws s3 library that expects bucket and key)

object storage does NOT have folders no matter how much they make it look like it!

due to interoperability with file systems, you might end up with a prefix in object storage which may look like a path but it's not!

path/name
path--name
path__name
path:name
path;name;
path…nauseum