jjjalljs

Software engineer.

Morning meeting that's supposed to just be "what you did yesterday, what you'll do today, and if you need help". People fuck that up and go off on tangents. What should be a ten minute meeting takes 30.

Product owners at some point told you what the features to work on this month will be. For example, we need to add the ability for some reasons to bulk delete appointments.

Chat with product and other engineers about what that entails. Product probably won't give complete, clear, requirements so you need to pull it out of them. (Hard delete or soft delete? Do you need an audit log? Are you sure with no take-backs you don't need an undo? Do you want to notify anyone when it's deleted? One email per request or per event? Do you have designs for that email? No? Of course not. And what do you want the UI to look like? If I "just put a button somewhere" we both know you won't like it. Give me details or that blank check in writing.)

At some point sit down and make code changes to do the thing. Change the backend server code to accept your new request. Write automated tests. Change the frontend to make the request. Write more tests. Manually bang on it. Probably realize some requirements were missed (you guys know there's a permissions system, right? I hooked this up to the existing can-delete permission. What do you mean CS doesn't use permissions? You made them all superusers??)

Manually bang on it a little. Deploy it to dev or some non-production environment. Have product and other stakeholders look at it and sign off. Probably get feedback and either implement it, or convince them to do it "later" (or: never, because they'll forget and it's not actually important).

Get code approval from other engineers. Make changes as needed.

Merge and deploy. Verify in production.

Meanwhile, do code reviews for other people's work. Context switch. Feels bad. Other guy is working on a progress report tool that's in a whole other part of the code, so every time you look at it it's a shifting of brain gears.

Also look at dependabot for libraries that need updating. Read release notes. Make changes if needed. Test. Pray.

Also periodic meetings to go over work in the backlog. A meeting to discuss how the team is doing that usually doesn't produce results, but can be a vent session.

I imagine from the product owner it's something like:

Get a mess of contradictory ideas from leadership. Try to figure out what they actually want and in what order. Manage their emotions because they have all the power and don't like being told no or otherwise feeling bad.

Talk to customers and other users. Try to figure out what they want. They say things like "make it go faster" or "can you make the map bigger?". There's no map on the website.

Talk to engineering. They ask so many questions. Why can't they just do the thing? They're always going on about stuff that doesn't seem important (like security and permissions and maintainability). This needs to go out Friday because the CEO wants it out.

Write tickets (a short document describing work to be done). People don't read them. Or maybe don't finish writing them, and leave a vague "as a user I want to be notified about changes to my project", without specifying any details. (Notified how, Ryan??)

I don't know what else they do.

Startups are a mess. Anyone who says they want to run the government like a startup should be banished from the land.

Also Uber just sucks. It's a private for profit solution (that lost money for years) to transit, which should be a public problem to work on.

Conservatives are like toddlers. Emotion driven to the point of having no mapping to reality, truth, and causality.

This is my favorite new to me song of the month: https://pearlcharlesmusic.bandcamp.com/track/does-this-song-sound-familiar-12-version

tagged as rock, desert rock, folk rock, garage pop, psych folk, psychedelic pop

But if you so much as joke about how maybe we should shoot a couple republican leaders well that's inappropriate violence is BAD, but only when it's visceral and fast. Slow deaths are cool, I guess.

Owning or renting a home has the same requirements of dependency on multiple companies

Are you suggesting people go without homes? And that's analogous to going without a car?

Maybe you're really radical and want free public housing like people want free public transit, but that's far outside the overton window.

DeSantis is a sack of shit and I hope he gets flushed down a toilet.

happy to pay some money for mobility in exchange for all that.

Most of the costs are probably externalized and not paid for by you

Also good neighbors vs bad neighbors isn't intrinsic to city vs country. You could easily have a neighbor out there that shoots guns unsafely , or feeds bears, or whatever. I had a whole DND crew here in the city that we could walk to each other's places.

But this is kind of getting off the topic of cars aren't the freedom people say they are.

Does New York City and its transit systems not exist in your world?

I realized this very quickly when I moved to the city. No longer had to worry about parking, gas, insurance, how to get home when i'm tired or drunk. It's pretty great.

Poe's law is dead and I can't tell if this is a joke.

No one I know wants to go into the office just-because, but they also don't want to starve. When the choice is yield or die, it's not much of a choice.

I really dislike that the incompetent dolts who can't adapt to the internet are dragging everyone else down. I don't want to be in an uncomfortable office, losing hours a day to a commute, so someone can walk up to me and say "Hey" instead of using slack.