25+ yr Java/JS dev
Linux novice - running Ubuntu (no windows/mac)

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 14th, 2024

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  • users are presented with a clear choice between two paths

    There is a third path. Just stop being a user. Maybe that choice isn’t clear enough. Push notifications are fucking evil. I removed the app and use FB as a PWA about once every six months. I might use it more if it had content from my friends or anyone I gave a fuck about, but instead it’s all promotions and suggestions.

    Without the little red number creating FOMO on my phone, I have no impulse to check it. Yet I check Lemmy several times a day. I check Bluesky every couple of days. Because every time I open them, someone I want to hear from is posting something I want to see. You should try that, Zuck.


  • Frankly that’s why I think it’s important for AI centrists to occupy these roles rather than those who are all in. I’m excited about AI and happy to apply it where it makes sense and also very aware of its limitations. And in the part of my role that is encouraging AI adoption, critical thinking is one of the things I try my hardest to communicate.

    My leadership is targeting 40-60% efficiency gains. I’m targeting 5-10% with an upward trajectory as we identify the kinds of tasks it is specifically good at within this environment. I expressed mild skepticism about that target to my direct manager during my interview (and he agreed) but also a willingness to do my best and a proven track record of using AI successfully.

    I would suggest someone like yourself is perhaps well-suited to that particular duty — though whether the hiring manager sees it that way is another issue.


  • Not sure I like that this headline / research seems to frame the issue as a PR problem. I don’t want to be filled with a bunch of AI slop to try to convince me that AI is not a threat to my job. I think overall I have a pretty balanced view of AI — though how many of us realize when we are unhinged — but I think it’ll eventually settle into a tool which increases efficiency, slightly reduces jobs in certain sectors just like the farm combine did, and not a lot will change overall.

    The thing negatively influencing my faith in democracy is so many of the people of the world voting for right-wing and autocratic parties. I feel like democracy has failed us in that respect. On the other hand I don’t know of a better solution. AI isn’t really involved there.

    I wonder if there isn’t a more fundamental connection between people who observe the direction of the world and those who see that corporations are falling over themselves to eliminate workers and are deeply worried that they just might succeed to the detriment of all.




  • The future looks to involve a mixture of AI and traditional development. There are things I do with AI that I could never touch the speed of with traditional development. But the vast majority of dev work is just traditional methods with maybe an AI rubber duck and then review before opening the PR to catch the dumb mistakes we all make sometimes. There is a massive difference between a one-off maintenance script or functional skeleton and enterprise code that has been fucked up for 15 years and the AI is never going to understand why you can’t just do the normal best practice thing.

    A good developer will be familiar enough with AI to know the difference, but it’ll be a tool they use a couple times a month (highly dependent on the job) in big ways and maybe daily in insignificant ways if they choose.

    Companies want a staff prepared for that state, not dragging their heels because they refuse to learn. I’ve been at this for thirty year’s and I’ve had to adapt to a number of changes I didn’t like. But like a lot of job skills we’ve had to develop over the years — such as devops — it’ll be something that you engage for specific purposes, not the whole job.

    Even when the AI bubble does burst, AI won’t go away entirely. OpenAI isn’t the only provider and local AI is continuing to close the gap in terms of capability and hardware. In that environment, it may become even more important to know when the tool is a good fit and when it isn’t.


  • There are cases of “architecture by happenstance” where a rewrite is your only path forward ultimately. Developer understanding of the specific business needs often evolves over time and poor choices were made in the beginning. You can rearchitect it in place over 5 years or you can do it in six months. It helps to have a leader with a strong vision and sense of where things went wrong the last time, though. If it’s just a bunch of “this app sucks. We need to rewrite it in .Net/NodeJS/etc.” then you’re doomed to fail in all the same ways.

    I took place in bailed on a Java -> .Net migration where they were literally copying and changing syntax. It could’ve been a singular opportunity to fix a bunch of things, but was instead a waste of money and probably 60 developer years. I wonder if they ever finished…




  • Agreed. I’m a technical lead at a startup. You know that guy in Office Space whose job it is to basically ferry messages between the engineers and the customer? I feel like that is my job. I attend meetings and pass along messages because they are in a different time zone.

    I:

    • try to convince other teams they’ve done something wrong and they need to fix it based on analysis already done by my team
    • preside over meetings where everyone summarizes and agrees upon root cause analysis that is already done by people on our teams
    • babysit the change management process
    • hound people for updates on things they are putting off
    • have meetings with my developers where they ask me for a decision, then correct me when I’m wrong
    • monitor the error queue and figure out what is wrong and fix it

    Some of it is because I’m relatively new, but mostly my job is filling in for my boss in meetings because he’s spread so thin so he can focus on strategic stuff. I feel like my job is just to have 30 years of experience so people take things seriously when I say them. There are people who will ignore a request if it comes from my team, but are super helpful when I ask. There is clearly value to me being here, but I had envisioned something different with mentoring and doling out technical wisdom like “this doesn’t adhere to SOLID principles” or “the best practice here is to do this.”

    The thing I’ve spent the most time doing developing a system where all the little shit I’m responsible for doesn’t fall through the cracks — mine or someone else’s.










  • I think there is a problem with overloading the term API gateway. That’s really an orchestration service that might often live behind the gateway itself. In fact in some architectures each of those service calls would go through their own API gateway, if they serve both clients and services.

    I agree with the idea and have used this architecture multiple times, but calling it an API gateway (which, to be fair, is exactly what I called it the first time I proposed it in design meetings) is going to confuse folks who are already working on cloud architecture.