- Liability - What can you really fit in HW4? - No right answers in many situations. - But mostly liability. It's pretty good.

You're highly critical. What would you be doing differently? So far Tridge has elected to:

- generally decide to fix security issues over preserving compatibility - rewritten an aging test suite in what appears to be a highly responsible way - brought on additional qualified developers to help with the workload

Not bad for a guy who's retired.

You care enough to complain on HN. You could be a part of the solution.

What were you going to do differently, specifically?

Yeah, we definitely need to make sure that we take the considerations of the mob into account.

The person owning the project is using the master branch in the way he sees fit.

Incidentally, there is no amount of communicating "correctly" that quells a mob. There's a Venn diagram of concerns, and those with concerns not being met will generate (now infinite) outrage.

I recommend "How to measure anything in cybersecurity risk". Really interesting read about putting actual value on security.

I'm truly hopeful that AI will open a new of prototyping. Back in the day, prototyping was how you figured out what to build, you'd very deliberately toss the entire first (or second!) version, and you'd plan to do that.

High quality ensued. Usually ;)

Most places I've worked, devs were basically afraid to prototype

Either you would get chastised for wasting time with prototypes, or worse, your prototype would end up in production

I think the software industry really needs a cultural reset to embrace slower and deliberate development to build quality, but unfortunately AI has us racing recklessly in the wrong direction

I am so tired of it. Are there any companies out there that actually give devs time to build quality software anymore? I'm so burned out of the "move fast and break everything" grind

I understand both sides.

Quality must come from engineering. If you’re depending on a product manager to ask you that you can improve the quality of the code, you already lost.

So it requires soft skills, proper framing and ability to iterate quickly on quality-related tasks without leaving junk and multiple-versions behind.

But I completely understand push back for “doing improvements developers want to do”: A lot of developers confuse quality with familiarity or even complexity/verbosity. So business people have a reason to be reluctant.

And as an engineering manager I also had to push back several times. The thing that makes money is not the place to learn new skills, for example.

I think there's an argument that it could be cheaper and better for morale to let employees upskill while working on the thing that makes money.

It really depends on how mature the developer is.

If they have the soft-skills to do it, then by all means.

If not, they need to upskill their soft skills before tackling anything big.

Ask on sprint planning if time can be set aside to spike out a proof of concept, and then you go do that prototyping in the sprint.

Has this (for me, normal) process really been that arduous in your past jobs? It's a slam dunk to leadership, as we do this to corral time wasted.

All these companies want devs with top-engineering talent and coding skill, but then fire them because they aren't using LLMs enough.

Might be the opposite in some orgs. Higher ups in working with get visibly annoyed when you start talking about prototypes or trying something out in isolation, they don’t see why you wouldn’t just work with the real codebase and end the project with a PR.

Also seeing a lot of managerial class bypassing the PR system entirely and just committing to main “because it’s faster”.

Now it's possible to toss many more. :)

I think this is nonsense.

Prototyping already existed - how do you think the iPhone came into existence?

I think that subscribing to another person's life prevents you from living your own. Also, "Everything is Lies, I Guess".

For me it's been useful as an idea categorizer: "oh well, that turned out to be a crap idea."

It's allowed me to clear out some long-standing brush on the forest floor. And burn it down once or twice.

Quoting:

"Because the effort was removed, so was the commitment, and with the commitment the focus, and with the focus any meaningful product at all."

This is the truth. Otherwise known as "easy come, easy go".

This is an excellent pattern; do as much as you can in the database.

External Spanner provides changes streams. Internal spanner is different, mostly because of the extreme scaling requirements in some cases (and a healthy dose of "because it already works" mixed with "arbitrary change streams are scary").

Internal Spanner allows any transaction to write queue entries, where queues are (more or less) tables with some special time awareness. You can schedule delivery. Entries get pushed from queues to a handler which can also do writes to the DB within the dequeue transaction. And all of the same scaling is there.

Yes, you are reading too much into things. The ultrawealthy are supporting the current MAGA nonsense because they wish to permanently lock up the massive wealth transfer they've engineered over the past two decades, and the only way to do that is through a combination of nationalism, populism, and fascism.

Every part of the MAGA platform is a smokescreen of outrage, intended as cover for policies that favor the ultrawealthy.

An aware and motivated population legislates and taxes their way out of the establishment and perpetuation of dynasties; this has been done in the past.