161–170 of 216 posts
The library itself was built with a lower-level part that covered every single feature, and a higher-level part that covered the most common use-cases, including enough to build a nice demo app with it.
That is, when I'd find an issue that needed fixing or monitoring, the dev's on different teams would argue about the contract. "Well it's their fault because they change the webservice, so they should have tests." Etc. The hot potato would be passed and nothing would get done by any team.
I was like, screw that, I just want it to work. So as much as I could, I'd set up monitoring tools and tests to make sure our stuff worked, rather than waiting for it to break and doing a long song and dance about how it "isn't our responsibility."
Users loved my work and I became known as the go-to person if you actually needed a problem solved, rather than argued over.
Mmmh... I rewrote big chunks of Firefox's Session Restore to ensure that people stopped losing their data in case of crashes. Pretty big impact on both Firefox and, hopefully, the life of a few hundred million users. I rewrote the Firefox Shutdown so that it actually worked. I also introduced structured async programming, async testing, async exception reporting in our codebase. And yes, I do enjoy bragging :)
I lost Firefox sessions so many times last year! As I have a few thousand tabs over several windows, some being placeholders for things I regard as important, that sort of thing is really bothersome. Every so often, after a system restart due to running out of battery on my laptop, I'd start Firefox and get the dreaded "only one window, home tab". I was able to recover by going through backups, but it was a fiddly an…
I'd sugges you need to find an alternative workflow... even one thousand tabs has far passed the point of diminished returns
Calling on quiet (but attentive) members of my team to speak up in meetings where we need to make a decision. There will be a pause in the conversation and (as if its my meeting) I'll say something like generic "Jim what do you think?" No matter what he says I acknowledge it and thank him. A few things happen. 1. It removes the internal conflict Jim was having if he should speak up or not. 2. It gives him 'the floor'…
24:00
Three things: voting down a move to microservices, identifying a fundamental flaw in a core data-structure that is the high-level impetus for future refactorings, and encouraging people to be discontent with multi-minute long build-test-debug (BTD) loop. Unfortunately, I find very long BTD loops to be personally offensive though, to the point it makes me emotional, which harms my ability to make my case. Despite know…
Encountering these in my very first programming job made me learn make(1).
The thing is, I'm not very bright and my work "style" involves a fair share of trial and error. Obviously, all this waiting prevented me from doing my thing, so I eventually rewrote the whole build system just so I can do more trial-and-error.
I've always considered my dependency on a fast BTD loop a weakness, though. I guess the majority of developers can just imagine what the code does in their head and only make the changes when they know what they're doing.
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I lost Firefox sessions so many times last year! As I have a few thousand tabs over several windows, some being placeholders for things I regard as important, that sort of thing is really bothersome. Every so often, after a system restart due to running out of battery on my laptop, I'd start Firefox and get the dreaded "only one window, home tab". I was able to recover by going through backups, but it was a fiddly an…
Good lord, what possible workflow leads you to having that many open tabs without bookmarking them or using some other plugin that allows you better tab management? Seems like a recipe for disaster, especially since you said you end up having to dig through backups to restore state.
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Indeed, doing successful rogue projects enhances your job security. Unsuccessful ones, though, watch out!
Yes, that's why these cost me a few weekends... if it's done in my Free Time(TM) they don't have to know about the unsuccessful ones.
Just carve out an hour every day from your salaried time to chip away at these projects. Nobody will ever know unless you tell them.
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Good lord, what possible workflow leads you to having that many open tabs without bookmarking them or using some other plugin that allows you better tab management? Seems like a recipe for disaster, especially since you said you end up having to dig through backups to restore state.
Some people use tabs as a sort of bookmarking/selective history thing. Firefox makes this especially easy with tree-style tabs. I'm still undecided whether it's good or bad.