41–50 of 174 posts
I wrote a Copy/Paste stack tool. Pressing ctrl+c adds the current selection onto the stack and ctrl+v pastes off of the stack. You can toggle between LIFO and FIFO. It's been very helpful for our client-facing folks who have to copy a lot of user data.
We implemented a customer support software, it was a game changer. It resolved most of the chaos.
I would describe the tech stack I've inherited charitably as "nearly pure opportunity."
I also came up with an architectural improvement not used anywhere else in the company that allowed us to close a security vulnerability related to a file copy process. I think the tech lead and the manager who owned the vulnerability were happy. Nobody else cared.
I think these types of improvements are fairly common and add up to great things, especially when multiple people have this mindset. Unfortunately in my experience most people don't have that mindset because it's not part of the culture where I work. Don't hold your breath for recognition or appreciation. The only way to achieve that is by improving something for the 'business people'.
I replaced our aging infra with AWS, oversaw replacement of a mishmash of C#, C++, PHP, and Java1.4 by a concise Java 11 based app, and I'm about to deploy our first PWA with a Postgres/Vert.x/OIDC backend. Legacy is still running Apache2/PHP5+MySQL. I would describe the tech stack I've inherited charitably as "nearly pure opportunity."
I've been using it in production for 3 years and regret selecting it.
Source control discipline is probably the single most valuable thing I have worked to improve. We still have a long ways to go, but we went from a place where on a team of roughly twenty developers with many active projects would constantly have to ask "Who has the latest code?" to a place that practices disciplined code management.
When I first started, my jaw almost hit the floor. I couldn't believe that no one actually knew how the source control worked (at the time TFVC). It is hard for me to explain just how bad things were. There were instances of features completely disappearing from production because some one never checked in the code.
Check-ins were at best months a part and production versions of code were scattered on different people's PCs.
After a long, long time we have most developers on board with good practices. There are still some who refuse to follow industry best practices, but our team, and the products we create have a much higher quality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried that - called it Tech Shorts (lightning talks) at small company. Found the largest issue was Passiveness in the engineering crowd. Ended up giving about 50% of the talks myself, not because I wanted to, but because there were so few people who were willing to step up and present. About 70% of the engineering team would attend (~50 people), so it was well received. Will try a new iteration next time. What made…
> Passiveness A lot more people have some degree of social anxiety than one might think, especially in IT. Lightning talks originate—and work well in—the sort of tech-bro workplaces where there’s an Xbox, foosball table, and bar in the breakroom. Half the “culture fit” criterion of hiring for those places is just an attempt to filter out potential hires with any amount of social anxiety; so the average level of it in…
We implemented a customer support software, it was a game changer. It resolved most of the chaos.
Could you say more about this? Is this an initial screening flow that formalizes customer support requests, a self-discovery tool, etc?
I replaced our aging infra with AWS, oversaw replacement of a mishmash of C#, C++, PHP, and Java1.4 by a concise Java 11 based app, and I'm about to deploy our first PWA with a Postgres/Vert.x/OIDC backend. Legacy is still running Apache2/PHP5+MySQL. I would describe the tech stack I've inherited charitably as "nearly pure opportunity."
Too many developers are discouraged when inheriting a legacy app. Nobody wants to be a turd polisher, but like you said, that just means there's even more opportunity for improvement.