21–30 of 325 posts
> There’s a lot of software being produced that just doesn’t care about its users [... caused by] a mismatch between what we thought doing a good job was and what a significant part of the industry considers profitable [... so] perhaps we should take a stronger ethical stand not to harm users. Or, we could ditch the "biz" part. It just so happens that software not written to serve business interests tends to also res…
For many of us, running our code 1 billion times will cost less than a few minutes of a developer's time. Hell, I could spend $200 for a month of server time on AWS and run a lot of my (web API) code 100 billion times. Optimizing for human readers is always better until you're working on something that proves itself to be too slow to be economical anymore.
In that version of capitalism, if your OS spends too much time putting spam in the Start Menu and not enough on fixing bugs, you can just switch to that other OS with full support from hardware vendors, that runs all your closed-source legacy software. If your favorite bird-themed social media site starts doing boneheaded stuff, you can just switch to that other site that has all your friends and data and lots of posts from experts and celebrities. If your search results are full of spam, you can switch to that other search engine with 10,000 highly paid engineers and 20 years of experience in Web search and integration with all your devices.
And all the businesses you moved away from would have to clean up their act or go out of business. If only those cows were perfectly spherical.
For many of us, running our code 1 billion times will cost less than a few minutes of a developer's time. Hell, I could spend $200 for a month of server time on AWS and run a lot of my (web API) code 100 billion times. Optimizing for human readers is always better until you're working on something that proves itself to be too slow to be economical anymore.
In my experience, you need to care about latency. That affects user experience. It's quite hard to pay for better latency.
> user > maintainer > author
This is completely wrong. To see why, replace the > signs with = and work backwards from there.
Because we as programmers need to know how to progam: learning trumps all. Thus: learning > biz > user > ops > maintainer > author There was that bit dev > * meaning resume-driven development, but in reality it is learning > * And that's the conflict programmers experience in corporate structures, for example the hassle programmers experience when they interview for a position. Employers know it too but they try to s…
My gripe with most programmers that they keep re-learning the same narrow set of skills while ignore the rest that actually makes someone a efficient expert.
> Software should have a purpose, it’s supposed to provide a service to some user. It doesn’t matter how well written or maintainable the code is, nor how sophisticated the technology it uses if it doesn’t fulfill its purpose and provides a good experience to the user: > user > maintainer > author This is completely wrong. To see why, replace the > signs with = and work backwards from there.
Because we as programmers need to know how to progam: learning trumps all. Thus: learning > biz > user > ops > maintainer > author There was that bit dev > * meaning resume-driven development, but in reality it is learning > * And that's the conflict programmers experience in corporate structures, for example the hassle programmers experience when they interview for a position. Employers know it too but they try to s…
My gripe with most programmers that they keep re-learning the same narrow set of skills while ignore the rest that actually makes someone a efficient expert.