They don't advocate for diversity that's for sure
A software conference that advocates for quality
71–80 of 160 posts
Re: A software conference that advocates for quality
#72They don't advocate for diversity that's for sure
Good for them.
Re: A software conference that advocates for quality
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just like all the fitness content. Get couple shredded guys and gals to show off how fit they are so everyone feels guilty they are snacking past 8PM. Sell another batch of “how to do pushups” followed by “how to do pushups vol.2” with “pushup pro this time even better”. Where in the end normal people are not getting paid for getting shredded, they get paid for doing their stuff. I just constantly feel like I am not…
Why would you skip unit tests? Especially in the AI age. You can quickly verify your behavior. Also, by not writing them you're also missing out on opportunities to modularize your code. Obviously, this assumes you write enterprise grade code. YMMV
You can write modular code without writing tests - I write testable code - I don't write tests. When I need I can always add them back, but I tend to skip it as mostly it doesn't make sense.
But still cottage industry of "clean code" is pushing me into self doubts and shame.
Re: A software conference that advocates for quality
#74I'm disillusioned because it never happens, but purveyors of conferences and books are happy to sell the promised land™ of how "it's really going to be different this time." Processes, tools, and diligence vigilantly seem the most apparent path. Perhaps rehash the 50 year old debate of professionalization while AI vibes coding is barking at the door, because what could possibly go wrong with even less experience doin…
It doesn't happen because building the best software is not the goal of a software engineering job.
If you want to do that on your own time, that's fine - but the purpose of a job is economic. Of course you should write software of some reasonable quality, but optimizations have diminishing economic returns. Eventually, the returns are lower than the cost (in time, money, etc) of further optimizing, and this break-even point is usually at a lower level of quality than engineers would like it to be. Leadership and engineering managers know this and behave accordingly.
Re: A software conference that advocates for quality
#75You would think a conference that advocates for quality software would have a better website.
I hesitated mentioning it, thinking perhaps I was the only one who thought so. The twitch video failing to load, the static text on blurred background text video, the horizontal text scrolling on mobile, ...
Text in video always sucks, but that's just how twitch coding sessions work.
Re: A software conference that advocates for quality
#76I'm disillusioned because it never happens, but purveyors of conferences and books are happy to sell the promised land™ of how "it's really going to be different this time." Processes, tools, and diligence vigilantly seem the most apparent path. Perhaps rehash the 50 year old debate of professionalization while AI vibes coding is barking at the door, because what could possibly go wrong with even less experience doin…
It doesn't happen because building the best software is not the goal of a software engineering job. If you want to do that on your own time, that's fine - but the purpose of a job is economic. Of course you should write software of some reasonable quality, but optimizations have diminishing economic returns. Eventually, the returns are lower than the cost (in time, money, etc) of further optimizing, and this break-ev…
While I agree with everything you've said, I think you might be making an assumption that quality costs time. In my experience this isn't the case, unless you're starting from a low quality codebase or working with low quality people. A high quality team can produce high quality software in less time than it takes a low quality team to produce low quality software meeting the same functional requirements.
The whole ballgame is making sure you have no low quality people on your team.
Re: A software conference that advocates for quality
#77I'm disillusioned because it never happens, but purveyors of conferences and books are happy to sell the promised land™ of how "it's really going to be different this time." Processes, tools, and diligence vigilantly seem the most apparent path. Perhaps rehash the 50 year old debate of professionalization while AI vibes coding is barking at the door, because what could possibly go wrong with even less experience doin…
It doesn't happen because building the best software is not the goal of a software engineering job. If you want to do that on your own time, that's fine - but the purpose of a job is economic. Of course you should write software of some reasonable quality, but optimizations have diminishing economic returns. Eventually, the returns are lower than the cost (in time, money, etc) of further optimizing, and this break-ev…
This is only true in certain contexts. Most of the time software quality is looked over not because it genuinely isnt important but simply because it's hard to perceive.
Ive watched many businesses appreciate the benefits of software quality (happy customers, few incidents, fast feature turnaround) without ascribing it to anything in particular.
Then, when it went away, they chalked up the problems to something else, throwing fixes at it which didnt work.
At no point in time did they accurately perceive what they had or what they lost, even at the point of bankruptcy.
Part of the problem is that the absence of bugs, incidents and delays just feels normal and part of the problem is most people are really bad at detecting second order effects and applying second order fixes. E.g. they think "another developer will fix it" or "devs just need to dedicate more time to manual QA".
Conversely, because it's so hard to see I think it can make a really good competitive moat.
Re: A software conference that advocates for quality
#78I'm disillusioned because it never happens, but purveyors of conferences and books are happy to sell the promised land™ of how "it's really going to be different this time." Processes, tools, and diligence vigilantly seem the most apparent path. Perhaps rehash the 50 year old debate of professionalization while AI vibes coding is barking at the door, because what could possibly go wrong with even less experience doin…
It doesn't happen because building the best software is not the goal of a software engineering job. If you want to do that on your own time, that's fine - but the purpose of a job is economic. Of course you should write software of some reasonable quality, but optimizations have diminishing economic returns. Eventually, the returns are lower than the cost (in time, money, etc) of further optimizing, and this break-ev…
Companies can sacrifice every thing for "time to market" - optimization, maintainability, security and safety even - but underestimate the costs of doing that. It is actually more a marketing choice than an economic choice.
One can be skeptical about the implied statement and leadership/management knows what it is doing beyond delivering at the (arbitrarily) set time. One definition of Quality is to satisfy a need entirely at the lowest cost in the shortest time, but more often that not, the last term gets 90% of the attention.
Re: A software conference that advocates for quality
#79I hate talk titles of this form: "Most of your projects are stupid. Please make some actual games.". So annoying. I know it's not personal but I'm sure a better title exists for all talks that choose this form. Why do you have to insult the audience?
Re: A software conference that advocates for quality
#80This thing feels pretty weird to me. I'm guessing it's an attempt at organizing some sort of european Handmade event, and trying to keep it small. But between the sparse website, invite-only and anonymous organizers, it just feels like it's emphasizing the reactionary vibes around the Handmade/casey/jblow sphere. Like they don't want a bunch of blue-haired antifa web developers to show up and ruin everything. Glad to…
> Like they don't want a bunch of blue-haired antifa web developers to show up and ruin everything
You write this like this is a bad thing.
I just came to a conference to learn some cool new tech, but instead got lectured about my transphobia, that my database is systemic discrimination and my HDD being named „slave“ means I burn crosses in my free time, even though I have zero family relations to anything America.
I mean this screams fun right from the get go.