51–60 of 73 posts
4 years in consulting. I've spent the first WEEKS of a project twiddling my thumbs waiting for a laptop, just to spend more weeks waiting on access to source code, tooling, etc.
My friends on the strategy side could start and finish entire projects in that time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I volunteered at an archaeology lab run by the state govt a few months ago. Knowing I was a data engineer, one of the archaeologists asked me to take a look at the cataloging system he’d cobbled together on his own: a shared-drive Access database with a full-featured CRUD interface that the whole office had been using for years. I was able to clean up one stray bug he had, and confirm his suspicion that one particula…
The avoidance of dirty hacks are not because they don’t work. They do and can be pretty X-effective when you’re short on X. But the end result is that when you need to switch away from the hacks, then the interest paid on X can be enormous. If X includes time, it may never be repaid.
But I have seen the maintenance burden first hand of solving weird Access lock file problems (if I never have to manually find and delete an .LDB file again, that would be great) and silent corruption issues and more. I've seen the workarounds of auto-backups of the shared folder and then auto-restores of those backups when silly things happen like the .MDB file is not the expected file size.
There's a special "joy" in needing to know the many under-the-hood versions of Access files and seeing apps that consume and/or produce more than one version at a time. That's just to maintain existing "apps", trying to migrate that data to modern databases for new apps is its own "joy" as well.
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Totally unrelated, if you need to suffix a k8s deployment with "-deployment" you are a hack, a fraud, an overengineer and someone who should NOT work as software or devops engineer.
I don't know if Telegram, Slack, Discord, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or Kubernetes will be around (or without massive breaking changes) in 20 years, but email absolutely will be.
TIL that Jenkins was only released in 2011. Feels like it's been around since forever.
As a dev currently working at a company where getting an access request fulfilled can sometimes take weeks, I feel this author's pain. But it seems like an enormous security hole, even with a codeword "password". The author didn't mention it, but I hope they're using whatever version of their company's E2E email encryption is for these messages.
Yeah, this is textbook "shadow IT" that could easily lead to something going seriously wrong. It's a fun example, but not something to aspire to. Ultimately the problem is that in a lot of big corps, IT is basically unaccountable for setting things up wrong. Their only KPI is tickets closed, not the quality or success rate of their fixes.
They default to tickets closed, uptime, SLA adherence as KPIs because you can't effectively measure "is it set up correctly?" and because the business absolutely must measure everything, they come up with bullshit KPIs so they can have a pretty dashboard and pretend like they're actually managing.
Glad I'm no longer in huge corps, but still an IT manager. Shadow IT is a direct symptom of IT not providing the right tools or having poor processes. But responsibility still lies higher up in the chain. If we weren't forced to quantify all activity, these issues wouldn't exist.
I can not believe blogspot is still alive. I just went there and it auto-signed me in via my Google account to "Blogger" where there are some posts from Google's blogspot. The last post was in 2020 https://blogger.googleblog.com/
As a dev currently working at a company where getting an access request fulfilled can sometimes take weeks, I feel this author's pain. But it seems like an enormous security hole, even with a codeword "password". The author didn't mention it, but I hope they're using whatever version of their company's E2E email encryption is for these messages.
Memories of waiting for months to get access to a MS SQL database and ending up putting an Access database on a network share for multiple user access instead. A horrible, horrible hack solution. But it worked!
I volunteered at an archaeology lab run by the state govt a few months ago. Knowing I was a data engineer, one of the archaeologists asked me to take a look at the cataloging system he’d cobbled together on his own: a shared-drive Access database with a full-featured CRUD interface that the whole office had been using for years. I was able to clean up one stray bug he had, and confirm his suspicion that one particula…
>When you leave software developers alone for too long, they start developing software I've gotten so bored at work lately I've been coding for fun again
I knew a guy who would brag that he used Outlook as his build system 20 years ago. Builds would take 9 to 24 months depending on the complexity of the project. But, as the CTO of a mid-sized software company, it worked for him.
CTOs are the original vibe coders.