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Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

neilkakkar.com

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Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#171

Post by enneff »

flukus wrote: post #164
pbourke wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this being downvoted? It is highly inappropriate to do this in a work context.

Because it's like having subtle adult jokes in Disney movies, the adults get it and the children are oblivious and unharmed by them. Anyone offended by the use of porn star names wouldn't (or at least shouldn't) know what it's referencing.

I know that porn is pretty normalised by western culture, and I’m not reply anti porn myself, but if you can’t see how another adult might find porn references in their work inappropriate then I don’t know what to tell you.

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#172

Post by neilv »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #152
marcosdumay wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't. I could never really pair programming, even in school. Interestingly, I can share my screen with people that have different tasks than mine. I just can't make it work when both people have the same state of mind.

pair programming is really a forced socializing in a field where a lot of people have trouble socializing, never really understood how it got as far as it did.

Pair programming seems to be social in some ways, but I could imagine two programmers with very little social awareness or self-consciousness being able to find a cadence for pair-programming.

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#173

Post by greyskull »

> In the end, we went with a database with role access control (only our machines and us can talk to the database). Our code gets the secrets from this database on startup.

How does the code get access to the database?

I've lived in AWS-land for so long, I don't know how the non-cloud world manages secrets.

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#174

Post by kristopolous »

teddyh wrote: post #21

> Naming your clusters? Naming them after the service that runs on them is great, till the point you start running something else on them too. We ended up naming them with our team name. This is covered by RFC 1178¹, Choosing a Name for Your Computer (from 1990): Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine. A manufacturing project had named a machine "shop" since it was going to be used to control a nu…

Names are an opportunity for fun. Call that old server PersistentSnail, or some old fashioned name like Myrtle. Make naming a reason to smile.

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#175

Post by dragonwriter »

flukus wrote: post #164
pbourke wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this being downvoted? It is highly inappropriate to do this in a work context.

Because it's like having subtle adult jokes in Disney movies, the adults get it and the children are oblivious and unharmed by them. Anyone offended by the use of porn star names wouldn't (or at least shouldn't) know what it's referencing.

> Anyone offended by the use of porn star names wouldn't (or at least shouldn't) know what it's referencing.

“Offended by the use of X to name servers at their workplace” doesn't imply “have never heard and wouldn't recognize the names of X”. Whether X is “porn stars” or “Nazi leaders”.

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#176

Post by pure-awesome »

teddyh wrote: post #21

> Naming your clusters? Naming them after the service that runs on them is great, till the point you start running something else on them too. We ended up naming them with our team name. This is covered by RFC 1178¹, Choosing a Name for Your Computer (from 1990): Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine. A manufacturing project had named a machine "shop" since it was going to be used to control a nu…

> It is especially tempting to name your first computer after yourself, but think about it. Do you name any of your other possessions after yourself? No. Your dog has its own name, as do your children. If you are one of those who feel so inclined to name your car and other objects, you certainly don't reuse your own name. Otherwise you would have a great deal of trouble distinguishing between them in speech.

a) I am, in fact, named after my father.

b) This does, indeed, cause trouble for other people trying to differentiate us.

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#177

Post by jaggederest »

teddyh wrote: post #21

> Naming your clusters? Naming them after the service that runs on them is great, till the point you start running something else on them too. We ended up naming them with our team name. This is covered by RFC 1178¹, Choosing a Name for Your Computer (from 1990): Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine. A manufacturing project had named a machine "shop" since it was going to be used to control a nu…

For some reason nobody liked my norse pantheon names.

Teaching people to spell yggdrasil correctly in order to get a database connection is fun. For some values of fun.

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#178

Post by teddyh »

pure-awesome wrote: post #176
teddyh wrote: post #21

> Naming your clusters? Naming them after the service that runs on them is great, till the point you start running something else on them too. We ended up naming them with our team name. This is covered by RFC 1178¹, Choosing a Name for Your Computer (from 1990): Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine. A manufacturing project had named a machine "shop" since it was going to be used to control a nu…

> It is especially tempting to name your first computer after yourself, but think about it. Do you name any of your other possessions after yourself? No. Your dog has its own name, as do your children. If you are one of those who feel so inclined to name your car and other objects, you certainly don't reuse your own name. Otherwise you would have a great deal of trouble distinguishing between them in speech. a) I am,…

“We named the dog ‘Indiana’!”

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#180

Post by Scarblac »

harrisonjackson wrote: post #118
OJFord wrote: post #81

> in my team culture it’s not frowned upon to “snoop behind” people writing code. Whenever I sensed something interesting going on, I’d roll around and watch what was happening. Agh, I'd hate that. In fact if anything interesting had been going on on my screen it would immediately stop, no way I could work with someone watching. I struggle enough at desks with my back to a door or where people walk by, just can't sto…

For me, it depends on who is creeping. A junior engineer, I'd probably pull them up and start explaining what is going on. A fellow senior engineer I'd probably take a welcome break and ask them to grab a coffee - the only reason they'd be lurking lol. If it is a PM or someone else it might put me on edge - likely because they wouldn't have the context to understand what I was working on and if they didn't say anythi…

So in all three cases, your focus is gone and what you were doing has stopped.
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