Once again, I would like to thank stupid politicians and greedy media conglomerates for their contributions to media piracy. If not for all their hard work, we would still be playing Russian Roulette with shitty DIVX rips on Limewire.

learn prompts engineering

“Can you please do it right this time? Pretty please?”

Why not just use what you have until you can afford to and/or need to upgrade? SAS drives are more expensive because they typically offer higher performance and reliability. Hardware raid may be “old” but it’s still very common. The main risk with it is that if your raid card fails, you’ll have to replace it with the same model if you don’t want to rebuild your server from scratch.

I’ve been running an old Dell PowerEdge for several years with no issues.

My oldest child is the only one who calls me by my first name. When I adopted her, I told her she didn’t have to call me “dad” unless she wanted to. I’ve heard her refer to me as “dad” when she thinks I’m not in earshot.

“Just need a few more million tons of bombs bro. Then the NVA will finally realize that WE’RE the good guys bro.”

– Robert McNamara (Probably)

Management often views software engineers more like machines that spit out code rather than actual engineers who design software. I can’t tell you how many projects I’ve been on where someone up the ladder is unhappy with the time estimate given to complete a feature so they either bring on a contractor or pull a team from another project

Invariably, the additional “help” makes a giant cluster fuck and the people who are actually familiar with the code are now stuck having to scrutinize every PR and fix a ton of defects rather than contributing to feature development. Then the feature takes twice as long to develop as originally estimated. Management scratches their head, shrugs it off, and repeats the same mistake the next time.

I’ve heard it called a “suicide plug”. A common use for them is back feeding power from a generator into your homes electrical panel during extended power outages.

It can technically work but comes with major safety risks such as:

• Giving yourself a nasty shock.
• Electrical fire.
• Electrocuting anyone who comes in contact with the power line, i.e. a lineman who might assume the line is de-energized.
• Blowing up your generator when the power comes back on.

The proper way to do it would be to have a transfer switch and generator plug installed. The transfer switch guarantees that when you’re running on gen power, you’re not back feeding through the transformer out to the power line.

• Stores putting out Christmas merchandise before Halloween.
• People who use their phones while driving.
• Littering.

One of my old bosses used to say, “the choice is often not between right and wrong, but good, better, and best.”

I agree with that sentiment for the most part. Different styles is fine. But sometimes you run into someone who is trying to use a socket wrench to drive nails and all you can do is just kind of watch in amazement and wonder how they arrived at the conclusion that this was the way to go.

First One:

Big ASP.Net Core Web API that passed through several different contract developer teams before being finally brought in house.

The first team created this janky repository pattern on top of Entity Framework Core. Why? I have no idea. My guess is that they just didn’t know how to use it even though it’s a reasonably well documented ORM.

The next team abandoned EFCore entirely, switched to Dapper, left the old stuff in place, and managed to cram 80% of the new business logic into stored procedures. There were things being done in sprocs that had absolutely no business being done there, much less being offloaded to the database.

By the time it got to me, the data layer was a nightmarish disaster of unecesary repo classes, duplicates entities, and untestable SQL procedures, some of which were hundreds of lines long.

“Why are all our queries running so slow?”

We’ll see guys, it’s like this. When your shoving a bunch of telemetry into a stored procedure to run calculations on it, and none of that data is even stored in this database, it’s going to consume resources on the database server, thereby slowing down all the other queries running on it.

Second One:

Web app that generates PDF reports. Problem was it generated them on-the-fly, every time the PDF was requested instead of generating it once and storing it in blob storage and it was sllloowwwww. 30 seconds to generate a 5 page document. There were a list of poor decisions that led to that, but I digress.

Product owner wants the PDF’s to be publicly available to users can share links to them. One of the other teams implements the feature and it’s slated for release. One day, my curiosity gets the best of me and I wonder, “what happens if I send a bunch of document requests at once?” I made it to 20 before the application ground to a halt.

I send a quick write up to the scrum Master who schedules a meeting to go over my findings. All the managers keep trying to blow it off like it’s not a big deal cause “who would do something like that?” Meanwhile, I’m trying to explain to them that it’s not even malicious actors that we have to be concerned about. Literally 20 users can’t request reports at the same time without crashing the app. That’s a big problem.

They never did fix it properly. Ended up killing the product off which was fine because it was a pile of garbage.

Facebook is optimized for other stuff. Vacuuming up data for instance. That tends to drag on performance. If you want to see a “fast” website, I believe McMaster-Carr’s is still the gold standard.

Growing up comes in stages, some of which are difficult for both parents and children to navigate.

When your kids are little, you’re the center of their universe and they are dependent on you for everything.

They grow up and become more independent. It’s a natural process as they prepare for adulthood. Their desire for autonomy develops without the benefit of experience. That can lead to conflicts.

Some of it is hard to take. Especially when your kid is telling you that “you don’t know what you’re talking about” or “I don’t need your help.” It makes you feel angry in the moment because it’s disrespectful and dismissive of your own experience. When I’m standing there, glowering angrily, I’m trying to think of what to say that doesn’t make things worse. Meanwhile, in my head I’m thinking, “Listen you little shit. You don’t know anything about anything. If you want to disregard what I’m telling you, fine. You can learn that you’re wrong the hard way.”

Then it makes you sad because you know that they will, in fact, have to learn the hard way. The hard way is painful. You know because you learned that way too when you were that age. But we learn from our own mistakes. Not from those of our parents. At least not when we’re young.

Love is not a feeling. Love has feelings connected to it but at its core, love is an act.

I loved my kids when they were adorable newborns. And when they screamed half the night and had explosive diarrhea.

When they come running, excited to see me and wanting to play. And when they’re being naughty little shits whom I’ve told to stop doing something seven times already.

When they’re telling me I’m a jerk because I won’t let them go to some party at some shithead from schools house because I know there will be drugs and alcohol involved. And when they need a hug because their boyfriend/girlfriend broke up with them or they’re just having a rough day.

Love means trying to do what’s best for them whether you’re happy, disappointed, or angry with them. Whether you like them or not. And there are definitely moments when you will NOT like your kids. But you still love them and want them to have a good life.

Its also incredibly fast.

One time my wife got me a really nice DeWalt jig saw for Christmas. I already had a jigsaw. It worked well enough for as much as I use it. Although the newer one was better quality and had a few nicer features.

You know what I did? I thanked her and told her how much I appreciated it. She saw something she thought would make my life a little easier and got it for me as a gift. It was a very kind gesture. If it were the wrong one, I probably would have talked to her later and asked if I could exchange it for one that would have suited my needs better while still letting her know that I appreciated what she was trying to do. I’m sure she would have been fine with that.

What I wouldn’t have done was gripe at her for buying me a new power tool because I “don’t like new things” or “I already have a jigsaw and it works just fine.” That would be a terrible idea which would understandably hurt her feelings when she was just trying to do something nice for me.

It wasn’t about the “thing”. It was about the gesture. The fact that they gave you such a gift shows that they pay attention to what you do and they wanted to give you something to make your life a little easier. That was very thoughtful but you threw it back in their face. I completely understand why they’re angry.

“We’re going to use NestJS for the backend.”

Wait… Oh no. Oh please no. God why!?!

You were “filled with the holy spirit.” You really couldn’t help it. 🤷‍♂️

All the function parameter and returns types are going to be “any”.

And we’re not going to tell you.

Self hosting is a great opportunity to learn about some popular technologies and even acquire a few sysadmin skills. Required knowledge of a self-hosted solutions tech stack is not gatekeeping any more than required knowledge of tools and building materials is gatekeeping when it comes to renovating your bathroom. In either scenario, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s going to be a much more difficult job.

reverse proxies

That said, you should not be exposing any of your services to the public if you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s a quick way to a bad time.