Mum’s frozen laptop screen

My Mum doesn’t call as much as she used to. So when I had a missed call from my Mum, I thought it could be an emergency. When I rang her back, she said her computer was stuck on the lock screen.

It’s hard work though because she is terrible at explaining problems or what she attempts to do, then she often finds it hard to understand my simple instructions.

She said holding the power button ain’t turning it off, which is weird. I thought the classic “turn it off and on again” would sort it out, so I said to “let the battery drain”. So she said “it can’t be the battery because she can see what is on screen”.

So I explained that the plan was that “letting the battery drain will turn it off. Then you can turn it back on again when plugged in“.

I couldn’t think of any other options.

She said she was “pressing Alt+F2 but it wasn’t doing anything”. I said “what does that shortcut do?“, and she said “I dunno“. I asked who told her to press it, and she said “myself“.＼（〇_ｏ）／

I wondered if she meant Alt+F4.

My Mum popped around to my house with her laptop. Clicking wouldn’t transition to the login screen, and you could move the mouse fine – so it wasn’t frozen. I pressed ctrl+alt+del and it unlocked. I locked it again and it went back to the login screen straight away and would respond to mouse clicks, so ¯\_( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)_/¯

I bet letting the battery drain would have solved it as well, but she kept on charging it. I do wonder if her fictional shortcut of Alt+F2 was meant to be ctrl+alt+del. This is what I mean when I say she is terrible at explaining problems or what she attempts to do. Then it ends up being frustrating for the both of us.

The takeover – the break’s over

Several months ago, I was on a social call with a few of my colleagues. We were talking about how our flagship product is really outdated but we had been working on a replacement for around 4 years without success. Therefore, the future looks bleak.

I made the point that if our rivals release their new software before we do, then we could be in serious trouble.

A colleague, Robin, agreed with me and stated:

“the only way we can stay in business is to rely on our competitors being worse than us”

Then added:

“we are Yahoo, waiting for Google to turn up”
Robin

I think the comparison is that Yahoo were quite a well-known search engine, but they didn’t build on what they had. So then Google came into the market with their superior search engine and not only took their market share, but then released products like Gmail which made Yahoo even more redundant. Yahoo ended up abandoning their own Search feature and used Google’s instead. Today, it seems they use Bing.

I’m not sure we would have the same opportunity just to back off and utilise our competitor’s features.

Robin then elaborated:

We have lost a lot of expertise over the years, so there’s large parts of our software we don’t truly understand. It’s essentially falling apart at this stage. We need to retire it. The sheer amount of technical debt is so bad that fixing technical debt is stymied by how much technical debt there is.
Robin

Shortly after, an American company placed a bid at a hefty 50% increase on share price. It was quickly accepted by the board who will be cashing in for millions.

“This is exciting for us. This is in recognition of the brilliant work we have achieved together in the past few years. It’s a recognition of success. This is about future growth, with potentially a new shareholder who can drive innovation, great service for our customers, and take us to the next stage. We believe this combination will have the resources and expertise to enable us to better support our users through technology innovations. Our long standing track record of delivering effective technology solutions and strong financial and operating performance combined with our partner Group’s resources and expertise will enable us to accelerate our development. We therefore consider that the combined group will be well positioned to serve its customers and partners in the UK, whilst ensuring we remain a strong organisation through technology innovation.”
Director’s corporate-jargon-riddled waffle.

A further update from the director’s was aimed to allay our fears of redundancy or general change to how we work. It was also full of the usual corporate jargon:

great for everyone, the employees, customers, the shareholders
Accelerating investment
redundancies: “Absolutely not the case. This is about growth.
genuinely really excited for this. Excited about the opportunities for individuals
Excited about the positive synergies between the two businesses
accelerate in research
“don’t worry because it’s going to be absolutely EPIC!”
Continue personal journey
accelerate our strategy, accelerate our roadmap, accelerate our customer base
gives our colleagues something to really relish
gunning for growth and innovation for some time. Completely in alignment with the direction we set.
no plan to change what we are doing in UK or India
unique culture that we will maintain and build upon
Benefits and conditions will remain (pensions safeguarded)

“clearly, what we are focusing on now, is making sure we complete the year”
At the end of the update, our CEO came out with this ominous statement

We are actually highly profitable (somehow), but that made it sound like we were struggling. Is there any doubt we will not see out the year?

I didn’t find many comments from our users posted on the internet, but a small group seemed to be concerned that our data would be owned by an American company. I think for the most part, and especially with our main software, we don’t actually own the data. Our users own the data and we are mainly the “data processor”. So if the American company wanted to buy us to get their hands on our data, then I reckon they would be doing illegal things, so that’s not a worry. I think it is merely a case of the American company wanting a profitable company and to get into the sector. They might be shocked when they find out our current software is really retro without much scope for growth, and the replacement is in “development hell”, and not worth the hype we gave it.

One user was saying that because the idea of Americans owning our data was “unethical”, they wanted to build their own system which would be ethical and not-for-profit. I did wonder if an open-source project could work – our system has essentially been built by hundreds of developers over 15 years. With hindsight, you could build something similar much quicker, especially if you focus on the core features. However, the architecture is a massive problem and costs loads to run. It would take at least 5 years before you had enough features to get users to switch to your system. Then it would still need to be funded to keep running. I think even the big open source projects have salaried software engineers because you cannot just rely on ad-hoc contributions.

Like I said, we have struggled to build our own replacement which is in “development hell”. That’s with full-time staff and loads of managers to coordinate it. Then we were talking about trialling a version which is basically just an RSS feed after hyping it up 4 years ago.

I was discussing this conversation with one of our Software Architects, and he said the open source idea could only feasibly work if an existing company like ours made our product’s code open source; so it was already complete and the architecture was in place. Then the contributions would be to add features, and make it more performant.

“Well, they certainly can’t make them any worse! That wheel of death that says ‘loading’ just goes round and round forever!
A user on the takeover, and our software’s recent performance issues

Back to the takeover, it will be interesting when/if the takeover fully completes to see what the American company plans to do with us. I’m intrigued if our Director’s statements have any truth.

Note: I stole the blog’s title from the Fall Out Boy song “The Take Over, The Breaks Over”

Software Tech Jargon

When you work in the Software Industry, it’s obvious there’s going to be a lot of technical terms and abbreviations/initialisations. However, I think in many cases, you could easily write/say something in a way that more people could understand. I think sometimes people want to appear more technical, or maybe even “gatekeep” by trying to outnerd their peers. Over a long period of time, I have collected various written and spoken quotes. So here is a nice and varied collection. I don’t understand what many of these mean.

“I believe this to could be because of the contiguous memory necessary to rasterise an image of this scope.”

“I think if you are migrating the symbol server, then you need to consume the symbols”
.Net Nerd

“That’s why I use a View that bakes the invariants in so I don’t need to re-check them a number of times.

Adding this index could improve performance of the query by 47% and avoid using hash matches and parallelism operators.
DB Nerd

You have a couple of options here. 1. If the data is small then you might consider xcom as an intermediary to share data between two operators. Preferably this is up to hundreds of records and no further (without using custom xcom backends). 2. Sounds like you probably want something like a TrinoToCloudWatchMetricsOperator, it’s the sort of thing that would need to be implemented as it’s quite niche but could likely be re-used across teams. I tend to treat Python Operator as a fallback option now. If it really doesn’t make sense to write your own operator because it’s so specific and couldn’t be re-used.

This code will need to be changed at some point in the future to detect the Evergreen Runtime as a prerequisite – removing the need for this Visual C++ runtime check.

For anyone interested in learning about Node.js and the MEAN stack to produce a quick REST API, this is a pretty good tutorial which dockerises the app too and deploys it to aws: https://blog.codeship.com/running-mean-web-application-doc…/ Incorporating a CI system like Travis, Jenkins or Circle, testing with Supertest or Postman and adding in aws clusters and load balancers means in a very short time you can create a CD system for the API too with a time to live of 3 to 4 minutes. Using all free tools like VS Code, Github and the AWS free tier means it can all be done without paying a single penny too. too much

Me 13:27:
can you tell me how a minimal deterministic acyclic finite state automaton would use less space than a trie?
Lucy 13:29:
7
Me 13:30:
This is because a DAFSA can compress identical branches from the trie which correspond to the same suffixes (or parts) of different words being stored.

what kind of nerd do you have to be to understand all this jargon?

The user account is in a different forest than the computer account. The processing of Group Policy from another forest is not allowed. Group Policy will be processed using Loopback Replace mode. The scope of the user policy settings will be determined by the location of the computer object in Active Directory. The settings will be acquired from the User Configuration of these policies.
Windows Event Viewer.
now that is a good bit of jargon. What the hell is a forest?

This is from some jargon from FutureShop for some crazily expensive headphones.

The LCD-4, Audeze’s new reference headphone, is the result of dedicated research and development and advancements in materials science. It features Their amazingly thin nano-grade diaphragms and unique Double Fluxor magnet arrays for the most powerful magnetic flux density in existence, an incredible 1.5 Tesla! It also features a new comfortable suspension-type carbon fiber and leather headband and delivers breathtaking high resolution sound, imaging and transparency, with exciting dynamics.

We are pleased to offer a free cable burn-in service for this cable when purchased through us. The Nordost VIDAR cable burn-in machine combines three different functions all in one operation:
It neutralises charges that build up around the cables and the insulation
It provides a very wide band and deep conditioning into the conductor core, which produces changes in the way signals pass through the metal.
It ultrasonically conditions the surface of the conductors.

So, we’ve now got a requirement to orchestrate some containers with Kubernetes and patch some MS SQL databases. Now we can bring Octopus in because we no longer have 180,000 machines to deal with, just the 300 or so database boxes with Kubernetes managing the rest of the servers running the containers. Throw in your CI/CD tool of choice to pipe directly in to Octopus and your container registry and you’ve got a pretty sweet setup going!

Me 16:30:
Enablers support the activities needed to extend the Architectural Runway
have you tried extending the Architectural Runway ?
Andrew  16:32:
i think there were protests about them doing that

Append blobs are made up of blocks like the block blobs, but are optimized for append operations. These are used for things like logging information to the same blob from multiple VMs.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-introduction

Suppress OrganisationLookup Index queries from the ambient transaction so that upstream callers can run their own transactions without escalating to a distributed transaction.
DB Nerd

The transaction log for database ‘tempdb’ is full due to ‘NOTHING’.
SQL Server error

Ongoing issues with L drive, so it has been recommended that we change the 10% buffer to 20% buffer. so the job stops earlier, but has less impact to live service and easier to support the job and provides more headroom if necessary. Will have an impact on how long the job to run.

“The StringFormat::GenericTypographic method creates a generic, typographic StringFormat object.”
Microsoft docs. I wanted to know what StringFormat.GenericTypographic actually does. Still non-the-wiser

It comes bundled with a few really interesting tools developed by the CoreOS team, such as etcd, fleet, and flannel.

most organizations seem to be quite attached to an antediluvian model of testing all components in unison. We had two services on the backend — a gevent based API server and some asynchronous Python background workers which had a tangle of gnarly native dependencies including the C++ boost library which, if memory serves me right, was compiled from scratch every time a new Vagrant box got spun up

If you’re an Erlangista, you’re probably familiar with Fred Hébert’s manual on using the Erlang VM’s primitives to debug production systems while they are running. Languages like Go come with built in support for obtaining the heap, mutex, CPU and goroutine profiles of any running Go process Unit testing such service-critical I/O with mocks inherently embodies a sellout since it not just sacrifices accuracy at the altar of speed, but also ends up shaping our mental model in a way that’s almost entirely dissonant with the actual characteristics of the system we’re building.
Some good words thrown about in this blog: https://medium.com/@copyconstruct/testing-microservices-the-sane-way-9bb31d158c16

Me 11:35: 
have you heard of a kibibyte

Daniel 11:35: 
nope

Me 11:35:  
any serious programer know the difference between kilo and kibi... – Florian Peschka 

apparently its 1024 bytes whereas a kilobyte is 1000

In computing, a nibble (often nybble or nyble to match the vowels of byte) is a four-bit aggregation,[1] or half an octet. It is also known as half-byte[2] or tetrade.[3]

Moreover, 1982 documentation for the Integrated Woz Machine refers consistently to an “8 bit nibble”
Wikipedia

Me 15:41: 
one day I'm gonna work out what Memoize() does and use it
Andrew 15:42: 
What is memoization and how can I use it in Python? 
if you don't know what it is then don't bother trying to use it
end of
Me 15:42: 
it sounds like a great word
"such as in simple mutually recursive descent parsing[1] in a general top-down parsing algorithm[2][3] that accommodates ambiguity and left recursion in polynomial time and space" 
Andrew 15:43: 
haha that's gotta be some sort of joke
Me 15:43: 
It says "simple" so it must be. You just aren't smart enough"Me 15:41: 
one day I'm gonna work out what Memoize() does and use it

I’d like to use NodeJS NPM package manager to setup a small gatling/postma/newman box for REST API testing. However NPM seems to have a problem with the corporate proxy. Does anyone have any tips for making the installation process easier?
Developer

“Before you can deploy Helm in an RBAC-enabled AKS cluster, you need a service account and role binding for the Tiller service.”

“making it volatile means it chucks out the thread-cached value for the variable each time it’s read. Therefore getting the actual value each time”
Developer

The KeyStore Web Services 8.1 uses a contract first approach to web service development. This approach defines the message contract for each web method requests and responses up front using xsd schemas and WSDL. This allows KeyStore to establish a suite of fixed web service methods that can be managed and versioned between releases.  

Hierarchical xml messages are constructed using xsd type definitions in order to establish a request and response message for each web method. When referenced using tools such as visual studio .Net, this will create a client side proxy classes that developers can use to call the web methods.  These proxy classes represent a strongly-typed client side object class model for each method request and its response. This removes the need for web service clients to work with raw xml. It also has the added advantage of ensuring type-safety for many input parameters (e.g. Dates/Integers etc).

“STAThreadAttribute indicates that the COM threading model for the application is single-threaded apartment.”

Available now: Single-threaded apartment (fully-furnished)
Andrew with a joke

For Gafana those who want to use the dashboard I created the JSON attached just needs to copied into import for your local Gafana ,Can someone try this I am interested to see how ‘intelligent’ Gafana is and if it exports the Data Sources it should be looking for as well or if the user importing needs to get them up as well

We have a CIS hardened ubuntu image with ssm access as a base image. I have installed all my software dependency and then made it as an ami release image. When i use this new ami image as launch template and create ec2 instance i can’t able to connect ssm. I have enabled ssh connection and check the status of ssm it is enabled & running.
Developer question. Can you help him?

I’m trying to create an Alias and a CMK key and trying to associate the alias with a secret. I was getting the following error during deployment using CDK “The operation failed because of an invalid KMS key: Alias arn:aws:kms:eu-west-2:xxxx:alias/rejs-alias-int-secret is not found”. I tried to directly associate the CMK key instead of the alias with the secret and it is working fine. I have also tried associating the alias of the same CMK key with other resources like s3 and it is working fine in that case too. I’m facing issue only with the secret and CMK alias combination. Am I missing out anything here? TIA
Developer question. Can you help him?

I’ve added some instrumentation to the FireInternal method on the EventBroker class to include the eventid in the exception message so we can try and identify where the null event is originating from. Going forward, maybe we should replace the .net 2 lock, queue approach with the ConcurrentQueue class in .net 4 to try and prevent any possible cross threaded operations / race conditions on the eventbroker. It looks like this issue isn’t just occurring on the quick access toolbar select patient operation but also on SessionControllers._messageReceivedWorker_DoWork method.
Developer

Kafka™ is used for building real-time data pipelines and streaming apps. It is horizontally scalable, fault-tolerant, wicked fast, and runs in production in thousands of companies. This can be done in a round-robin fashion simply to balance load or it can be done according to some semantic partition function

Likewise for streaming data pipelines the combination of subscription to real-time events make it possible to use Kafka for very low-latency pipelines; but the ability to store data reliably make it possible to use it for critical data where the delivery of data must be guaranteed or for integration with offline systems that load data only periodically or may go down for extended periods of time for maintenance. The stream processing facilities make it possible to transform data as it arrives.
https://thirdeyedata.io/apache-kafka/

–parallel

Similar to –stream, but completely disregards concurrency and topological sorting, running a given command or script immediately in all matching packages with prefixed streaming output. This is the preferred flag for long-running processes such as npm run watch run over many packages.

$ lerna run watch –parallel

Note: It is advised to constrain the scope of this command when using the –parallel flag, as spawning dozens of subprocesses may be harmful to your shell’s equanimity (or maximum file descriptor limit, for example).
Lerna

In parallel computing, an embarrassingly parallel workload or problem (also called embarrassingly parallelizable, perfectly parallel, delightfully parallel or pleasingly parallel) is one where little or no effort is needed to separate the problem into a number of parallel tasks.[1] This is often the case where there is little or no dependency or need for communication between those parallel tasks, or for results between them.[2]

Thus, these are different from distributed computing problems that need communication between tasks, especially communication of intermediate results. They are easy to perform on server farms which lack the special infrastructure used in a true supercomputer cluster. They are thus well suited to large, Internet-based volunteer computing platforms such as BOINC, and do not suffer from parallel slowdown. The opposite of embarrassingly parallel problems are inherently serial problems, which cannot be parallelized at all.

A common example of an embarrassingly parallel problem is 3D video rendering handled by a graphics processing unit, where each frame (forward method) or pixel (ray tracing method) can be handled with no interdependency.[3] Some forms of password cracking are another embarrassingly parallel task that is easily distributed on central processing units, CPU cores, or clusters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel

The Phantom Bogey Wiper & Sub-human Antics

I was looking through my work emails, looking for some classic stories, and found the story of The Phantom Bogey Wiper.

From: Lee Davidson
Sent: 10 May 2010 14:42
To: Development
Subject: If you're the phantom bogie wiper please take note!!!
Importance: High

Apologies to everyone for my tone in this email but some filthy scummy piece of excrement who’s most likely one of our colleagues has been wiping bogies on the toilet walls. This isn’t something that happens by accident, the offending vile contemptible excuse for a human being must be making a conscious decision to offend others so I’ll not hold back in my show of disgust at this utterly pathetic person.

Whoever you are and you know who you are could you put a stop to it please?

Regards,

Dave.

From: Lee Davidson
Sent: 27 May 2012 10:26
To: Development
Subject: Toilet etiquette

Dear Colleague,

It is with great deal of regret I send this message but the sub-human antics of one or more of my male colleagues in confines of a toilet cubical have left me appalled and disgusted.

I can’t believe I’m typing this but could the person who is treating the toilet as their own personal cesspit please use the following etiquette.

·        Do not wipe your bogeys on the cubicle wall.
·        Do not spit chewed toilet paper on the toilet door.
·        And worse of all do not smear your excrement on the cubicle wall.

If you’re the person responsible then please remember you share this toilet with civilised human beings.

Best Regards,
David.
Lee Davidson

From: Richard Hirst
Sent: 29 March 2012 10:36
To: Keith Hanrahan; Me
Subject: FW: Toilet etiquette

Stay vigilant people… The toilet related incidents have been much better upstairs since Testing moved downstairs, any suspects?

From: Me
Sent: 29 March 2012 10:40
To: Keith Hanrahan; Richard Hirst
Subject: RE: Toilet etiquette

Ben always said he had poor hand-eye co-ordination. Maybe bum-hand co-ordination too

I can’t believe I wrote that in an email. I don’t think we had chat apps back then though. I shared it with a colleague:

Sadiq Khan: 
In this day and age, that's a ballsy email

Me  09:15
11 years ago :scream:

Sadiq Khan  09:16
Makes sense for that time

Me  09:17
back in the dark ages where we wiped poo on the walls

From: Scott Simpson
Sent: 27 August 2015 13:19
To: Development
Subject: Toilet etiquette

Apologies to all the female members but having to send the below out again!! Credits to Lee Davidson for the initial email 3 years ago.

I have added a slight addition after a harrowing experience yesterday!
·        Do not leave your excrement all over the toilet seat or around the bowl – It is NOT the cleaners job to clean after you!

Scott Simpson
Product Owner

From: Norman Taylor
Sent: 24 November 2015 10:16
To: Development
Subject: RE: Toilet etiquette

Apologies once again to all the female recipients of this email!

I’d just like to reiterate Scott’s point below as I’ve spotted a second sighting of this in the downstairs loos!  Not exactly what I wanted to see after my morning porridge!

Norman Taylor

From: Mike Dean
Sent: 24 November 2015 10:18
To: Norman Taylor
Subject: RE: Toilet etiquette

That’s probably nothing compared to the state of the left-hand cubicle toilet seat yesterday afternoon, mate!

I had to force the contents of my lunch back into my stomach!

June 2016

Me 16:40: 
The Phantom Bogey-Wiper has been hard at work. There's a right collection in the toilet cubicle wall 
surely, there's not many people who it could be, unless there's more than one Phantom

Mike Dean 16:42: 
the phaaaantom of the loo-pera is here
disgusting

Me 16:45: 
in fact, the original incident that you sent me was 10 May 2010  
so 6 years on, the Phantom is still at work

Mike Dean 16:47: 
wow
who could it be?
I've been here about 6 years, but I have an alibi

Me 16:48: 
if it's the same person, they must have worked in those 3 offices, must be male, and in Development
but there could be multiple phantoms

We never did solve the mystery. I did suspect it was multiple people but quite hard to accept people would behave in that manner.

Women In Tech: Software Developer Transition To Manager

Many years ago, I was listening to a podcast where a group of women were talking about their experiences in Software Development. I think Person A had started their own company so now didn’t do much development because they were now the CEO. Person B had switched to teaching software development and was going to take up a role as a “Developer Advocate” which I think is kind of a teaching role; making tutorials and promoting via social media. Then Person C seemed happy being a software developer.

In other blogs, I’ve briefly mentioned my observations with women in software development. I find there’s a much higher percentage of women that will desire to go into management, whereas many men seem to love the idea of a career constantly coding.

I’ve followed a few of the women from the podcast, intrigued where their careers would go. Person A and B are still CEO and Developer Advocate, respectively. Person C, who was happy being a software developer had apparently got their dream job at a big tech company early 2021.

“I’m so lucky I get to do something I love for a living”

Neary a year later, they announce they are taking a year out due to maternity. A few months later, they state how being a new mother has given them new inspiration as a software developer. I wasn’t sure if she had been coding in her free time, or was just posting for attention.

She claimed that she could:

“tap into new-found inspiration and creativity”
“think about more nuanced edge cases”
“Be more efficient”
“better at asking for help”
“better at asking the right questions”

The justification was that you have extra accountability, have to maximise how you spend time/money, ask for assistance when you struggle to support your child. It was quite tenuous and when people asked her to elaborate on how it really helps coding, she just accused them of “toxic masculinity”.

Only 2 months later, she announces that she applied to switch roles to become an Engineering Manager. Wait, what!? What happened to all that boasting about securing her dream role at her dream company? What about this new-found inspiration to be a better developer?

How can that mentality shift in such a short space of time?

“I kinda just fell out of love with coding”

People often say that social media gives people a skewed perception of people’s realities, because it is a filtered view: people only post the good stuff, and sometimes even modify the photos. If someone goes on holiday, you see the beautiful sunny beach, and the exciting scuba diving session. You don’t hear about the argument they had with their partner, or how they were bedridden with illness on the other days.

So was she lying about her love for coding? Were the development teams at this company not well suited to her mindset or ability?

When she did return from maternity leave, she then said he loved being a manager “way more than I liked being a software developer.”

I do find it odd that her mentality has always seemed to be focussed on promoting women in tech, and calling out “bro culture”, but then she has ditched being a developer and followed the stereotype of being a manager instead.

State of Js

I drafted up this blog a year ago but never published it.

“State of JS” do an annual survey about Javascript, and one of the questions was about people’s favourite content authors.

In the 2021 survey, 2 out of 15 of these content authors were women, and some of the “Social Justice Warriors” aren’t happy about this, so one of them stated that the chart’s title should be simply “MEN”. Then she follows it up with highlighting the demographics of the people surveyed. 71.3% were men, 4% women, 0.9% non-binary, and everyone else refused to answer.

I think her point is that men are voting for men and thus perpetuating the “bro culture” that is holding back women like her.

If we assume that the survey does represent the proportion of developers (after-all, it is well known that the software development industry is mostly men), then I would say that should be proportionate to the number of public content creators too.

Therefore, we should only really expect to see 4% of women occupy the Top 15 Content Creators list. So what is 4% of 15? Isn’t it 0.6? So really, it’s not even that farfetched to expect all 15 to be Men.

It’s possible there are more women since there’s that large number of people who opted not to specify. However, around 492 women did respond, so there could easily be more women on that list. What’s that you say? Women are probably nominating men?! Unheard of!

I only learned some Web Development stuff HTML, Javascript, Typescript, React over a short period, and if you asked me to name some creators, I’d have probably named Dan Abramov, Wes Bos, Florin Pop, and Stefan Baumgartner and Cory House. Kent C. Dodds, Dan Abramov are big names in the field and the likes of Wes Bos have a huge following, have paid content, are very active on Twitter, and have a Podcast. So you expect these names to occupy the top spots of a list like this. Is it really perpetuating an exclusive culture?

I think it is just simple statistics. There’s no point lambasting StateOfJs for putting a survey out there. There’s no point attacking the men who responded that they didn’t vote for your friends.

I’ve written about a few occurrences like this. Deep down, these people think they are doing good by going on the offensive and “virtue signalling”, but all they are doing is creating a divide/toxic culture which is the opposite of what they actually want.

Note: It looks like there are 5 women on the latest survey https://2022.stateofjs.com/en-US/resources/. I wonder if this is linked to last year’s outrage, or mere coincidence.

The DockerCon Proposal

We had a Senior Software Developer join us a few years back and he seemed obsessed with “networking” and also using “new technology“. By “new technology”, I mean if we weren’t already using it, he wanted to use it, so was pushing to use Docker. And by “networking”, I mean going to nerd conferences and events.

“Is anyone thinking of going to DockerCon? Seems like the kind of thing we should get some skin in the game?”
Senior Developer

I’ve never heard of that phrase “skin in the game” before, but my biggest question is “how long can people talk about Docker for?” People from all around the world, going to Barcelona to talk about what things they have docked.

I don’t often see a benefit of these conferences anyway. People do mention “networking”, but what do you really do? Talk to random people, boast about how good you are, and hope that if you apply to the company they work for, that they are the ones looking at your application, and also remember your name and who you were? If not, it probably isn’t increasing your future job prospects.

You must think it is very beneficial if you are travelling from England to Spain just for a conference, but this developer was well up for it. I suppose if he could convince the company to send him, then it’s a free holiday, so maybe you don’t know how sincere he is.

In my previous job, we were in the gambling industry. There was some event down in London, something like the “International Gaming Exhibition”. It was for companies in the gambling industry to show off their new products. There were loads of slot machines, fancy roulette wheels, all kinds of automated machines (card shufflers, automated roulette wheels).

I had no idea what our objective was really, so I just walked from stall to stall, taking all the free stuff. I got a couple of tote bags; stationery items such as pens and post-it notes; and playing cards. Our company was essentially rivals to some of these companies so we weren’t there to buy, and we didn’t have our own stall so we weren’t there to sell.

Some of the stalls were very elaborate and like those ones they used to have at E3 before that sort of approach was deemed sexist. So some stalls were occupied by bikini-clad “booth babes”. You could say those companies are getting some “skin in the game”! I thought they must hire them from some modelling agency or something, but it was interesting hearing them answer fairly technical questions about the products – so they must have done their homework. One company was spraying their woman in full body paint. I got there when she was about 90% painted, but one of my colleagues was boasting about how he got there earlier. This was probably around 2011 so I would imagine those “booth babes” might be cancelled, like the ones at E3.

Training

Cost

One of the software testers was saying that they have been asked if they are interested in participating in a C# Programming course, with the aim of gaining skills to possibly allow them to write automated tests.

My opinion is that a 3 day course probably isn’t going to teach them anything that a video course wouldn’t (such as LinkedIn Learning or Pluralsight which we have access to). Also, there’s plenty of free resources like Microsoft’s own websites.

I was shocked at how much the training courses cost:

Programming Foundations (3 days) – £2975.00
The C# Programming Language (4 days) £4425.00

Maybe these courses include some kind of mentoring (which give an advantage over online videos), but given we employ loads of developers, surely a couple of people would be willing to volunteer to run some sessions internally. It would be much cheaper as long as they can spare the time.

Earlier in the year, to transition to a different form of Agile development (SAFe), we were sending some Product Owners on a training course. But not all of them. The ones that were sent were expected to then train the others. Nice money saving tip there.

Agile Training

Even when you go on training courses, how much information do you even retain? We did hire a SAFe trainer to present to the entire department, giving a general overview, but it was about 3 hours long and I couldn’t focus because the content was boring.

A week later, I was discussing how we currently worked and wasn’t sure where some responsibilities lie.

Colleague: Why are the roles/responsibilities so blurred? Where are the clear definitions of who does what?
Me: If you turned up to the training and listened, then you would know...but I turned up and didn't listen

Another colleague said that the training apparently costs £900 for 1 person – and it was for everyone in the department. Crazy.

Compliance Training

Every year, we have to complete some basic training courses. It just involves reading pages of information, then completing a multiple choice test. We have so many of them that we basically do 1 or 2 per month. There’s often a few questionable questions that we end up having a laugh about.

Fire

“If you hear the fire alarm, wait a moment to see if it is just a test.”

That’s not the normal advice is it? I’m sure the previous training has always said that you should be told the exact time when a fire alarm test is going to be. Any other time you hear the alarm, then you leave the building promptly via the nearest fire escape. If you are supposed to wait, you may as well use that time to grab your belongings. How long is a “moment” anyway. It never stated how you verify it is a test.

Security

Natalia’s Instagram has been hacked. Should she change her password first, or tell her customers

Why haven’t the hackers changed her password already? If they haven’t, surely you need to do it before they do. It only takes a minute to change your password. Surely, that comes first, then you can tell your customers. The training said you should inform your customers first.

you don’t have to follow the same level of security for all of your accounts.

Is that even good advice? I mean, most people probably do it like that, but everything should be secure. If someone can gain access to one of your accounts, they may be able to use that to get extra information about you to help them hack into your other accounts.

It is okay to write passwords down, but not on post-it notes.

I’ll write them down in a book labelled “Passwords Do Not Read”. Seriously, what does that advice even mean? A good password is one you remember. But writing it down is probably better than not being able to get into your own account. Maybe that is the point but the course didn’t explain it well.

Me 14:57:
someone follows you into your workplace and asks you to hold the door as they have forgotten their access card. Should you stop and challenge them?
-to a fight
-Rock paper scissors
-to a quiz
-Pokemon duel
Paul 14:57:
LOL
Are they actual answers??
Me 14:57:
no, it was true or false

Work Environment/Health & Safety Training

Good posture requires you to keep your feet flat on the floor or on a footrest.

Don’t footrests make your feet at an angle?

I love doing training about good posture whilst leaning forward at an angle. I do find it hard to sit like the training implies. It seems unnatural to have everything perfectly straight. I tend to slouch and constantly change position throughout the day.

The air in your environment should not be uncomfortably dry – you shouldn’t find your eyes or nose drying out.

is that even a thing?

Welcome to this course on Display Screen Equipment (DSE).

“Take appropriate action to prevent ill health when using DSE”

Do we really need an abbreviation for that? Can’t it just be “monitors”. It makes it sound like we work with asbestos or some hazardous material.

“Your wrist and forearm must be supported when using a pointing device”

I’m trying to picture someone using a laser-pen with their wrist and forearm strapped to a plank of wood.

There was a section on different decibels of various environments. Libraries are apparently fairly noisy…

Me 16:20:
which is louder, a library or living room?
Andy 16:20:
libraries are notoriously quiet
Me 16:21:
have you done this Health and Safety training?
the library is louder. Even a wooded area is quieter
Andy 16:21:
this sounds rubbish
Me 16:21:
what happens if you have the TV on
or is that with the tv on
because it's a lot louder than a bedroom
Andy 16:22:
there aren't any of those areas at work
maybe a 'wooded area' at a push
Me 16:23:
did you know a conversation is louder than an office?
Andy 16:24:
haha shut up now
Me 16:25:
well, that's one way of reducing noise!

How can a conversation be louder than an office when offices contain several conversations? Is it comparing a face-to-face conversation vs a silent office?

Later on, there was a question about why water is bad for electricals. Since it is multiple choice, some of the answers are a bit silly.

Me 16:32:
Water can increase the power of the electricity and cause the equipment to work too fast.
Andy 16:32:
haha
Me 16:32:
I once overclocked a PC by spilling a drink on it
we should log a ticket - "build server is performing slow and needs to be watered"
Andy 16:34:
do you mind watering our build server while we're away on holiday and feeding the Load Balancer?

Bribery and Corruption

There were various scenarios and you have to state if it is a bribe or not…

“An offshore agent was dishing out bribes”

I think you have just given away the answer.

“We uncovered inappropriate payments…”

Sometimes I think these training courses have no effort put into them. It’s innappropriate, so I would say it is a bribe.

There was a question where it says something along the lines of: “Sean happens to have a relative who works for your company, and Sean is bidding for a contract. The company wants to accept Sean’s offer because he has put forward the best proposal. Is there anything wrong with this?” Options are:

Yes, Sean should not have sent the offer because it’s unprofessional
We will look conflicted if we do any future work.
Not at all, provided Sean has the skills that we’re looking for

I selected the last option, but I was wrong, it is the second option. An explanation was provided “recruiting people who are related to employees, clients or suppliers is not prohibited, but the appointments must always be made on merit and in line with company policy.”

Wait…I was correct then. It is fine to accept Sean’s offer.

Environment Training

This last answer made me laugh:

Why is it important for our Company to care about the environment?
A) To increase our productivity and cut costs
B) Because the environment is an invaluable source of resources that are necessary for our continued business
C) To take part in the latest management fad despite it having no real benefits

MANAGEMENT FAD.

Windows 11 Upgrade

At the end of May, our IT department began upgrading everyone to Windows 11. Around a month and a half later, in mid-July, they announced that the upgrade had been a success, and managers were congratulating them on a good job.

40% of clients have had a Windows 11 attempt.
IT Manager

40% seems very low. The thing is, if you actually think about their phrasing, they say “attempt” so it wasn’t necessarily successful. I’d like to know why 60% of computers didn’t even attempt to upgrade.

For me, it failed twice. After the first failure, I asked how much space was required because I was sure I had at least 10GB, and I was notified of the failure when Windows popped up an alert saying I was completely out of disk space.

“About 10GB should do it (this has been confirmed in the testing phase).”
IT Manager

So it is confirmed but they aren’t sure on the exact amount of space we need.

I cleared out 20GB for it, and it still wasn’t enough. Unless it failed for some other reason. I started browsing through my hard drive and found a secret folder. There was an ISO file for the upgrade which was 5.2GB but then there was also an extracted version of another 5.2GB. So the temporary files they are using is 10.4GB but yet they claim you only need “around 10GB”. No, you need 10.4GB for the installer, and another X amount to actually install it, but maybe 20GB wasn’t even enough. 🤷‍♂️

There was also a file with an interesting name “RunOnce_Do_NOT_Run.bat”. I wonder what that means. Was the file created with the contradictory name? Or did someone run it once, then rename it? 🤔

Over 2 months later, they instructed people to trigger the upgrade again. This time I had 40GB free and it upgraded fine. If it did fail again, only then would IT investigate what the problem was. Surely loads of failures are just down to low disc space, but their script never checked before attempting, nor did they publicly confirm how much space we even needed.

Absolute shambles.

FENSA Inspection

Recently, I replaced all the windows and doors to my house using a local company. Most windows were installed well, but some windows had minor scratches/scuff marks which they replaced, but they replaced them with scratched ones. They replaced them again…with scratched ones. More importantly, I had one window where there was a draught coming through each of the 4 sides of the window, and when they put a new window-ledge in, they managed to crack the wall all the way down to the skirting board.

“FENSA is a government-authorised scheme that monitors building regulation compliance for replacement windows and doors.”
https://www.fensa.org.uk

I kept on giving them a chance to fix the issues but they often delayed. I thought I could complain to FENSA, but in hindsight, they seem useless. You can opt in for an inspection, but they may not inspect your property if they have done enough inspections for that particular company within the year.

When I received a FENSA certificate, I assumed that I would not be getting an inspection. The FENSA certificate should be their approval to say it has passed their standards, but receiving it without an inspection seems like it’s not worth the paper it is written on.

A few days later, I received another letter from FENSA. It was a duplicate certificate. How do you manage to send 2 certificates out? A bit of a shambles.

A few weeks go by, then I receive a call from some other inspection company saying they would like to come round for the inspection. I was quite excited for it, because surely they would fail the inspection and I could get them to reinstall windows that actually work, and fix the damage to the wall.

The guy that turned up was in a FENSA uniform which was confusing since that wasn’t the company that called. I thought FENSA was outsourcing the inspection, but he seemed like he was actually from FENSA. He “inspects” the downstairs windows, and by that, I mean he glanced at them and used some sort of electronic device against each pane of glass (he just pressed it against it and it beeped, no idea what it was actually doing). He then said “I think that’s all done then”, and I was like “erm, don’t you need to go upstairs?”.

So he goes upstairs and does the same with the bathroom and hallway, then he was about to go back down until I reminded him that he hasn’t looked in any of the 3 bedrooms. In one of the bedrooms, he used the device against 1 glass pane and was about to walk out, but I pointed out there was another 2 panes above the main window.

We get into the problematic bedroom, and I explain the problems with the draught, and the crack in the wall. For the draughts, he said he could see sealant around the windows so it was fine. I told him originally there was no sealant, but I got the window company back in to seal it. However, there were still a few sections where a draught was coming in, and if a draught is coming in, there must be an entry point outside the house too. He said he wasn’t gonna check outside. He basically said that he just checks there are windows, and there’s a decent amount of sealant around them. Any draughts or other damage are outside the scope of what they check. For the crack in the wall, he said it looked like the crack had been there a while, so he thought I was falsely blaming the window installers.

I expected FENSA to act as an Ombudsman that would step in to resolve disputes. I thought they would have a high standard of quality and actually carry out a thorough inspection. You know; get ladders out and check the minor details with fancy equipment. Then give you a certificate only if it passes their rigorous standards.

What happened was: they sent me a certificate to say it has passed (twice in fact), then sent someone round as a token gesture who couldn’t wait to leave as soon as he came through the door. Probably wasn’t even 10 minutes to check 9 rooms and 2 doors.

I thought it was like when software developers create a “Pull Request” for their peers to review against the “coding standards” and “best practices”, but all their colleague does is casually glance at it and click “approve”. There’s no real “quality gate”, people are just box-ticking without any thought to bypass the process.