Yeah management is totally backwards there; it’s like the building manager on a construction project going “all electrical needs to be done in X weeks”, but realistically they have no direct control over that deadline being met by declaring an arbitrary deadline. The unfortunate difference is that if you do a shitty job wiring a building, you’ll fail inspection and have to spend more time and money fixing it. Software can often hobble along; there aren’t strict enforcements for quality that the business can legally ignore, so you’ll always have sad defeated devs go “okay boss, we’ll skip the things we need to get this done faster for you (I hate this job and don’t care about the product’s long term success)”. Having a steady supply of those people will slowly kill a software company.

In the past, I’ve dealt with estimate pushback not by explaining what necessary work can be removed like tests, documentation, or refactoring, but by talking through ways to divide the project more effectively to get more people involved (up to a point, a la mythical man month). That seems to go more proactively. Then we look at nixing optional requirements. But, I’ve also usually dealt with mostly competent engineering management.

The thing that frustrates me about developers who feel powerless over technical debt is…who is actually stopping them from dealing with it? They way I see it, as a software engineer, your customer is sales/marketing/product/etc. They don’t care about the details or maintenance, they just want the thing. And that’s okay. But you have to include the cost of managing technical debt into the line items the customer wants. That is, estimate based on doing the right things, not taking shortcuts. Your customer isn’t reading your commits. If they were, they wouldn’t need you.

It would be bizarre if your quote for getting your house siding redone included line items for changing the oil on the work truck, organizing the shop, or training new crew members. But those costs of business are already factored into what you pay at the end of the day.

James Cameron knows all too well both the artistic input required for perfection in CGI heavy filmmaking as well as the tedium and cost involved with parts of that process. I consider him joining to be better than other folks; probably will help to focus on artist tooling rather than replacing the artistry entirely.

It was actually pretty good. I remember having to pass an ingame training course to use the medic class. I still vaguely remember how to apply a tourniquet lol

I really wish we could focus on the actual causes of high government spending instead of this or that tax rate.

I tend to think it’s due to use it or lose it budgets. Same thing happens outside government too. You get a chunk of money to use, and if you don’t spend it all, you’ll probably get less next year. If you spend it all, you might be able to argue for more next year since you ran out.

There’s little incentive for the groups doing the spending to save a lot of money, especially if they know they only take a tiny piece of the enormous pie. But it collectively causes that pie to have to be enormous.

Is there any real world solution to this endemic behavioral incentives problem with some history of large scale long-term success? Naive solutions can easily backfire or lead to corruption. You don’t want to incentivize cutting so much that necessary spending is impacted either.

Yeah my house is almost 100 years old but it’s pretty close to a lot of stuff. The small bit of land is worth as much as the house.

Always irks me when articles and pundits talk about housing prices without distinguishing between land value and structure value. Like…the data is easily accessible. Just look at the parcel map, not Zillow or whatever.

They probably wanted to use Rust but got frustrated by its struct and impl paradigm.

They’re backtracking now that they need workers back. Sure, there was some very short quarterly profit increase. But at what cost?

And this will lead to games with more animations and better animations, not a loss of animation jobs. Might lower the skill ceiling a bit, but there are always going to be bespoke animations requiring much more manual work, especially for non-humanoids and objects. Animators will be able to focus their time more broadly.

Which is faster, getting a squiggle instantly or discovering a silly bug at runtime later? So happy I could write code in Typescript and be confident it would do what I expected when it ran without digging out the debugger.

The language and its standard libraries lead developers towards common patterns. Javascript’s standard library is pretty sparse excluding browser-only web apis, so there are tons of external libraries to fill the gap for better or worse.

I commit and squash before pushing the branch if I have to change what I’m working on. Keeps the changes on remote so I don’t lose progress. Not like a PR is open if the work I isn’t ready anyway.

If it’s a build artifact, put it in a registry. If it’s resource type files, Git LFS can be used if it’s not an absolute ton.

But did you PULL the string?!