Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

Yeah. Random example: I have better "ambient awareness" remotely because with slack I am in every hallway simultaneously, and can skim the conversations and set up highlight words

> Somehow we were better at using remote tools while literally in the same office than some teams are at using them now while fully remote.

I couldn't agree more. I pushed to get the place I worked for to use Slack when it first launched, moving us off AIM (ha!). Our use of Slack when we shared an office in the twenty-teens was so much better than the use I've seen of Slack/competitors on fully-remote teams.

I wonder if it's because the failure mode was, as you said, to "drop by." Now the failure mode is... just failure.

Electronic chat is really not the same as face-to-face communication. Neither are video calls.

> Somehow we were better at using remote tools while literally in the same office than some teams are at using them now while fully remote.

This is sort of the point. Remote tools work great when you have spent a lot of time building relationships and rapport with the people involved. That's hard to do in professional settings, and extremely hard to do in remote professional settings.

Letting teams that know each other well work remotely works great. Building teams remotely is very hard.

I'm a diehard for remote work, but we have to be realistic abouts limitations.

now we do the work of 7 projects in half a team paid 50% less and can't get to help anyone as we all drown in 7 tickets we should do in parallel with agents writing docu on the side and assist and some of the easier code on the side because management drank the koolaid of going full into AI and "the Team now can do 300% more right". I miss the old times where making 100k and still could have few minutes to help each other and now we're in this hypercapitalistic garbage AI age were we have to just output, output, output and fuck quality and else they lay you off and get the next guy from wherever.

I am indeed learning, working to close those gaps.

For automated testing, I'm in the middle of reading Developer Testing by Alexander Tarlinder, with xUnit Test Patterns by Gerard Meszaros coming close behind. I'm also working through Test-Driven Development: By Example with my wife as we have time.

For SQL, I read Grokking Relational Database Design by Qiang Hao last winter, and I started SQL Queries for Mere Mortals by John Viescas this week. Sadly, my flub with "left inner join" was not a joke.

For OOP, I've been on a whirlwind tour: OOA&D With Applications by Booch et al., Object Thinking by David West, POODR and 99 Bottles of OOP by Sandi Metz, Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans, IDDD and DDDD by Vaughn Vernon, and Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen, Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin, and Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck. Still on the docket are Design Patterns by the Gang of Four, PoEAA by Martin Fowler, Smalltalk, Objects, and Design by Chamond Liu, and Object Design by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock.

> confessing that you don't know something and gleefully stopping there is not much better [...] we shouldn't let shamelessness about what we don't know limit us either

I promise you, this was not gleeful and this was not shameless. Shame and fear affected me for months on these issues. And I'm not stopping there... From the end of the article: "I’m going to continue to work on skill building, but now I feel free to write about it. If [...] you’d like to help me fill [my knowledge gaps], [...]"

> if you want to write a blog about a topic, then part of the requirements here is that you do hold yourself to a high standard

A high standard of writing, maybe. But plenty of great stories come from those who are striving for a high standard, not just those already in the upper echelon. It's what makes this place different from academic journals.

Not exactly your main point, but where’d you go to learn calculus? I did the usual classes in high school but none since, and I’d love to develop a better appreciation for it.

So many things like that!

I don't know if I could tell you with confidence the proper way to get a string length in any language. Is it a global function or an object method or property? Is it length or count or size? I have to look it up or rely on intellisense every time. I do too much bouncing between languages.

Well, I know it in BASIC. Len().

I’ve spent so much time in both the .NET and JS worlds that I can't even begin to count how many times I’ve typed `Where` when I meant `filter` or vice versa.

In python, it's trivial:

def main(): # code

The dunder syntax you see around isn't required.

With Java 24 it’s now:

    void main() {
   
    }

I set up some .NET services years ago. Since then it was just adding new stuff. If I was asked how to set up another service, I would have no idea how to do it

What, `def main():`? Or do you mean the __name__ == "__main__" thing for distinguishing whether the code was imported?

Continuing the confessions: I do php.net/<function_name> at least twice a day

It's the main benefit of Rust ;)

(obviously it's not but it is super nice that main in Rust is just:)

    fn main() {
    
    }

All the confessions are highly subjective. If someone tried a refactor like the one at https://refactoring.com/catalog/replaceConditionalWithPolymo... there is a decent chance it should get picked up and reverted on code review.

Taking a switch statement and spreading it out over 3x classes is not a general improvement, it is very context specific. It makes the code difficult to navigate because what used to all be in one spot and easy to read is now spread out who-knows-where and there might be a special case lurking somewhere.

I suppose I included the last section as a "confession" because I spent years pre-pandemic wishing I could go remote, talking loudly about how open office spaces were bad, etc. That, plus it's embarrassing to admit that I dislike remote work even though I am a remote worker. And not just a remote worker, but an enfranchised remote worker living 3 hours away from the nearest city with an international airport. I made the mistake of rebuilding my life around remote work before I had experienced it long-term.

I was as curious as you were. Turns out there are only so many popular threaded discussion sites in the vein of HN on the Internet, so an educated guess is all it takes.

Without making judgment on the actions of any involved party, I do wonder why the author would choose to bring up this incident and submit it as part of a story to a site where there is a significant overlap in readership.

Probably already a subreddit for it like r/programminghorror.

https://thedailywtf.com/

It would attract the humble-braggers. ;)