Ethan

u/firelizzard@programming.dev
12 posts · 378 comments

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šŸ˜†šŸ˜‚šŸ¤£ Are you kidding? Have you tried using nouveau? It works, sure, but you can’t play games that are even vaguely modern and if something uses up a bit too much RAM the entire display system starts jittering/lagging or becomes unresponsive. Source: I ran nouveau with a GTX 2080 for years. I was only able to fully ditch Windows once I fully ditched Nvidia (by switching to an AMD GPU and scrubbing every last vestige of Nvidia’s bullshit off my PC).

Speak for yourself. I’m a huge Linux fan but I find it rather easy to not annoy people. Mostly because IDGAF what OS anyone who isn’t me is using. And the only time I’d ever recommend Linux is if someone technical was asking for advice. If they’re non-technical, I will tell them to not use Linux (no fucking way am I going to be their tech support). If they’re technical, they can decide on their own (unless they ask me directly).

on Vibe management · c/programmer_humor · 6 pts · 73d

Possible in the sense that biological brains and human brains aren’t special. But no one will ever convince me that large language models (I’m talking about the actual math and programming that they use today for ā€œAIā€) will ever be actually intelligent.

And it’s management’s job to multiply the senior’s estimate by 5 and +/-50% for good measure. And even then, that’s a rough estimate at best.

Maybe using points for some planning actually works; I’ve never worked at a place that could use it for actual estimates. My estimates are entirely based on gut feel, my feeling of the complexity involved and my feeling of how much the team can get done. Over the last two years (since metastasizing into a CTO) my overall estimates have pretty much always been in the right ballpark. Which is to say, when the CEO says ā€œWe’re going to do X, Y, and Z this quarter,ā€ I say ā€œWe’ll be able to reach about 50% completion if we work on all of those at the same time,ā€ I’m usually more or less right.

I’ve never worked with a dev who could make significantly better estimates than me (excluding the early years of my career when my estimates were absolutely awful). Most of the devs I’ve worked with just wouldn’t give estimates; if pushed they’d be as vague as they possibly could. The only boss I’ve had who would give definite estimates was always off by an order of magnitude (as in he thought it would be 10x easier than it was, even though he had decades of experience writing code and managing teams).

Most devs absolutely suck at estimating the time involved in a task. If management is setting deadlines by asking ā€œhow many hours will this task takeā€ then missing a deadline is on management.

If the squash merge is too big to review then that change should have been broken up into multiple separate changes. Regardless whether you’re using pull requests or some equivalent or directly merging feature branches, if ā€œone unit of workā€ is too much to review when squashed, then your unit of work is too big and needs to be split up. A unit of work should always be reviewable as a whole.

I constantly rebase my feature branches regardless of how many commits there are and whether I’ve pushed any of them. So long as no one else has checked out my branch it’s perfectly safe. Personally I find rebase merge conflicts far easier to work with. Traditional merge conflicts are ā€œHere’s someone else’s changes, figure out how to merge them into your feature branch.ā€ Rebase merge conflicts are ā€œThe main branch has changed since you made your changes. Re-apply your changes to the new base.ā€ For me/my brain, the latter is so much easier. The only time I ever run into problems is when there are merges in the history I’m rebasing. Which I avoid by never merging into my feature branches, only rebasing.

And if it goes wrong, just git rebase —abort. Or if you already completed the rebase, git reset —hard origin/YOUR-BRANCH. Or if you majorly fucked up, use git reflog to find a good commit and reset to that. Zero risk if you know what you’re doing.

on githubDownDaily · c/programmer_humor · 1 pts · 91d

The tangible cost of the server it runs on and the intangible costs of the engineering time required to set up and maintain it are more than the cost of SaaS equivalents. We could but it’s a better business decision to migrate to another SaaS (since GitHub has become so unreliable).

on githubDownDaily · c/programmer_humor · 4 pts · 91d

I set up and maintained a GitLab instance and GitLab CI runners for five years. It was fine. I still hated it. I loath maintaining infrastructure.

on githubDownDaily · c/programmer_humor · 2 pts · 91d

Oh fuck off. I’m not talking about the GitLab instance. Those aren’t hard. The trauma is from other stuff, but it adds a spicy flavor of stress and anxiety to all infrastructure work.

on githubDownDaily · c/programmer_humor · 3 pts · 91d

It’s not as much time as it is stress, anxiety, and trauma. Being on call when shit breaks is fucking awful and my best coping strategy to date is refusing to be an infrastructure person and aggressively not giving a fuck when things are down for a day or two.

on githubDownDaily · c/programmer_humor · 4 pts · 91d

I'm the only person at my (small startup) company who has the skills to maintain a GitLab instance. Been there, done that, never fucking again. I HATE maintenance. We're probably going to migrate to some other platform since GitHub is intent on turning to shit.

on githubDownDaily · c/programmer_humor · 3 pts · 91d

What do you use for project management? What platform-less system are you using for that? Or are you saying to use a non-US platform? Do you have specifics.

on githubDownDaily · c/programmer_humor · 93 pts · 92d

Git allows me to write code as much as I want. But GitHub does more than just Git. If you don’t remember the details of the next task you need to work on and GitHub is down, that’s a problem. As a senior I spend a lot of time reviewing PRs. That’s considerably harder when GitHub is down.