There are Two kinds of people in the world…
Which one do you fall under? I actually fall under neither because for me EOD is when I sign off for the day which is usually about 1am-2am depending, as when I say EOD I mean my End of Day i.e. when I log off for the day/night.
– Suramya
Interviewing people is hard and each of us has their own bag of tricks and filters we use to identify the correct candidate for the position. However, some of the ways that people use to filter out applicants just make you go ‘Wow!’ with a head shake. One such example is below:
Using a phone preference as a filter is not the right way to filter out candidates, if this becomes the norm then folks will start filtering candidates on what music they like, what brands they wear or what car they drive. Unless you are working at apple rejecting people for using an Android phone (which for the record is way better then iPhone) is foolish. It is also extremely classist, it automatically filters out people who can’t afford to buy an expensive iPhone as the General cost range for an iPhone is between $500 – $1,500+ whereas an Android phone would range between $100-$1,750+. It also filters out people who care about compatibility of their phone with other users at their home as it is hard to connect an iPhone to an Android ecosystem.
Plus it tells me that you are more concerned about arbitrary markers of evaluation than actually relevant criteria. Personally, I think that if the person interviewing me is using something like this as a filtering mechanism then I am better off getting rejected as who know what insane criteria they might come up with for performance evaluation once you join and start working with them.
I do have a lot of thoughts on interview processes and how some companies do screening but that is a post for another time.
– Suramya
This screenshot of the synopsis for ‘Alien’ popped up in my feed earlier and I couldn’t stop laughing.
“Space ship people get up from sleeping coffin and have eat. Computer woman find strange noisings on planet and astronauts go to seeing. Astronauts find big elephant man who dead then find too many egg/
Astronaut is possess by egg demon and new egg demon is come when eat bad noodle. Seven friends and cat all try to find egg demon before ship go home but is hard working.
Who will life to escaping? Who is bad milk blood robot? Scream not working because space make deaf.”
This reminds me of “All your base are belong to us” which was another masterpiece of bad translation.
– Suramya
Twitter downtimes are becoming more and more common, and even though I don’t spend that much time on Twitter anymore (Mastodon is so much better and more fun) this was too good to ignore.
If you visit Twitter.com (or any url on twitter) right now instead of the content you get an API error message stating that “Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint, please see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api for more information”.
Looks like the team managed to nuke their own connections to the API while attempting to restricting some API calls to paid customers only. Although this is an error that should have been caught in UAT or QA testing. I mean that is the basic 1st thing to check to see if all services are working after a major change like this one. But it looks like it was pushed to prod directly without validation.
I guess firing a majority of your teams with almost no notice or Knowledge Transfer sessions is a bad move and makes it harder to keep your site up and running. Who knew?
– Suramya
The Operating System (OS) wars have been going on since we have had computers and the ferocity with which some OS users defend their preference at times borders on that of fundamentalist religions. The following incident just takes it to the logical conclusion, where a new joiner in a company doesn’t want to use windows on their office laptop because their religion does not allow use of Apple or Microsoft owned Operating Systems.
I wonder that their stance is about using other software/websites/services owned by Apple/Microsoft. Have they stopped using Github because it is owned by MS? What about LinkedIn? or Mojang, X-Box? or any of the thousands of companies they own or have stakes in. Do they use Beat headsets? Shazam? Akamai? Apple either owns or has stakes in them and a ton of other companies as well.
I personally use Linux as my primary OS and would always prefer to use it whenever possible. However, I have had to use Windows at work in most of the companies that I have worked in because that’s what the standard setup was over there. I did push for Linux in some of the orgs and we ended up replacing Windows with Linux for some of the developers in a few companies. That being said, refusing to work with an OS because you don’t want to is a bit over the top for me and calling it against their religion makes it even more out there…
Source: Whitney Merrill on Mastadon
– Suramya
It is funny how people will make up stuff to explain why Linux (or any other OS) is difficult and why the person making the pronouncements can’t get it to do what they want it to do. Recently, the screenshot below came up in my feed and it made me laugh. As per the author only autistic people use Linux and everyone else “has just fallen for the meme”.
I have been using Linux almost full time since 2001 and am definitely not autistic. I can’t identify trains by their sounds and instead of not being able to talk to girls, according to some I sometimes talk too much. I have no interest in learning the names of the cast for any TV show and as far as I can tell I am leading a pretty normal life.
The genius who penned this (and I am of half a mind that this is just someone trolling Linux users) doesn’t seem to know that it is used to power 96.3% of the world’s top web servers and Android is based on Linux as well. It is the world’s 3rd most popular OS (after Windows and Mac) and while it has its own quirks it def doesn’t need you to know the in’s and out of the computer in order to use it. In fact in my experience, it is easier to install Linux and have a functional setup than it is to install Windows as Windows requires a lot of extra stuff to be installed in order to be productive while in Linux most of that is already pre-installed or built-in.
This was good for a laugh so I wanted to share it here.
– Suramya
They say that the best way to gauge if someone understands a topic in depth is to see if they can explain it in language simple enough that a 5 year old can understand. Too many people use acronyms and buzzwords to explain stuff that just confuses people and makes it harder to figure out what people are talking about. There was an old XKCD joke about explaining something using the top 1k most commonly used words in English (See an example about a Rocket below). There is a book about it as well called the ‘Thing Explainer‘ that I had gifted to Vir (my Nephew) a while ago. They both (Vir & Sara) love it and still refer to it quite often.
Theo Sanderson was inspired by the idea and has created a website where you can attempt to explain something with only the top 1000 most commonly used English words.
Writing like this actually sounds a lot easier than it is and when I tried it, it took me a few tries to write something that passed the test. Check it out and share your creative writing. 🙂
– Suramya
Just realized today that in my 24+ years of programming I have never named a variable foo, bar or baz. These are the goto names for placeholders in code & metaphysical variables and have decades of history behind them. Most programmers use them for temporary variables or place holders. Since I have never used them, can I still call myself a programmer? 😀
Jokes aside, you should use good variable names in your code that are meaningful, easy to read and concise. Some guidelines on how to do that are below:
Also, another point to keep in mind is to avoid acronyms that can have a different meaning in a different language or resemble rude words etc. See the screenshot below for an example of a ‘bad’ variable name:
Well this is all for now. Will post more later.
– Suramya
In the past few weeks I have seen this joke multiple times where they talk about programmers automating something in 10 days that could be done manually in 10 mins. It does seem funny and people love to think that programmers like doing things the hard way. At times this is true but not always. There is a reasoning behind why we spend 10 days automating a 10 min task. When people look at this they don’t consider the frequency of the task i.e. how many times we are doing that 10 min task. Most of the time you will find that the 10 min task was being done fairly frequently and wasting a lot of time.
When I evaluated candidates for automation in one of my previous companies we had a calculation we used to determine if a process was a candidate for automation. We looked at the time required to complete, complexity of the task (ease of automation), the frequency at which it was done (hourly/daily/weekly/yearly) and the resources freed if automated. Then we looked at how long it would take to automate the process. Looking at the two values we would take the call to automate or not depending on the return of investment from the automation. So, if we had something that was only 10 minutes but done daily then spending the 10 days to automate would probably make sense. On the other hand if the task was a one-off or done yearly then it wouldn’t be a candidate for automation.
Programmers love to automate things. I have automated most of the tasks that I do frequently for system maintainance etc. However not every task needs to be automated and assuming that programmers are doing it just for the heck of it is a disservice. But it is funny. Take a look at a Rube Goldberg machine if you want to see this taken to the extreme, where everything is automated in a manner as complicated as possible.
– Suramya
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