to add to this, id like standardization of qualification and competencies - kind of like a license so I don't have to "demonstrate" myself during interviews.
I hate being in a candidate pool that all have a degree and experience, we all go through a grueling interview process on college basics, and the "best one gets picked." Company says "our interview process works great, look at the great candidates we hire." like, duh, your candidate pool was already full of qualified engineers with degrees/experience, what did you expect to happen?
I'm betting you aren't involved in hiring? The number of engineers I've interviewed with graduate degrees from top universities who are fundamentally unable to actually write production quality code is mind-boggling. I would NEVER hire somebody without doing some panel with coding, architecture/systems design, and behavioral/social interviews.
This. I've had someone in my team that was completely self-taught with no relevant education that was a great dev.
I've also interviewed someone that supposedly had a master degree and a couple of certificates and couldn't remember how to create a loop during the interview.
I don't know how you could properly implement "standardization of qualification and competencies" without just min-maxing it in a way that favors academics
good question. Software and computer practices are changing much faster than other fields but with time, pillars are being better and better defined. Production quality code, CI/CD, DevOps, etc..
Civil engieers have a successful licensure process established. See my comment regarding that.
But an approach where a candidate would spend time under a "licensed professional software eng" would favor practical work experience over academic.
Programming should be more like other trades, apprentice for a year or two before getting journeymen status, then work up to master status. Pay and job changing becomes more fair, and we get some reasonable fucking hours and rules to keep us from making overworked mistakes.
Companies know what they’re getting asked on the programmer’s level (specific experience will still matter, but baseline will be much more standard).
And workers get experience and learn from the gray beards instead of chatgpting their way into a job they don’t understand.
the trades is a great example of having to work under a professional. Other engineering disciplines also have successful licensure processes. See my comment regarding that.
There are parallels to be drawn between licensed professionals (like doctors, CPAs, lawyers, civil engineers) that they all have time under a professional and the professional then signs off and bears some responsibility vouching for a trainee.
There are parallels to be drawn between licensed professionals (like doctors, CPAs, lawyers, civil engineers) that they all have time under a professional and the professional then signs off and bears some responsibility vouching for a trainee.
We need to keep in mind that the main value proposition of these licenses is to bar people from practicing. There is no other purpose.
In some activities this gatekeeping mechanismo is well justified: a doctor who kills people out of incompetence should be prevented from practicing, and so do accountants who embezzle and civil engineers who get people killed by designing and building subpar things.
Your average software developers doesn't handle stuff that gets people killed. Society gains nothing by preventing a software developer from implementing a button in a social network webapp.
society gains nothing by preventing a software developer from implementing ...
I see the point you are trying to make but I respectfully disagree. Technology is at the core of seemingly every field and at the core of technology is software. Will it result in direct bodily harm? Rarely. But indirectly the impact is certainly more substantial.
Take internet as an example. The significance of internet and information sharing cannot be disputed. Disturptions to information sharing can send ripples through services that provide essential services. Networking these days is accomplished Vida software defined networking techniques. And we are becoming more dependant on technology and automation.
I can see why the indirect risk is not as scary as direct risk, but you have to admit, as automation is growing and decisions are being made for us, regulation of those that build these systems should not be overlooked. Professional engineers have a code of ethics they have to adhere to and if you read through it you can see the value it would bring.
As a counter example to your "doctors are licensed to not kill people" - orthodontists, who move teeth around, pose no fatal risk to their patients. Should they be exempt from being licensed?
EDIT:
Just yesterday news was published by Reuters that Musk and managers at Tesla knew about defects of autopilot but marketed otherwise. If those working on it had been licensed, then negligence and decietfulness could line them up to lose their license and prevent them from working in this line again. It would bring accountability
As a counter balance to that though, interviewers need to understand what they are hiring for and tailor the questions asked to those requirements.
For example, there is genuinely very little coding required of an SRE these days but EVERY job interview wants you to do some leetcode style algorithm design.. Since containers took over, the times I have used anything beyond relatively unremarkable bash scripts is exceptionally small. It's extremely unlikely that I will be responsible for a task that is so dependent on performance that I need to design a perfect O(1) algorithm. On terraform though, I'm a fucking surgeon.
SRE specifically should HEAVILY focus on system design and almost all other things should have much much less priority.. I've failed plenty of skill assessments just because of the code though.
As a counter balance to that though, interviewers need to understand what they are hiring for and tailor the questions asked to those requirements.
This does not happen. At all.
Back in reality we have recruiters who can't even spell the name of the teck stacks they are hiring for as a precondition, and asking for impossible qualifications such as years of experience in tech stacks that were released only a few months ago.
From my personal experience, cultural fit and prior experience are far more critical hiring factors, and experience in tech stacks are only relevant in terms of dictating how fast someone can onboard onto a project.
Furthermore, engineering is all about solving problems that you never met before. Experience is important, but you don't assess that with leetcode or trivia questions.
Evaluation is fine but I'd like to eliminate the overuse of leetcode style questions. I've used those skills in exactly two places: school and tech interviews. If the tech job is actually for a scientific/biotech company then it's fair game.
Also, schools don't really prepare students for writing production code (if it's a compsci degree). I learned about unit testing, mocking, dependency injection, environment configs, REST APIs, and UI/UX on the job.
It varies on who does the interview but I push for much simpler than leetcode type stuff- e.g. not puzzle problems but more "design a program that can represent a parking structure and provide a function that could be used for the ticket printer to determine where a new car should park, as well as one that can run upon exit to determine payment"
Then if they are actually solid we can dive into complexity and optimization and if they can't write a class or a function at all (and esp if they can't model a problem in this way) it's really obvious.
Are the distances between the meter and the spaces already known and accessible?
And yet that could rule people like me out. I have a history of delivering longer than most developers have been alive, across many technologies, languages, toolsets, for several industries. My resume looks fantastic, and I can pull together a larger strategy and project plan in my sleep, and deliver a cost effective and quality solution.
However after jumping across all these technologies, I really rely on my IDE for the syntax. I’ll use a plugin for the cli syntax of whatever tool, framework or cloud service we’re using today.
I like to think I’m extremely qualified, but that programming test on paper will get me every time (why the eff is anything on paper these days), and certifications were a thing for early in your career
Aren't paper tests usually pseudocode?
I think it's important to check for competencies that are valuable to the employer during the interview process. However many, but admittingly not all, employers will use time constrained college level puzzels that a candidate can usually only solve if they have seen it before.
I've been on both sides of the interview process. In my day to day I use a debugger to verify and step through code all the time. Hacker rank, the leading platform to test candidates and generate a metric report, doesn't even have a debugger. Off-by-one index mistakes are sooo common to see from a candidate who is under time pressure. A few iterations with a debugger and problem solved. I advocate for candidates to develop on their on env and share their screen or bring it with them. But anyway, I'm ranting.
I agree with most comments arguing against a standardization and pointing to the weakness. I didn't say it works great, I just wish it was like some other professionals have. See my comment about other engineering disciplines that have a successful licensure process.
to add to this, id like standardization of qualification and competencies - kind of like a license so I don’t have to “demonstrate” myself during interviews.
I strongly disagree. There is already a standardization of qualification of competences in the form of cloud vendor certifications. They are all utter bullshit and a huge moneygrab which do nothing to attest someone's experience or competence.
Certifications also validate optimizing for the wrong metric, like validating a "papers, please" attitude towards recruitment instead of actually demonstrate competence, skill, and experience.
Also, certifications validate the parasitic role of a IT recruiter, the likes of which is responsible for barring candidates for not having decades of experience in tech stacks they can't even spell and released just a few months ago. Relying on certifications empower parasitic recruiters to go from clueless filterers to outright gatekeepers, and in the process validate business models of circumventing their own certification requirements.
We already went down this road. It's a disaster. The only need this approach meets is ladder-pulling by incompetent people who paid for irrelevant certifications and have a legal mechanism to prevent extremely incompetent people from practicing, and the latter serves absolutely no purpose on software development.
I agree with what you said, it is a shit show. but I wish it weren't so.
My good friend is a civil engineer and for him to obtain a Professional Engineer license (PE) he had to complete a four-year college degree, work under a PE licensed engineer for at least four years, pass two intensive competency exams and earn a license from their state's licensure board. Then, to retain their licenses, PEs must continually maintain and improve their skills throughout their careers.
This licencing approach is prohibitive to just "pay your way" through. This never caught on in software and computer eng because of how quickly it was (and still is) changing. But certain pillars are becoming better defined such as CI/CD, production-safe code & practices, DevOps.
Attention and awareness of the ways in which modern technology is harming ourselves.
We're providing people with the electronic equivalent of heroin, from a young age, completely rewiring our brains and detaching us from nature and each other.
The statistic that ~90% of American teens own an iPhone was shocking to me. It makes me think that from a young age, children are taught not to question but just accept their cage. If closed source is all they grow up with, opensource will be foreign to them. And that in a way that's worse than when you grow up with windows which doesn't completely lock you in.
I’m not surprised that 90% have a phone, but am surprised that’s specific to iPhone Where are you you Android people at?
Android users aren't having kids. /s
This! I feel it myself, my ADHD was much better when I stayed in a relatively natural setting with only little technology. for a few weeks (I did some programming there though, and boy was I focused in complex problems without medication etc. had one of my best coding sessions there I think). I'm pretty sure that a lot of ADHD but also other psychiatric issues like autism or social anxiety etc. that is diagnosed these days is because of all this unhealthy environment we have created. Or in other words, our modern technology promotes psychiatric issues such as ADHD, autism, social anxiety etc.
Fun fact: car emissions cause allergies
Three things off the top of my head:
Unionisation
Way more stuff publicly funded with no profit motive
Severe sanctions on US tech giants all around the world, with countries building up their own workforce and tech infrastructure. No more east india company bullshit.
Severe sanctions on US tech giants
For the hell of it? Because they’re inherently evil? Protectionism am to develop local industry?
I’ve worked for a few, but not the consumer giants most people think of. I haven’t found them evil, and they support employees across the world.
I’ll go even further with developing countries in particular. From my perspective, entire software industries were built on multi-national funding, and we still pay better than local companies. The biggest change over the last decade or two has been switching models from cheapest outsourcing to employing local talent everywhere
This is just like, my opinion, but here you go:
If you live in the western sphere, the US tech giants control half of your critical infrastructure and invade every aspect of your personal and professional life. If you live outside the US, they do not answer to you or to anyone you can vote for. They lean on your government for permission to turn your whole existence into a series of transactions, and then extract as much value as possible from each one. The money doesn't swirl around your community making everyone richer. Instead, 5% goes to pay a few nice salaries in your biggest city, and the rest of it gets funneled straight out of the country and into california.
Even Europe - their imperial mentor and favourite uncle - is treated like shit. Europe built half of their technology but controls none of it. There is not a single european tech giant. Every last one is american, with extensive ties to the US government and security apparatus.
Never thought of it that way. Depending on your definitions, here’s a top 20 list that has SAP as the only European company. Asian ones are getting pretty common though
To give some example, I saw recently an article about a Frenchman looking to fill some paperwork, which was possible... Except the account needed you to install some Android app, and the app used Google services.
Author was saying that, since he doesn't think he should have to create a Google account to fill in some paperwork, he will send a letter instead. A damn letter, like Germany or something
Haha yeah, I was eager to watch the recent SoaceX test launch but their official feed required a Twitter account. So I patronized some random YouTuber instead
More focus on the ability to maintain, repair, and perhaps even upgrade existing tech. So often people are pushed to upgrade constantly, and devices aren't really built to last anymore. For example, those yearly trade in upgrade plans that cell phone providers do. It sucks knowing that, once the battery in my cell phone finally dies, the whole phone is essentially garbage and has to be replaced. I miss my older smartphones that still had replaceable batteries, because at least then it's just the battery that's garbage.
We're throwing so much of our very limited amount of resources right into landfills because of planned obsolescence.
I think the solution to this will come by itself: the supply chain will break down and people will have to learn to make do with what they have. It was like that in the Soviet Union, is like that in some parts of the world right now, and can easily return if we don't get climate change in check.
once the battery in my cell phone finally dies, the whole phone is essentially garbage
I don’t get this. I understand they aren’t user replaceable but surely you can get it replaced? Given how good batteries are, they easily last 2-3 years. iPhones are supported for 5-6 years so you only ever need one replacement
Getting my iPhone battery replaced has typically cost about $75, not all that different from a decade ago spending $35 for a user replaceable battery for a flip phone
One major difference now is that at least iOS gives me a good measurement of battery health so I can make data driven decision
More privacy and less profit 🫣
I realize most people could rather not pay for a service they currently have for free (which is partly due to the lack of transparency regarding our data usage).
It's possible that a donation based-society might work. However, I'm not sure how that can be achieved in parallel to a profit-based society (the on we majorly have to take part in).
IMO one way is to force the issue by making certain methods of profit impossible or not worth it in the long run. Something like "don't use it? you lose it" in terms of patents or proprietary solutions. For example if a company stops producing and supporting something, then it has to release the designs, code, and intellectual property to the public.
Have developers be more mindful of the e-waste they're contributing to by indirectly deprecating CPUs when they skip over portions of their code and say "nah it isn't worth it to optimize that thing + everyone today should have a X cores CPU/Y GB of RAM anyway". Complacency like that is what leads software that is as simple in functionality as equivalent software was one or two decades ago to be 10 times more demanding today.
Yes!! I enjoy playing with retro tech and was actually surprised on how much you can do with an ancient Pentium 2 machine, and how responsive the software at the time was.
I really dislike how inefficient modern software is. Like stupid chat apps that use more RAM while sitting in the background than computers had 15-20 years ago...
It leads to software obesity and is a real thing. I think it has to do with developer machines being beefy, so if you write something that runs on it and don't have a shit machine to test it on, you don't know just how badly it actually performs.
But it also has to do with programming languages. It's much much easier to prototype in Python or Javascript and often the prototype becomes the real thing. Who really has time (and/or money) to rewrite their now functional program in a language that is performant?
IMO there doesn't seem to be a clear solution.
I don't think that even the languages are the problem, it's the toolchain. While certainly if you went back to C or whatever, you can design more performant systems, I think the problem overall stems from modern toolchains being kinda ridiculous. It is entirely common in any language to load in massive libraries that suck up 100's of mb of RAM (if not gigs) to get a slightly nicer function to lowercase text or something.
The other confounding factor is "write once, run anywhere" which in practice means that there is a lot of shared code and such that does nothing on your machine. The most obvious example being Electron. Pretty much all of the Electron apps I use on the reg (which are mostly just Discord and slack) are conceptually simple apps that have analogues that used to run on a few hundred mbs of storage and 10's of mb of RAM.
Oh, one other sidetone - how many CPUs are wasting cycles on things that no one wants, like extremely complex ad-tracking/data mining/etc.
I know why this is the case, and ease of development does enable us to have software that we probably otherwise wouldn't, but this is a thing that I think is a real blight on modern computing, and I think it's solvable. I mean, probably the dumbest idea, but improving translation layers to run platform-native code can be vastly improved. Especially in a world where we have generative AI, there has to be a way to say "hey, I've got this javascript function, I need this to work in kotlin, swift, c++, etc."
LLVM will save us.
Maybe...
LLVM is ironically a very slow compiler back-end, whose popularity has contributed to a general slow-down in compilation speed across the whole industry (it's even slow at doing debug builds for fast iteration).
WASM has some promise though
Doesn't really matter if the compiler is slow if the result is optimized and fast 🤷 Rust compiles slower than C, but that's because C has no safeguards (excluding static typing). Very often the wasted CPU cycles are on the end of the user, not the developer.
Thank you for saying this. Sometimes I feel like I sm the only one thinking like this 🙇♥️
That we stop fawning over tech CEOs
The death of the device and the return of the system.
A device is a sealed thing provided on a take it or leave it basis, often designed to oppose the interests of the person using it. Like hybrid corn, a device is infertile by design: you cannot use a device to develop, test, and program more devices.
A system is a curated collection of interchangeable hardware and software parts. Some parts are only compatible with certain other parts, but there is no part that cannot be replaced with an alternative from a different manufacturer. Like heirloom seeds, systems are fertile: systems can be used to design and program both other systems and devices.
A system is a liberatory technology for manipulating information, while a device is a carceral technology for manipulating people.
Probably less elitism. "Oh you build it in x language? Well that's a shit language. You should use y language instead. We should be converting everything to y language because y language is the most superior language!"
(If this feels like a personal attack, Rust programmers, yes. But other languages as well)
To people that really spend time in code, this banter is meaningless.
Well sure, it depends on the context. If it's a shitpost on /c/programmer_humor, whatever, meaningless banter.
If it's a serious question, (maybe for a beginner) asking how to do something in their language, and the response is "It would be a lot easier in y language" - I don't think it's particularly helpful
You can write it in whatever language you want, as long as it's rust.
/s
As someone who's quite vocal about my support for Rust, I can definitely see how it can go overboard.
But on the other end of the spectrum, saying that all languages are just as good or capable and it doesn't matter which one you use is definitely wrong. There are meaningful differences. It all comes down to what your needs are (and what you/your team knows already, unless you're willing to learn new stuff).
Yea, I kept my original comment language-agnostic (Just referring to it as y language) - but added the extra wink to Rust because generally they seem to be the highest offenders.
I have years of experience in loads of languages: PHP, Ruby, Java, Python, C#, C++, Rust - And that's probably how I'd order the level of elitism. PHP Devs know everything they're doing is shit - Python should probably be next in ranking of how shit they are, but they're not self-aware enough - (Sarcastic elitism aside here - )
Anyways, besides that - at the end of the elitism-spectrum there seems to be Rust. Someone like me says something about Rust in a general unrelated-to-Rust thread like this - and a Rust enthusiast sees it, and it would just devolve into a dumbass back-end-forth about how good Rust is
C'mon, a little bit of flexing is so nice.
But, I get what you're saying. I usually filter out this bullshit (because I'm a Rustacean myself 😜) but this doesn't mean that it is as easy for someone else as it is for me.
Rewrite it in Rust? No, no, no. Rewrite it in JavaScript because then it's portable /s
The cargo culting is always going to happen and turn into elitism. But it stems from real advantages of specific technologies, and sometimes you should actually consider that the tech you're using is irresponsible when better alternatives exist.
not being forced to have an Android or Apple smartphone, so more open standards and just Web apps instead of proprietary apps
(...) so more open standards and just Web apps instead of proprietary apps
What do you classify as "proprietary apps", and from the user's standpoint where do you see a difference between them and web apps?
Pretty much anything that's only available via an app store. The difference with web apps is that I can also use them on a laptop/PC and I have a bit more control about tracking (by using ad/tracking blockers).
Phones with fully open source drivers including the bootloader and decent specs. Give me a UEFI over fastboot any day.
I'd also love it if electron and sexism would kindly go away.
I would like to see:
Corporations treating their customers like people, not just bags of money.
Corporations and employers to stop spying on people. Like, it makes me feel so unsafe and that I can't really trust them.
People becoming more tech literate.
Open source software, such as Linux being used by more people, especially those who are not so tech literate.
A pivot way from cargo cult programming and excessive containerization towards simplicity and the fewest dependencies possible for a given task.
Too many projects look like a jinga tower gone horribly wrong. This has significant maintainability and security implications.
Containerization (even for small things) makes modern infrastructure a LOT easier.
Containerization helps isolating system dependencies however
ISO-8601 only
UTF-8 only
UTC only
Oh and more self hosting. Clouds are expensive and unnecessary for some stuff.
I think what they meant is requiring that only UTC time should be in the database. This prevents ambiguity when pulling dates/times out as with many poorly designed systems it's not possible to know whether a date represents UTC time or local time.
At my work we store local time in our database and I hate it. We only serve customers in our country, which only has one time zone, so that's fine for now. But we've definitely made it harder for ourselves to expand if we ever wanted to.
Better yet, why are you not using a Date type? That’s very precisely defined, more scalable, and plenty of functionality for doing math or converting among time zones. You don’t have to care what time zone you’re in, and can give people the answer in any time zone
I get the advantage, and if I could change our schema with a click of my fingers I would, but it's not that easy. We do use the native date type in our schema, but the dates we store in there are in local time. It's bad, I know. It was originally written by a couple of people about 15 years ago, so software standards were a lot more lax back then.
We already have many customers with lots of data that are currently using this product, so it's unfortunately non-trivial to fix all of their data with the current systems we have in place.
We developers often want to fix so many things but we're often told what to do based on what the business cares more about, rather than what we actually want to fix. That's why we always end up building shit on top of shit, because the business doesn't want to pay us to rewrite 15-20 years worth of legacy code despite in doing so it would make the product an order of magnitude better in every conceivable way.
I feel your pain
That is a somewhat tongue in cheek comment. I think time zones are silly and people could easily account for the differences of what a particular time point means for them at their location. More realistically, UTC should be the only way a time stamp is stored.
Maybe we could just reduce it to 4 time zones, and no DST
Worker ownership of tech firms
Honestly, just less waste. Wasted time, wasted hardware, etc. We spend so much time building devices that are meant to break, and be unfixable,, and making software that fights the user instead of helping. All in the name of profits or something.
We could be making so many cool things, but instead we're going back and forth not making any progress.
We spend so much time building devices that are meant to break, and be unfixable, and making software that fights the user instead of helping.
Kudos to the EU for forcing mobile phone manufacturers to support replaceable batteries and standardize on USB-C charging.
I’m not sold on user replaceable phone batteries, but USB-C was a long time coming.
I just wish they had moved faster on USB standardization - I’m trying to switch but my phone and Kindle are my only USB-C devices. Either I need to waste functioning products by updating everything else or I still need chargers for older stuff back to mini-USB. It’d be nice to standardize on USB-C charging blocks but even that would mean buying new cables or adapters for four different USB form factors
I’m not sold on user replaceable phone batteries, but USB-C was a long time coming.
As someone who had a perfectly fine Android smartphone die because its battery went dead, and had to replace it with an off-brand one to keep it ticking... I can assure you that the lack of support for user-replaceable phone batteries is forcing people to throw away perfectly good hardware.
I'm sold on user replaceable batteries, just not necessarily like they are the Nokia's of old. Especially with phones, they're mature enough where the end of support for them is either a choice a company makes, or just purely because the battery is dead. Batteries don't necessarily need to be hot-swappable, but they should be able to be replaced by most people in-home, with tools you probably already have.
Data is a part of a person's individual self. Storing such data on another person is owning a part of their person. It is slavery for exploitation, manipulation, and it is wrong.
This distinction is the difference between a new age of feudalism with all of the same abuses that happened in the last one, or a future with citizens and democracy.
Never trust anyone with a part of yourself. Trust, no matter how well initially intentioned, always leads to abuse of power.
I agree with the sentiment that personal data is owned by whoever it is about. And that other organizations shouldn't be able to exploit it.
less sexism
User first, non-profit software companies.
To maximize profits, software keeps sacrificing the users happiness. I want to stop having the argument that the user would want X, but hearing we can't do that because it will hurt profits.
User first, non-profit software companies.
How do you expect to keep a non-profit software company afloat?
Non profit doesn’t mean they earn nothing
Non profit doesn’t mean they earn nothing
You need a valid business model to keep an organization ticking. Staff doesn't live out of hopes and dreams. It's hard enough to get a for-profit software company to stay up. If your starting point is that the company is not focused on getting a profit then it all sounds as hopes and dreams instead of an actual business plan.
… yes, a non profit is not meant to earn a profit. A profit is earning something more than what you need to be functioning.
Floaties, foam noodles, and a special ray gun that can turn anything into a float.
Balloons. Lot and lots of balloons.
☭
Boot out corporate shitware, boot out adverts, and stop collecting data unless it is absolutely necessary, or alternatively just cancel the fucking product and don't do it.
Out of the cloud and back into our federated hands/the edge.
People just love the easy path at the loss of sovereignty.
Respecting privacy.
Get rid of CRLF on windows or QWERTY keyboard layout
What's wrong with QWERTY?
It’s inefficient, there are many alternate layouts that are “better”. I feel like AI is going to give us auto-fill that makes the keyboard efficiency less important though.
How is it "inefficient"? There are many keyboard layouts out there for different languages. DVORAK also exists, which supposedly is better.
I'd argue that the mode of entry of inefficient, not the layout. There's a lot of movement for a finger to reach a key. Much of that movement could be reduced. An example thereof is the CharaChorder
I read OP’s comment as indicating they wanted tech to move to alternative layouts from QWERTY, and the argument is always improved wpm.
I type slow as hell, I don’t have a dog in the fight.
I thought it was well known that the studies about Dvorak being superior were fabricated by Dvorak himself... but apparently that's forgotten knowledge.
I’ll go further and say some sort of OpenStack like thing should be mainstream. Why shouldn’t home computers by default be able to deploy cloud-like services?
As a guy, I'd like to see less sexism in the field, there's no reason why gender would affect skill
A friend of mine got asked if she had a boyfriend. She asked back "why that question". It was to know whether she would be likely to get pregnant and miss work.
What a horrifying mentality some companies have
I'm curious, are you in the USA? Working in Western Europe, so far I have never seen sexism (nor racism) happen at work. Outside of it, for sure though.
Are you a guy by any chance. I also hadn't noticed until the day I asked a couple of my women colleagues. Turns out it can be very subtle but "effective". And it can also come from women.
As a guy, my manager kicks ass and we’re all extra motivated to make her look good. She used to be a peer but once she became manager, her true skills shone
Personally, I'm just sick and tired of modern UI design. Bring back density, put more information on the screen, eliminate the whitespace, use simple (and native!) widgets, get rid of those fucking sticky headers, and so on.
In addition to all the software freedom stuff, and so on. Also, I wish GPL were more popular too.
Yeeees, why do modern websites have so much horizontal whitespace? That 3 column design where 2 are empty. Just... why? Luckily firefox has a reader mode. Makes news websites much more bearable.
I love how we have free to use licences (MIT, GPL, CC, etc) and it would be really great to see the same idea used with terms of services and privacy policies! How great it would be to quickly see that this site uses fair tos and to understand what it includes? Maybe this would also nudge (at least smaller) companies toward not being horrible privacy invading monsters
Check out tosdr.org. It helps a little
That would probably be pretty hard, considering every service is different. Google drive stores your data and so their ToS probably says you can't store pirated content, but that wouldn't make sense for most other services that you can't upload stuff to.
DOM APIs in WASM.
Wait... that doesn't exist?
Afaik, the way it currently works is by calling via javascript. Ironically, the way strings are handled in the browser is also a major performance block with rust at least.
Accessibility and internationalization first. A lot of projects start without it and tack it on later. It's so much better to have good roots and promote diversity and inclusivity from the start.
Could you elaborate in what context and to what extend? I can agree that bigger companies with large user-bases should have a focus on accessibility and internationalization -
But generally a lot of projects start with just one dev solving a problem they have themselves and make their solution Open-Source. Anecdotally, I'm dumping my solutions on Github that are already barely accessible to anyone somewhat tech-illiterate. No one is paying me anything for it. Why would I care whether it's accessible or internationalized for non-English speakers?
As a solo developer, some things are out of scope like writing translations or ensuring full compliance with accessibility standards. What's important is to have some knowledge of what things block progress in these areas. For example, not treating all strings like ASCII, or preferring native widgets/html elements as those better support accessiblity tools.
Internationalization isn't about the translation. It's about not hard coding the strings that display. Putting them somewhere that is easy to swap out would allow users to provide their own if they wanted.
The disappearance of all these tech peacocks and web turkeys who focus on their number of followers and the quantity of talks rather than quality. The dev rel advocates made the atmosphere toxic
Stop forcing updates on the lower level stuff that forces people to spend billions on maintaining code. This way, we could return to a world where you can just buy software and use it for years without some update borking it.
Also outlawing financially motivated (i.e. greedy) retroactive ToS changes.
Fucking always-on connectivity and security problems caused by it are the main reason why things can't just work. You need to be updated or else.
I visited a friend not that long ago and he kept using Windows XP and The Bat and Opera around version 9. He knew every keyboard shortcut because he didn't have to relearn every few years. Never got hacked, I just wonder when his bank stops working because of TLS incompatibilities.
Any sort of “contract”with the user including ToS, licensing agreements, etc. These consistently violate contract law since it’s not a negotiation between peers, you don’t have an opportunity to read before purchasing, and there’s no direct quid pro quos for what you’re giving up. By all rights these should be unenforceable
I mean it did change for a very good reason. Stuff gets hacked because everyone is online always. In "the good old days" it wasn't a problem because people weren't really online so there was pretty much zero risk of old software being used to exploit your machine. These days? It's a liability to have old stuff on your phone because someone could exploit it to steal stuff from a large number of users.
Small security updates when necessary would be fine, but all the time I just see software (especially with the web) be like, we're deprecating these features (that millions of websites use).
Lots of stuff -
On the internet, more open standards and community driven stuff. It's currently really, really annoying that on my mastodon there are a lot of people sharing bluesky codes, as if that's not just punting the ball for another couple of years. Although this will hopefully be a better outcome than straight up silos like the old social media, fediverse still should be the default way we think about connecting humanity (or something like it, the underlying tech isn't really that important.) Also, far more things should just be like, a dollar a month or whatever instead of having a massive amount of privacy invading, user experience destroying ads.
In software in general, more privacy. It should be assumed that unless I explicitly opt in, my data is just that, mine. This is a tricky one because I remain hopeful about generative AI and that needs data to improve the models, I'm leery of sharing my data with it because so far the more pedestrian uses of data mining have not been used for things that I can really support. I remain extremely leery about GAI that isn't explicitly open source and can't be understood generally.
On the hardware side, computers have mostly been good enough for a while now. Tech will always get better, but I would like to see more of a focus on keeping working devices useful. Like, at some point, technology products will cease being possible to be useful in a practical way because it can't run modern software, but we're leaving a lot of shit behind where that's not the case. Just about any device with an SSD and a processor from the last 10 years (including phones!) should be able to be easily repaired, supported longer, and once support ends, opened up for community support.
FYI the bluesky protocol is open and there's plans to standardize. It's also federated (the sandbox network is open to 3rd parties)
There's lots of new privacy techniques from cryptography, stuff like differential privacy and MPC could help a lot with making it easier and safer to use collaboration tools.
I am skeptical of Bluesky. It's led by Jack and we've already seen how that goes. Second, there isn't really a good technical reason for it to exist as it's own protocol outside of the fact that they want to control it given that Fedi/Mastodon was already there and they could have just as easily contributed to that with the things they wanted, they just wouldn't have had full control. Similar to Threads promise to federate, I will be somewhat surprised if they ever do it.
Were Bluesky/Threads not a corporate effort, I have a feeling that it would have followed a similar pattern as the fediverse - build the protocol and release that, then the clients will follow. Bluesky still isn't federating even with its own protocol, and Threads isn't either. Given that's stuff that tiny teams with far, far fewer resources than the corps have accomplished, it's a little wild that neither have gotten there.
Especially with Bluesky, there doesn't seem to be a stated plan for how it's going to make money. And we're talking about a lot of the same people that destroyed the Twitter API and started locking things down even before Elon killed it completely and they're trying to convince us that they are pushing for an open environment.
As said many times before, Jack is now AWOL and left for nostr, he even deleted his bluesky account because the crowd didn't like him there. He doesn't have a majority on the board and don't own any majority stake either.
The motivation for a new protocol is there's architectural limits to activitypub. It's essentially email over http, it really behaves like public mailing list archives, as servers push each interaction as a message. This is part of why there's often a discrepancy between visible replies across servers because retries are limited. Account portability is also very limited as accounts and posts are tied to a server.
Bluesky switches to a content addressing model plus user ID based on a public key, allowing you to more easily move across servers as well as syncing data between servers such as thread replies, it's very much like git (user data is held in personal repositories signed by your key) with a shared CDN/cache (relay servers, previously called BGS) and "worker agents" (mostly driven by the "appview" which is the api endpoint for your client + feed generator servers). You post to your repository via your appview, it sends a ping to other servers and they sync new relevant entries.
They already have federation with 3rd parties in a sandbox network and the official server just switched on "internal federation" (used to be a single shared server, now there's 10 using the same protocol that open federation will later use)
The code is already open source, several servers in the sandbox is 3rd party reimplementations
Gotcha, thanks for the info. I'm def behind in following the goings on there. Do you have any insight on the revenue plan?
Not really.
Since handles are domain names (and your own DNS entry points to your account public key, DID) they have a referral deal with a registrar to let people easily get a custom domain and set it as a handle (otherwise your handle is a subdomain on the bluesky domain). But future plans are uncertain
Yeah, this is def a thing that is a big sticking point for me. I have a hard time supporting a company these days without a clear revenue plan because it's just kind of a bait-and-switch otherwise.
Any hardware that's abandoned needs to be forced to release the source of any needed software - the latest version.
We'd need a range of available licences, as to prevent any bullshit "you're only allowed to read this source" license.
This is going to suck for Apple, but it's going to be great for people who pay for some expensive microscope that's not supported any more.
There's probably a lot of legal nonsense that may make this impossible in practice, but I'd love to see this happen.
Same thing for companies that run out of business. When you pay for something there's a (sometimes tacit) agreement that bugs will be fixed. At least this would allow companies/users to do that themselves when needed.
So would I. Every election, the Pirate Party gets my vote. On technical issues, they are the only party that really understands what's going on.
Less software bloat.
No more proprietary software (including firmware)
No more software that spies on its users
No more software that disrespects user freedom
No more corporations solely trying to extract profit from their users
More free hardware
I want my devices to run on an OS/framework which allows everything to be scriptable. Data should be visualised using simple/consistent interface.
There will be events, Actions, variables, data-streams, etc and the operating system should provide easy interface to quickly create new programs which can
Visualize data streams (filterable) using simple interfaces(configurable)
Create scripts which can create custom events or custom actions which are just built upon existing events/actions.
In such a system, the focus of apps should not be to add fancy interfaces for simple things, but to register new events, actions, data streams, visualizers into the OS and maybe provide new templates to use these additions.
Focus more on stability in terms of apis. We can't be rewriting our apps constantly because they keep updating frameworks every year.
I think that most core frameworks put a ton of effort into backwards compatibility. Maintainers of smaller libraries and glue packages, however…
I suppose.. but when you have frameworks like Angular that update every 6 months, even the best efforts for backwards compatibility fall by the wayside.
Awareness if not prioritizing energy efficiency. We rarely give any thought to services that run 24/7 even though they're only used 8/5 or we don't care how many CPU cycles a process uses even though it has no SLO for runtime. Most companies probably think it's a question of dumping millions of carbon units into to the atmosphere or becoming luddites.
Privacy policies should concern not just the site's right to gather data, but the rights of users to post other people's data
Developers should go back writing efficient code in lower level programming languages to stop wasting CPU cycles for stupid reasons, like not wanting to use types, or something more stupid than that.
I agree but at the same time cannot be bothered to go lower level than Python for my personal projects. It's so damn convenient.
For personal projects and prototypes i believe it's fine, but when you consume the electricity of mid-size countries just because you prefer to write your production code in convenient languages don't lecture others about ecology and climate change (i am not refering to you).
@onlinepersona +1
prima donnas like Stewey on In Living Color: "Look what I kandoo!"
Less consumerism, more focus on real social aspects:
Macro: robust (decentralized) political system, that's not easily corruptible, e.g. via something like blockchain
Micro: more focus on direct interaction with other people, not via something like a screen, as another post here already said, we're harming ourselves (promote psychiatric issues etc.) with the current state of technology (smartphone overuse). We have gone much less social (direct interaction with others) because of this I'm sure of.
Just add blockchain to something, it will show em!
Actually that's one of the few cases, where a (distributed/decentralized) blockchain really makes sense (trustless ledger which can be used for incorruptible/transparent political systems)...
Ignoring all the buzzword bingo and hype.
No needing a GPU to do intensive 3d rendering and Ray tracing
What do you think should be doing that task instead?
TIS-100
A specialized architecture will always be better than a general purpose processor no matter how advanced the tech gets.
So you will always need a GPU as a GPU is quite literally a Graphical Programming Unit, that is a specialised architecture for Graphical computations
Move to VR and infinite screen space. We're so close. No doubt once Apple joins the fray it'll be time
What do you mean by "infinite screen space". In VR?
Have you worked in VR before? I feel like we will require different modes of input. A VR keyboard doesn't seem very enticing.
In VR, you are able to place windows anywhere. You have infinite amounts of screen. Look at something like Simula
Why Apple?
Bc they're about to release a VR headset PC that allows just that. It will likely inspire other companies to do so as well
Criminalizing proprietary software.
What alternative would you propose? FOSS is barely getting any donations / sponsors - So how are developers supposed to make a living?
UBI would be a step towards something better.
We could end the era of the developer as a specialized caste. Our tools should be powerful enough that they allow people with problems to collaborate on software to solve those problems, without having to let that become their full time job.
I think there's a step in between: forcing proprietary solutions (hardware, software, designs, ...) to be opensourced once they aren't maintained or supported anymore.
@onlinepersona I'd like to see less skinny-jeans male faux feminists in tech and more big-chested manly men. I would also like to see less dishonest feminized virtue-signalling from soydev bugmen about what great feminist egalitarians they are. We all know that's bullshit.
@onlinepersona Q. What change would you like to see in tech?
A. No more surveys about what changes I would like to see.
Unionizing
to add to this, id like standardization of qualification and competencies - kind of like a license so I don't have to "demonstrate" myself during interviews.
I hate being in a candidate pool that all have a degree and experience, we all go through a grueling interview process on college basics, and the "best one gets picked." Company says "our interview process works great, look at the great candidates we hire." like, duh, your candidate pool was already full of qualified engineers with degrees/experience, what did you expect to happen?
I'm betting you aren't involved in hiring? The number of engineers I've interviewed with graduate degrees from top universities who are fundamentally unable to actually write production quality code is mind-boggling. I would NEVER hire somebody without doing some panel with coding, architecture/systems design, and behavioral/social interviews.
This. I've had someone in my team that was completely self-taught with no relevant education that was a great dev.
I've also interviewed someone that supposedly had a master degree and a couple of certificates and couldn't remember how to create a loop during the interview.
I don't know how you could properly implement "standardization of qualification and competencies" without just min-maxing it in a way that favors academics
good question. Software and computer practices are changing much faster than other fields but with time, pillars are being better and better defined. Production quality code, CI/CD, DevOps, etc..
Civil engieers have a successful licensure process established. See my comment regarding that.
But an approach where a candidate would spend time under a "licensed professional software eng" would favor practical work experience over academic.
Programming should be more like other trades, apprentice for a year or two before getting journeymen status, then work up to master status. Pay and job changing becomes more fair, and we get some reasonable fucking hours and rules to keep us from making overworked mistakes.
Companies know what they’re getting asked on the programmer’s level (specific experience will still matter, but baseline will be much more standard).
And workers get experience and learn from the gray beards instead of chatgpting their way into a job they don’t understand.
the trades is a great example of having to work under a professional. Other engineering disciplines also have successful licensure processes. See my comment regarding that.
There are parallels to be drawn between licensed professionals (like doctors, CPAs, lawyers, civil engineers) that they all have time under a professional and the professional then signs off and bears some responsibility vouching for a trainee.
We need to keep in mind that the main value proposition of these licenses is to bar people from practicing. There is no other purpose.
In some activities this gatekeeping mechanismo is well justified: a doctor who kills people out of incompetence should be prevented from practicing, and so do accountants who embezzle and civil engineers who get people killed by designing and building subpar things.
Your average software developers doesn't handle stuff that gets people killed. Society gains nothing by preventing a software developer from implementing a button in a social network webapp.
I see the point you are trying to make but I respectfully disagree. Technology is at the core of seemingly every field and at the core of technology is software. Will it result in direct bodily harm? Rarely. But indirectly the impact is certainly more substantial.
Take internet as an example. The significance of internet and information sharing cannot be disputed. Disturptions to information sharing can send ripples through services that provide essential services. Networking these days is accomplished Vida software defined networking techniques. And we are becoming more dependant on technology and automation.
I can see why the indirect risk is not as scary as direct risk, but you have to admit, as automation is growing and decisions are being made for us, regulation of those that build these systems should not be overlooked. Professional engineers have a code of ethics they have to adhere to and if you read through it you can see the value it would bring.
As a counter example to your "doctors are licensed to not kill people" - orthodontists, who move teeth around, pose no fatal risk to their patients. Should they be exempt from being licensed?
EDIT:
Just yesterday news was published by Reuters that Musk and managers at Tesla knew about defects of autopilot but marketed otherwise. If those working on it had been licensed, then negligence and decietfulness could line them up to lose their license and prevent them from working in this line again. It would bring accountability
As a counter balance to that though, interviewers need to understand what they are hiring for and tailor the questions asked to those requirements.
For example, there is genuinely very little coding required of an SRE these days but EVERY job interview wants you to do some leetcode style algorithm design.. Since containers took over, the times I have used anything beyond relatively unremarkable bash scripts is exceptionally small. It's extremely unlikely that I will be responsible for a task that is so dependent on performance that I need to design a perfect O(1) algorithm. On terraform though, I'm a fucking surgeon.
SRE specifically should HEAVILY focus on system design and almost all other things should have much much less priority.. I've failed plenty of skill assessments just because of the code though.
This does not happen. At all.
Back in reality we have recruiters who can't even spell the name of the teck stacks they are hiring for as a precondition, and asking for impossible qualifications such as years of experience in tech stacks that were released only a few months ago.
From my personal experience, cultural fit and prior experience are far more critical hiring factors, and experience in tech stacks are only relevant in terms of dictating how fast someone can onboard onto a project.
Furthermore, engineering is all about solving problems that you never met before. Experience is important, but you don't assess that with leetcode or trivia questions.
Evaluation is fine but I'd like to eliminate the overuse of leetcode style questions. I've used those skills in exactly two places: school and tech interviews. If the tech job is actually for a scientific/biotech company then it's fair game.
Also, schools don't really prepare students for writing production code (if it's a compsci degree). I learned about unit testing, mocking, dependency injection, environment configs, REST APIs, and UI/UX on the job.
It varies on who does the interview but I push for much simpler than leetcode type stuff- e.g. not puzzle problems but more "design a program that can represent a parking structure and provide a function that could be used for the ticket printer to determine where a new car should park, as well as one that can run upon exit to determine payment"
Then if they are actually solid we can dive into complexity and optimization and if they can't write a class or a function at all (and esp if they can't model a problem in this way) it's really obvious.
Are the distances between the meter and the spaces already known and accessible?
And yet that could rule people like me out. I have a history of delivering longer than most developers have been alive, across many technologies, languages, toolsets, for several industries. My resume looks fantastic, and I can pull together a larger strategy and project plan in my sleep, and deliver a cost effective and quality solution.
However after jumping across all these technologies, I really rely on my IDE for the syntax. I’ll use a plugin for the cli syntax of whatever tool, framework or cloud service we’re using today.
I like to think I’m extremely qualified, but that programming test on paper will get me every time (why the eff is anything on paper these days), and certifications were a thing for early in your career
Aren't paper tests usually pseudocode?
I think it's important to check for competencies that are valuable to the employer during the interview process. However many, but admittingly not all, employers will use time constrained college level puzzels that a candidate can usually only solve if they have seen it before.
I've been on both sides of the interview process. In my day to day I use a debugger to verify and step through code all the time. Hacker rank, the leading platform to test candidates and generate a metric report, doesn't even have a debugger. Off-by-one index mistakes are sooo common to see from a candidate who is under time pressure. A few iterations with a debugger and problem solved. I advocate for candidates to develop on their on env and share their screen or bring it with them. But anyway, I'm ranting.
I agree with most comments arguing against a standardization and pointing to the weakness. I didn't say it works great, I just wish it was like some other professionals have. See my comment about other engineering disciplines that have a successful licensure process.
I strongly disagree. There is already a standardization of qualification of competences in the form of cloud vendor certifications. They are all utter bullshit and a huge moneygrab which do nothing to attest someone's experience or competence.
Certifications also validate optimizing for the wrong metric, like validating a "papers, please" attitude towards recruitment instead of actually demonstrate competence, skill, and experience.
Also, certifications validate the parasitic role of a IT recruiter, the likes of which is responsible for barring candidates for not having decades of experience in tech stacks they can't even spell and released just a few months ago. Relying on certifications empower parasitic recruiters to go from clueless filterers to outright gatekeepers, and in the process validate business models of circumventing their own certification requirements.
We already went down this road. It's a disaster. The only need this approach meets is ladder-pulling by incompetent people who paid for irrelevant certifications and have a legal mechanism to prevent extremely incompetent people from practicing, and the latter serves absolutely no purpose on software development.
I agree with what you said, it is a shit show. but I wish it weren't so.
My good friend is a civil engineer and for him to obtain a Professional Engineer license (PE) he had to complete a four-year college degree, work under a PE licensed engineer for at least four years, pass two intensive competency exams and earn a license from their state's licensure board. Then, to retain their licenses, PEs must continually maintain and improve their skills throughout their careers.
This licencing approach is prohibitive to just "pay your way" through. This never caught on in software and computer eng because of how quickly it was (and still is) changing. But certain pillars are becoming better defined such as CI/CD, production-safe code & practices, DevOps.
Attention and awareness of the ways in which modern technology is harming ourselves.
We're providing people with the electronic equivalent of heroin, from a young age, completely rewiring our brains and detaching us from nature and each other.
The statistic that ~90% of American teens own an iPhone was shocking to me. It makes me think that from a young age, children are taught not to question but just accept their cage. If closed source is all they grow up with, opensource will be foreign to them. And that in a way that's worse than when you grow up with windows which doesn't completely lock you in.
I’m not surprised that 90% have a phone, but am surprised that’s specific to iPhone Where are you you Android people at?
Android users aren't having kids. /s
This! I feel it myself, my ADHD was much better when I stayed in a relatively natural setting with only little technology. for a few weeks (I did some programming there though, and boy was I focused in complex problems without medication etc. had one of my best coding sessions there I think). I'm pretty sure that a lot of ADHD but also other psychiatric issues like autism or social anxiety etc. that is diagnosed these days is because of all this unhealthy environment we have created. Or in other words, our modern technology promotes psychiatric issues such as ADHD, autism, social anxiety etc.
Fun fact: car emissions cause allergies
Three things off the top of my head:
For the hell of it? Because they’re inherently evil? Protectionism am to develop local industry?
I’ve worked for a few, but not the consumer giants most people think of. I haven’t found them evil, and they support employees across the world.
I’ll go even further with developing countries in particular. From my perspective, entire software industries were built on multi-national funding, and we still pay better than local companies. The biggest change over the last decade or two has been switching models from cheapest outsourcing to employing local talent everywhere
This is just like, my opinion, but here you go:
If you live in the western sphere, the US tech giants control half of your critical infrastructure and invade every aspect of your personal and professional life. If you live outside the US, they do not answer to you or to anyone you can vote for. They lean on your government for permission to turn your whole existence into a series of transactions, and then extract as much value as possible from each one. The money doesn't swirl around your community making everyone richer. Instead, 5% goes to pay a few nice salaries in your biggest city, and the rest of it gets funneled straight out of the country and into california.
Even Europe - their imperial mentor and favourite uncle - is treated like shit. Europe built half of their technology but controls none of it. There is not a single european tech giant. Every last one is american, with extensive ties to the US government and security apparatus.
Never thought of it that way. Depending on your definitions, here’s a top 20 list that has SAP as the only European company. Asian ones are getting pretty common though
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-worlds-tech-giants-ranked/
To give some example, I saw recently an article about a Frenchman looking to fill some paperwork, which was possible... Except the account needed you to install some Android app, and the app used Google services.
Author was saying that, since he doesn't think he should have to create a Google account to fill in some paperwork, he will send a letter instead. A damn letter, like Germany or something
Haha yeah, I was eager to watch the recent SoaceX test launch but their official feed required a Twitter account. So I patronized some random YouTuber instead
More focus on the ability to maintain, repair, and perhaps even upgrade existing tech. So often people are pushed to upgrade constantly, and devices aren't really built to last anymore. For example, those yearly trade in upgrade plans that cell phone providers do. It sucks knowing that, once the battery in my cell phone finally dies, the whole phone is essentially garbage and has to be replaced. I miss my older smartphones that still had replaceable batteries, because at least then it's just the battery that's garbage.
We're throwing so much of our very limited amount of resources right into landfills because of planned obsolescence.
I think the solution to this will come by itself: the supply chain will break down and people will have to learn to make do with what they have. It was like that in the Soviet Union, is like that in some parts of the world right now, and can easily return if we don't get climate change in check.
I don’t get this. I understand they aren’t user replaceable but surely you can get it replaced? Given how good batteries are, they easily last 2-3 years. iPhones are supported for 5-6 years so you only ever need one replacement
Getting my iPhone battery replaced has typically cost about $75, not all that different from a decade ago spending $35 for a user replaceable battery for a flip phone
One major difference now is that at least iOS gives me a good measurement of battery health so I can make data driven decision
More privacy and less profit 🫣
I realize most people could rather not pay for a service they currently have for free (which is partly due to the lack of transparency regarding our data usage).
It's possible that a donation based-society might work. However, I'm not sure how that can be achieved in parallel to a profit-based society (the on we majorly have to take part in).
IMO one way is to force the issue by making certain methods of profit impossible or not worth it in the long run. Something like "don't use it? you lose it" in terms of patents or proprietary solutions. For example if a company stops producing and supporting something, then it has to release the designs, code, and intellectual property to the public.
Have developers be more mindful of the e-waste they're contributing to by indirectly deprecating CPUs when they skip over portions of their code and say "nah it isn't worth it to optimize that thing + everyone today should have a X cores CPU/Y GB of RAM anyway". Complacency like that is what leads software that is as simple in functionality as equivalent software was one or two decades ago to be 10 times more demanding today.
Yes!! I enjoy playing with retro tech and was actually surprised on how much you can do with an ancient Pentium 2 machine, and how responsive the software at the time was.
I really dislike how inefficient modern software is. Like stupid chat apps that use more RAM while sitting in the background than computers had 15-20 years ago...
It leads to software obesity and is a real thing. I think it has to do with developer machines being beefy, so if you write something that runs on it and don't have a shit machine to test it on, you don't know just how badly it actually performs.
But it also has to do with programming languages. It's much much easier to prototype in Python or Javascript and often the prototype becomes the real thing. Who really has time (and/or money) to rewrite their now functional program in a language that is performant?
IMO there doesn't seem to be a clear solution.
I don't think that even the languages are the problem, it's the toolchain. While certainly if you went back to C or whatever, you can design more performant systems, I think the problem overall stems from modern toolchains being kinda ridiculous. It is entirely common in any language to load in massive libraries that suck up 100's of mb of RAM (if not gigs) to get a slightly nicer function to lowercase text or something.
The other confounding factor is "write once, run anywhere" which in practice means that there is a lot of shared code and such that does nothing on your machine. The most obvious example being Electron. Pretty much all of the Electron apps I use on the reg (which are mostly just Discord and slack) are conceptually simple apps that have analogues that used to run on a few hundred mbs of storage and 10's of mb of RAM.
Oh, one other sidetone - how many CPUs are wasting cycles on things that no one wants, like extremely complex ad-tracking/data mining/etc.
I know why this is the case, and ease of development does enable us to have software that we probably otherwise wouldn't, but this is a thing that I think is a real blight on modern computing, and I think it's solvable. I mean, probably the dumbest idea, but improving translation layers to run platform-native code can be vastly improved. Especially in a world where we have generative AI, there has to be a way to say "hey, I've got this javascript function, I need this to work in kotlin, swift, c++, etc."
LLVM will save us.
Maybe...
LLVM is ironically a very slow compiler back-end, whose popularity has contributed to a general slow-down in compilation speed across the whole industry (it's even slow at doing debug builds for fast iteration).
WASM has some promise though
Doesn't really matter if the compiler is slow if the result is optimized and fast 🤷 Rust compiles slower than C, but that's because C has no safeguards (excluding static typing). Very often the wasted CPU cycles are on the end of the user, not the developer.
Thank you for saying this. Sometimes I feel like I sm the only one thinking like this 🙇♥️
That we stop fawning over tech CEOs
The death of the device and the return of the system.
A device is a sealed thing provided on a take it or leave it basis, often designed to oppose the interests of the person using it. Like hybrid corn, a device is infertile by design: you cannot use a device to develop, test, and program more devices.
A system is a curated collection of interchangeable hardware and software parts. Some parts are only compatible with certain other parts, but there is no part that cannot be replaced with an alternative from a different manufacturer. Like heirloom seeds, systems are fertile: systems can be used to design and program both other systems and devices.
A system is a liberatory technology for manipulating information, while a device is a carceral technology for manipulating people.
Probably less elitism. "Oh you build it in x language? Well that's a shit language. You should use y language instead. We should be converting everything to y language because y language is the most superior language!"
(If this feels like a personal attack, Rust programmers, yes. But other languages as well)
To people that really spend time in code, this banter is meaningless.
Well sure, it depends on the context. If it's a shitpost on /c/programmer_humor, whatever, meaningless banter.
If it's a serious question, (maybe for a beginner) asking how to do something in their language, and the response is "It would be a lot easier in y language" - I don't think it's particularly helpful
You can write it in whatever language you want, as long as it's rust.
/s
As someone who's quite vocal about my support for Rust, I can definitely see how it can go overboard.
But on the other end of the spectrum, saying that all languages are just as good or capable and it doesn't matter which one you use is definitely wrong. There are meaningful differences. It all comes down to what your needs are (and what you/your team knows already, unless you're willing to learn new stuff).
Yea, I kept my original comment language-agnostic (Just referring to it as y language) - but added the extra wink to Rust because generally they seem to be the highest offenders.
I have years of experience in loads of languages: PHP, Ruby, Java, Python, C#, C++, Rust - And that's probably how I'd order the level of elitism. PHP Devs know everything they're doing is shit - Python should probably be next in ranking of how shit they are, but they're not self-aware enough - (Sarcastic elitism aside here - )
Anyways, besides that - at the end of the elitism-spectrum there seems to be Rust. Someone like me says something about Rust in a general unrelated-to-Rust thread like this - and a Rust enthusiast sees it, and it would just devolve into a dumbass back-end-forth about how good Rust is
C'mon, a little bit of flexing is so nice.
But, I get what you're saying. I usually filter out this bullshit (because I'm a Rustacean myself 😜) but this doesn't mean that it is as easy for someone else as it is for me.
Rewrite it in Rust? No, no, no. Rewrite it in JavaScript because then it's portable /s
The cargo culting is always going to happen and turn into elitism. But it stems from real advantages of specific technologies, and sometimes you should actually consider that the tech you're using is irresponsible when better alternatives exist.
not being forced to have an Android or Apple smartphone, so more open standards and just Web apps instead of proprietary apps
What do you classify as "proprietary apps", and from the user's standpoint where do you see a difference between them and web apps?
Pretty much anything that's only available via an app store. The difference with web apps is that I can also use them on a laptop/PC and I have a bit more control about tracking (by using ad/tracking blockers).
Phones with fully open source drivers including the bootloader and decent specs. Give me a UEFI over fastboot any day.
I'd also love it if electron and sexism would kindly go away.
I would like to see:
A pivot way from cargo cult programming and excessive containerization towards simplicity and the fewest dependencies possible for a given task.
Too many projects look like a jinga tower gone horribly wrong. This has significant maintainability and security implications.
Containerization (even for small things) makes modern infrastructure a LOT easier.
Containerization helps isolating system dependencies however
ISO-8601 only
UTF-8 only
UTC only
Oh and more self hosting. Clouds are expensive and unnecessary for some stuff.
What do you mean by UTC only?
Yeah, @UFODivebomb@programming.dev ... UTC only?
Time zones are stupid.
😂
I think what they meant is requiring that only UTC time should be in the database. This prevents ambiguity when pulling dates/times out as with many poorly designed systems it's not possible to know whether a date represents UTC time or local time.
At my work we store local time in our database and I hate it. We only serve customers in our country, which only has one time zone, so that's fine for now. But we've definitely made it harder for ourselves to expand if we ever wanted to.
Better yet, why are you not using a Date type? That’s very precisely defined, more scalable, and plenty of functionality for doing math or converting among time zones. You don’t have to care what time zone you’re in, and can give people the answer in any time zone
I get the advantage, and if I could change our schema with a click of my fingers I would, but it's not that easy. We do use the native date type in our schema, but the dates we store in there are in local time. It's bad, I know. It was originally written by a couple of people about 15 years ago, so software standards were a lot more lax back then.
We already have many customers with lots of data that are currently using this product, so it's unfortunately non-trivial to fix all of their data with the current systems we have in place.
We developers often want to fix so many things but we're often told what to do based on what the business cares more about, rather than what we actually want to fix. That's why we always end up building shit on top of shit, because the business doesn't want to pay us to rewrite 15-20 years worth of legacy code despite in doing so it would make the product an order of magnitude better in every conceivable way.
I feel your pain
That is a somewhat tongue in cheek comment. I think time zones are silly and people could easily account for the differences of what a particular time point means for them at their location. More realistically, UTC should be the only way a time stamp is stored.
Maybe we could just reduce it to 4 time zones, and no DST
Worker ownership of tech firms
Honestly, just less waste. Wasted time, wasted hardware, etc. We spend so much time building devices that are meant to break, and be unfixable,, and making software that fights the user instead of helping. All in the name of profits or something.
We could be making so many cool things, but instead we're going back and forth not making any progress.
Kudos to the EU for forcing mobile phone manufacturers to support replaceable batteries and standardize on USB-C charging.
I’m not sold on user replaceable phone batteries, but USB-C was a long time coming.
I just wish they had moved faster on USB standardization - I’m trying to switch but my phone and Kindle are my only USB-C devices. Either I need to waste functioning products by updating everything else or I still need chargers for older stuff back to mini-USB. It’d be nice to standardize on USB-C charging blocks but even that would mean buying new cables or adapters for four different USB form factors
As someone who had a perfectly fine Android smartphone die because its battery went dead, and had to replace it with an off-brand one to keep it ticking... I can assure you that the lack of support for user-replaceable phone batteries is forcing people to throw away perfectly good hardware.
I'm sold on user replaceable batteries, just not necessarily like they are the Nokia's of old. Especially with phones, they're mature enough where the end of support for them is either a choice a company makes, or just purely because the battery is dead. Batteries don't necessarily need to be hot-swappable, but they should be able to be replaced by most people in-home, with tools you probably already have.
Data is a part of a person's individual self. Storing such data on another person is owning a part of their person. It is slavery for exploitation, manipulation, and it is wrong.
This distinction is the difference between a new age of feudalism with all of the same abuses that happened in the last one, or a future with citizens and democracy.
Never trust anyone with a part of yourself. Trust, no matter how well initially intentioned, always leads to abuse of power.
I agree with the sentiment that personal data is owned by whoever it is about. And that other organizations shouldn't be able to exploit it.
less sexism
User first, non-profit software companies. To maximize profits, software keeps sacrificing the users happiness. I want to stop having the argument that the user would want X, but hearing we can't do that because it will hurt profits.
How do you expect to keep a non-profit software company afloat?
Non profit doesn’t mean they earn nothing
You need a valid business model to keep an organization ticking. Staff doesn't live out of hopes and dreams. It's hard enough to get a for-profit software company to stay up. If your starting point is that the company is not focused on getting a profit then it all sounds as hopes and dreams instead of an actual business plan.
… yes, a non profit is not meant to earn a profit. A profit is earning something more than what you need to be functioning.
Floaties, foam noodles, and a special ray gun that can turn anything into a float.
Balloons. Lot and lots of balloons.
☭
Boot out corporate shitware, boot out adverts, and stop collecting data unless it is absolutely necessary, or alternatively just cancel the fucking product and don't do it.
Out of the cloud and back into our federated hands/the edge.
People just love the easy path at the loss of sovereignty.
Respecting privacy.
Get rid of CRLF on windows or QWERTY keyboard layout
What's wrong with QWERTY?
It’s inefficient, there are many alternate layouts that are “better”. I feel like AI is going to give us auto-fill that makes the keyboard efficiency less important though.
How is it "inefficient"? There are many keyboard layouts out there for different languages. DVORAK also exists, which supposedly is better.
I'd argue that the mode of entry of inefficient, not the layout. There's a lot of movement for a finger to reach a key. Much of that movement could be reduced. An example thereof is the CharaChorder
I read OP’s comment as indicating they wanted tech to move to alternative layouts from QWERTY, and the argument is always improved wpm.
I type slow as hell, I don’t have a dog in the fight.
I thought it was well known that the studies about Dvorak being superior were fabricated by Dvorak himself... but apparently that's forgotten knowledge.
Here's a magazine article about it: https://reason.com/1996/06/01/typing-errors/
Linux becoming mainstream
I’ll go further and say some sort of OpenStack like thing should be mainstream. Why shouldn’t home computers by default be able to deploy cloud-like services?
As a guy, I'd like to see less sexism in the field, there's no reason why gender would affect skill
A friend of mine got asked if she had a boyfriend. She asked back "why that question". It was to know whether she would be likely to get pregnant and miss work.
What a horrifying mentality some companies have
I'm curious, are you in the USA? Working in Western Europe, so far I have never seen sexism (nor racism) happen at work. Outside of it, for sure though.
Are you a guy by any chance. I also hadn't noticed until the day I asked a couple of my women colleagues. Turns out it can be very subtle but "effective". And it can also come from women.
As a guy, my manager kicks ass and we’re all extra motivated to make her look good. She used to be a peer but once she became manager, her true skills shone
Personally, I'm just sick and tired of modern UI design. Bring back density, put more information on the screen, eliminate the whitespace, use simple (and native!) widgets, get rid of those fucking sticky headers, and so on.
In addition to all the software freedom stuff, and so on. Also, I wish GPL were more popular too.
Yeeees, why do modern websites have so much horizontal whitespace? That 3 column design where 2 are empty. Just... why? Luckily firefox has a reader mode. Makes news websites much more bearable.
I love how we have free to use licences (MIT, GPL, CC, etc) and it would be really great to see the same idea used with terms of services and privacy policies! How great it would be to quickly see that this site uses fair tos and to understand what it includes? Maybe this would also nudge (at least smaller) companies toward not being horrible privacy invading monsters
Check out tosdr.org. It helps a little
That would probably be pretty hard, considering every service is different. Google drive stores your data and so their ToS probably says you can't store pirated content, but that wouldn't make sense for most other services that you can't upload stuff to.
DOM APIs in WASM.
Wait... that doesn't exist?
Afaik, the way it currently works is by calling via javascript. Ironically, the way strings are handled in the browser is also a major performance block with rust at least.
Accessibility and internationalization first. A lot of projects start without it and tack it on later. It's so much better to have good roots and promote diversity and inclusivity from the start.
Could you elaborate in what context and to what extend? I can agree that bigger companies with large user-bases should have a focus on accessibility and internationalization -
But generally a lot of projects start with just one dev solving a problem they have themselves and make their solution Open-Source. Anecdotally, I'm dumping my solutions on Github that are already barely accessible to anyone somewhat tech-illiterate. No one is paying me anything for it. Why would I care whether it's accessible or internationalized for non-English speakers?
As a solo developer, some things are out of scope like writing translations or ensuring full compliance with accessibility standards. What's important is to have some knowledge of what things block progress in these areas. For example, not treating all strings like ASCII, or preferring native widgets/html elements as those better support accessiblity tools.
Internationalization isn't about the translation. It's about not hard coding the strings that display. Putting them somewhere that is easy to swap out would allow users to provide their own if they wanted.
The disappearance of all these tech peacocks and web turkeys who focus on their number of followers and the quantity of talks rather than quality. The dev rel advocates made the atmosphere toxic
Stop forcing updates on the lower level stuff that forces people to spend billions on maintaining code. This way, we could return to a world where you can just buy software and use it for years without some update borking it.
Also outlawing financially motivated (i.e. greedy) retroactive ToS changes.
Fucking always-on connectivity and security problems caused by it are the main reason why things can't just work. You need to be updated or else.
I visited a friend not that long ago and he kept using Windows XP and The Bat and Opera around version 9. He knew every keyboard shortcut because he didn't have to relearn every few years. Never got hacked, I just wonder when his bank stops working because of TLS incompatibilities.
Any sort of “contract”with the user including ToS, licensing agreements, etc. These consistently violate contract law since it’s not a negotiation between peers, you don’t have an opportunity to read before purchasing, and there’s no direct quid pro quos for what you’re giving up. By all rights these should be unenforceable
I mean it did change for a very good reason. Stuff gets hacked because everyone is online always. In "the good old days" it wasn't a problem because people weren't really online so there was pretty much zero risk of old software being used to exploit your machine. These days? It's a liability to have old stuff on your phone because someone could exploit it to steal stuff from a large number of users.
Small security updates when necessary would be fine, but all the time I just see software (especially with the web) be like, we're deprecating these features (that millions of websites use).
Lots of stuff -
On the internet, more open standards and community driven stuff. It's currently really, really annoying that on my mastodon there are a lot of people sharing bluesky codes, as if that's not just punting the ball for another couple of years. Although this will hopefully be a better outcome than straight up silos like the old social media, fediverse still should be the default way we think about connecting humanity (or something like it, the underlying tech isn't really that important.) Also, far more things should just be like, a dollar a month or whatever instead of having a massive amount of privacy invading, user experience destroying ads.
In software in general, more privacy. It should be assumed that unless I explicitly opt in, my data is just that, mine. This is a tricky one because I remain hopeful about generative AI and that needs data to improve the models, I'm leery of sharing my data with it because so far the more pedestrian uses of data mining have not been used for things that I can really support. I remain extremely leery about GAI that isn't explicitly open source and can't be understood generally.
On the hardware side, computers have mostly been good enough for a while now. Tech will always get better, but I would like to see more of a focus on keeping working devices useful. Like, at some point, technology products will cease being possible to be useful in a practical way because it can't run modern software, but we're leaving a lot of shit behind where that's not the case. Just about any device with an SSD and a processor from the last 10 years (including phones!) should be able to be easily repaired, supported longer, and once support ends, opened up for community support.
FYI the bluesky protocol is open and there's plans to standardize. It's also federated (the sandbox network is open to 3rd parties)
There's lots of new privacy techniques from cryptography, stuff like differential privacy and MPC could help a lot with making it easier and safer to use collaboration tools.
I am skeptical of Bluesky. It's led by Jack and we've already seen how that goes. Second, there isn't really a good technical reason for it to exist as it's own protocol outside of the fact that they want to control it given that Fedi/Mastodon was already there and they could have just as easily contributed to that with the things they wanted, they just wouldn't have had full control. Similar to Threads promise to federate, I will be somewhat surprised if they ever do it.
Were Bluesky/Threads not a corporate effort, I have a feeling that it would have followed a similar pattern as the fediverse - build the protocol and release that, then the clients will follow. Bluesky still isn't federating even with its own protocol, and Threads isn't either. Given that's stuff that tiny teams with far, far fewer resources than the corps have accomplished, it's a little wild that neither have gotten there.
Especially with Bluesky, there doesn't seem to be a stated plan for how it's going to make money. And we're talking about a lot of the same people that destroyed the Twitter API and started locking things down even before Elon killed it completely and they're trying to convince us that they are pushing for an open environment.
As said many times before, Jack is now AWOL and left for nostr, he even deleted his bluesky account because the crowd didn't like him there. He doesn't have a majority on the board and don't own any majority stake either.
The motivation for a new protocol is there's architectural limits to activitypub. It's essentially email over http, it really behaves like public mailing list archives, as servers push each interaction as a message. This is part of why there's often a discrepancy between visible replies across servers because retries are limited. Account portability is also very limited as accounts and posts are tied to a server.
Bluesky switches to a content addressing model plus user ID based on a public key, allowing you to more easily move across servers as well as syncing data between servers such as thread replies, it's very much like git (user data is held in personal repositories signed by your key) with a shared CDN/cache (relay servers, previously called BGS) and "worker agents" (mostly driven by the "appview" which is the api endpoint for your client + feed generator servers). You post to your repository via your appview, it sends a ping to other servers and they sync new relevant entries.
They already have federation with 3rd parties in a sandbox network and the official server just switched on "internal federation" (used to be a single shared server, now there's 10 using the same protocol that open federation will later use)
The code is already open source, several servers in the sandbox is 3rd party reimplementations
Gotcha, thanks for the info. I'm def behind in following the goings on there. Do you have any insight on the revenue plan?
Not really.
Since handles are domain names (and your own DNS entry points to your account public key, DID) they have a referral deal with a registrar to let people easily get a custom domain and set it as a handle (otherwise your handle is a subdomain on the bluesky domain). But future plans are uncertain
Yeah, this is def a thing that is a big sticking point for me. I have a hard time supporting a company these days without a clear revenue plan because it's just kind of a bait-and-switch otherwise.
Any hardware that's abandoned needs to be forced to release the source of any needed software - the latest version.
We'd need a range of available licences, as to prevent any bullshit "you're only allowed to read this source" license.
This is going to suck for Apple, but it's going to be great for people who pay for some expensive microscope that's not supported any more.
There's probably a lot of legal nonsense that may make this impossible in practice, but I'd love to see this happen.
Same thing for companies that run out of business. When you pay for something there's a (sometimes tacit) agreement that bugs will be fixed. At least this would allow companies/users to do that themselves when needed.
So would I. Every election, the Pirate Party gets my vote. On technical issues, they are the only party that really understands what's going on.
Less software bloat.
I want my devices to run on an OS/framework which allows everything to be scriptable. Data should be visualised using simple/consistent interface.
There will be events, Actions, variables, data-streams, etc and the operating system should provide easy interface to quickly create new programs which can
In such a system, the focus of apps should not be to add fancy interfaces for simple things, but to register new events, actions, data streams, visualizers into the OS and maybe provide new templates to use these additions.
Focus more on stability in terms of apis. We can't be rewriting our apps constantly because they keep updating frameworks every year.
I think that most core frameworks put a ton of effort into backwards compatibility. Maintainers of smaller libraries and glue packages, however…
I suppose.. but when you have frameworks like Angular that update every 6 months, even the best efforts for backwards compatibility fall by the wayside.
Awareness if not prioritizing energy efficiency. We rarely give any thought to services that run 24/7 even though they're only used 8/5 or we don't care how many CPU cycles a process uses even though it has no SLO for runtime. Most companies probably think it's a question of dumping millions of carbon units into to the atmosphere or becoming luddites.
Privacy policies should concern not just the site's right to gather data, but the rights of users to post other people's data
Developers should go back writing efficient code in lower level programming languages to stop wasting CPU cycles for stupid reasons, like not wanting to use types, or something more stupid than that.
I agree but at the same time cannot be bothered to go lower level than Python for my personal projects. It's so damn convenient.
For personal projects and prototypes i believe it's fine, but when you consume the electricity of mid-size countries just because you prefer to write your production code in convenient languages don't lecture others about ecology and climate change (i am not refering to you).
@onlinepersona +1
prima donnas like Stewey on In Living Color: "Look what I kandoo!"
Less consumerism, more focus on real social aspects:
Just add blockchain to something, it will show em!
Actually that's one of the few cases, where a (distributed/decentralized) blockchain really makes sense (trustless ledger which can be used for incorruptible/transparent political systems)...
Ignoring all the buzzword bingo and hype.
No needing a GPU to do intensive 3d rendering and Ray tracing
What do you think should be doing that task instead?
TIS-100
A specialized architecture will always be better than a general purpose processor no matter how advanced the tech gets.
So you will always need a GPU as a GPU is quite literally a Graphical Programming Unit, that is a specialised architecture for Graphical computations
Move to VR and infinite screen space. We're so close. No doubt once Apple joins the fray it'll be time
What do you mean by "infinite screen space". In VR?
Have you worked in VR before? I feel like we will require different modes of input. A VR keyboard doesn't seem very enticing.
In VR, you are able to place windows anywhere. You have infinite amounts of screen. Look at something like Simula
Why Apple?
Bc they're about to release a VR headset PC that allows just that. It will likely inspire other companies to do so as well
Criminalizing proprietary software.
What alternative would you propose? FOSS is barely getting any donations / sponsors - So how are developers supposed to make a living?
UBI would be a step towards something better.
We could end the era of the developer as a specialized caste. Our tools should be powerful enough that they allow people with problems to collaborate on software to solve those problems, without having to let that become their full time job.
I think there's a step in between: forcing proprietary solutions (hardware, software, designs, ...) to be opensourced once they aren't maintained or supported anymore.
@onlinepersona I'd like to see less skinny-jeans male faux feminists in tech and more big-chested manly men. I would also like to see less dishonest feminized virtue-signalling from soydev bugmen about what great feminist egalitarians they are. We all know that's bullshit.
@onlinepersona Q. What change would you like to see in tech?
A. No more surveys about what changes I would like to see.