people still follow me for programming stuff? huh. weird.

programming: terrible

crows: great

here's some programming content: someone linked to a blog post of mine, saying "you don't need to read it, the title alone suffices"

great, i'm the onion of programming

part of the reason i haven't written about tech stuff is burnout, but really, there's a bigger reason

most of the problems you'll encounter in a programming job are ones you'll have no agency over, and no means to fix or change them, beyond quitting and re-rolling the dice

pretty much everyone says they use "best practices" and "the right tool for the job", which always turns out to mean "whatever we're already doing" and "whatever tools we feel comfortable with, get status for using, or feel are low risk"

agile's popular because it allows management to blame programmers for "not estimating correctly" when the problem is an under-funded under-resourced project, kicked off long after it's due, pressured to be rushed into production

in other words, as i've gotten older, the more i've come to see "writing buggy programs" as a systemic property, far more than it being down to "some coders write more bugs"

well, "some coders get promoted for shipping bugs, others get punished for it"

honestly, the only real thing that's seen improvement in my programming career, beyond spurious and asinine domain knowledge, is communication

my secret? it's a lot easier to win arguments about doing the right thing if you use fancy sounding words

anyway, that's why i'm coming up short on what might be useful to blog about. i guess i can cover some technical fundamentals, but reality is, they won't be that useful

almost all the big decisions have been made already and they're almost always made for the wrong reasons, too

other people are better at cutting through the mess and writing good introductory material, or long thoughtful discussions about indepth stuff

me, i'm good at saying something trite with depth, akin to how americans are impressed by british accents

"the meritocracy isn't real. but if it were. we'd be very good. we hired the best."

time to write a 60,000 line ad-hoc interpreter for business logic for a one off workflow process in yaml, i guess

anyway, apart from the burnout, and apart from people having almost no agency over the software they write, or the processes behind it, the other reason i haven't bothered to write much is that programmers will read a heartfelt essay and then say "aha this confirms the opposite!"

programmers will spend almost all their time debugging, and yet claim they understand the consequences of their actions, despite all evidence to the contrary

i don't know how i can write another "just eat your vegetables" post without dying just a little more inside

there's a patrick star meme where it's me talking about error handling and a programmer on hacker news nodding along until the very last moment

anyway i should mute this before people read back my points to me