I had a wise friend tell me that engineers are always in a state of being wrong. What you build today you will most likely laugh at in five years. The goal for today is to build the least wrong thing you can.
I used to argue more than I should have simply because I didn't like being wrong either. After hearing this, it helped me to become more objective.
My problem is that the least wrong thing I know of is very different from all existing processes, and take more time and money than most are willing to stomach.
Indeed, but then there is, "using a query language designed for data analysis in event sourced systems to: read, parse, version, and write system and configuration files instead of using VCS like Git" levels of wrong, and sales/marketing professionals in charge of the system wrong.
Time is measured in quarters, money is measured vaguely by proximity to sales.
Thought using excel as a database was bad? Try working in a system where strings are `eval`ed in SQL, and every state change is stored in intermediate or virtual tables, then thrown away, so no actual version control is taking place; just diffing and merging Unix configuration files.
Why not use diff and patch? Takes too much time and money, they only know SQL.
That's not nice. Everyone is on their own journey, their own learning curve, to a level experience needed to fulfill their own ambition. Rather than saying, "your code is crap" wouldn't it be more productive to encourage this person to challenge themselves to get outside their comfort zone?
That person explicitly dismissed "advanced mastery" and thus challenging and bettering oneself or themselves as being non-inclusive. I find this attitude highly offensive, because my motivation towards mastery is not of that kind. I'm happy to include people, explain them my code, help them along towards mastery.
Software also has an ongoing quality crisis, all while being more and more influential in people's lives. That person's attitude towards writing quality software helps to deepen that crisis and is therefore harmful.
The Blue Nowhere by Jeffery Deaver. I read it at least once a year and live my life by it. There was no book that better described living in the digital world vs the physical world when I was growing up programming and living in muds. Every thing and every relationship in the physical world is a game that can played successfully with the right character
Get a pinephone and a pinebook pro and be done with it. When you want to get online, use a public WiFi like mcdonalds or starbucks and connect to tor or i2p and do your thing.
Attempting to hide in a world full of people who could care less about their privacy will make you stand out to those watching, however.
What about sbc's? afaik, they wouldn't be subject to any of this and since Intel and amd are doomed, wouldn't something like a pinebookpro or rpi make for a secure, yet affordable, solution?
Wasn't being sarcastic. Assuming your workload can support the hardware, why isn't this a viable alternative? I could do ~99% of my job with one. People below are asking about affordable ways around this and it made me think of this
