taklimakan

can someone explain what I am looking at?

I let AI write unit tests, PR summaries, documentation, UIs for internal use, and some production code. I review the code that goes in production, mostly to refactor and simplify, or just to make sure the code is understandable at a glance by a human.

My goal is to avoid tech debt, and to actually own the code. If you don’t review, you don’t own the code, and this eventually can come back and bite you in the rear.

Ed Zitron sells subscriptions to his blog. Whether he’s right or wrong is irrelevant.

Today it’s AI thought leader, yesterday it was crypto hacker, before then it was big data engineer, and so on. It’s marketing. It works, otherwise people wouldn’t be doing it. Bullshitters will bullshit, especially in a business so bullshit-driven as tech. If you don’t buy it, then you are not their target.

The same thing happened to us too. Fresh company account, banned right away. Two weeks later we get an automated email stating that our appeal was reviewed but they could do nothing about that. I can’t even begin to describe how ridiculous this is.

The previous role of the current VP of Community for Stack Overflow was at Wikipedia. Did it work then? Will it work now? I found SO useful because I could find working answers in minutes from search results. Threaded replies are going to make that much harder. But hey, mods won’t close my crappy questions any more, that’s a win right? Right??!?

Why Rust?

It’s either documented or it’s not. When I modify code in a way that isn’t immediately obvious by looking at the code itself plus the immediate surroundings, I write a two-or three-lines code comment. It takes me ten seconds and does a big favor to my future self. I fail to understand why this isn’t standard procedure.

To actually answer your question, do a git blame, check the commit messages and anything linked in commit messages. Do some search in the company’s internal knowledge base, architecture documents, specs, whatever you have available. Even if you don’t find a direct answer, understanding some more context might eventually lead to one.

If you have no documentation at all anywhere, then you have to analyze the code yourself. It’s part of your job. When you’re done be sure to document your findings.

Yes nice but also very naive. Most developers do not have that level of ownership, nor know how their users interact with the software. Their job is precisely to complete tickets from the product manager. The product manager is the one who should be in charge of UX research and “build a software that solves users problems.” Sure, in abstract that is the mission of the developers too, but in any structured (and hopefully functional) team, product strategy is not what the software engineer should be concerned with.

It might be a new account for privacy reasons. Folks can choose whether to believe them or not. If the company is really doomed, we’ll know soon enough.

This unfortunately resonates with my experience. I used to attend GoLab, the event held in Florence, Italy.

Over time, as the event gained in popularity, speakers shifted from developers to developer advocates.

Last time I attended (2023 edition, IIRC) one of the talks was from some Intellij dev-relations person: the talk was about the importance of unit testing or something like that, completely devoid of any value for anyone who hasn’t started coding yesterday. The speaker was obviously not a technical person and gave a strong impression they were presenting content they barely knew anything about. I seriously doubt the slides deck was put together the night before. It was an utter disappointment. That was it for me. That’s a glaring example of what the OP is talking about but other talks I had listened to were only marginally better or on par with that one. That’s when I decided the thing was so much not worth the (hefty) ticket price + cost of transportation + accommodation.

It’s a sad state of affairs but not unexpected.

I don’t get it. Is anyone forcing you to vibe code? If you don’t like vibe coding, don’t do it. The time you save when vibe coding is offset almost 1:1 by the time you need to verify the AI’s output for all but the most trivial applications. And even then, were you happy writing trivial code?

I was under the impression mermaid is a wrapper around graphviz dot.

This is all very interesting, but is complete fiction for most readers. 99% of job seekers aren’t going to receive competing offers from multiple companies conveniently at the same time.

In my experience many organisations do Agile even if they don’t call it that. Agile is just a series of sensible principles to get stuff done. The problems start when people mistake the process for the goal.