• 3 Posts
  • 98 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle




  • Cheers, hope you have/are having a good weekend too. I’m intrigued by your shipping containers. Are you getting something delivered, shipping something or doing something interesting with the containers themselves?

    Funnily enough I live about a 15 minute drive from Stockport, I’m happy to report we’re currently having our one weekend of sun for the year.




  • I wonder if the website did the thing where it lists their big customers like a trophy cabinet on the main landing page.

    It would probably make a good list of places to sell snake oil

    Also love that this is all evidence to back up the premise that building the happy path of an application is generally easy, one of the main skills in software engineering is ensuring the unhappy paths are covered sufficiently. I can say I’ve started a bank and keep people’s money in my wardrobe, I’ll be providing the service of holding their money—I’ll also probably get robbed sharpish because I’m not skilled in the kind of security needed to avoid that.













  • Yes, silly engineers that don’t like being held to unrealistic estimates and deadlines; typically the ones that arise at the start of a project where there are still who-knows-how-many unknowns to find.

    Waterfall is the most effective tool for software engineering in a world where the whole world stops once you’ve planned and only starts again once the project has finished—i.e. a fictional world that doesn’t exist. Literally every waterfall project I worked on back in the old days was derailed because something happened that wasn’t planned for—because planning for everything up front is impossible and planning for anything more than a handful of eventualities is impractical.

    Agile and subsequent methodology comes from realising that requirements will change and that you are better off accepting that fact at the time than having to face it once you’re at the end of the current road.

    Agile does not mean engineers talking continuously to the users, engineers are hired to do what they’re good at: engineering. Understanding user requirements and turning that into a plan has always been product’s job regardless of methodology, in agile and similar it’s just spread out over the duration of the project, not front loaded. Agile isn’t “make the engineers do every proficiency”.


  • A software engineer was not involved in this if waterfall is painted positively.

    I think the last time I heard an engineer unironically advocating for a waterfall IRL was about a decade ago and they were the one of the crab-in-a-bucket, I-refuse-to-learn-anything-new types—with that being the very obvious motivation for their push-back.