throwaway-18

10 mesi fadiscuss

Honest question - What DO you merge into shared branches? And, when your local needs to "catch up", don't you have to pull in those shared commits which conflict with your magit-wip commits because they touch the same code, but are different commit hashes?

throwaway-18

10 mesi fadiscuss

My employer has been around 40 nearly 50 years. We still run COBOL for 90% of our business operations. Day-to-day employees work in bluescreens built in RM/COBOL and RM/PANELS.

As recently as the 2010s, we used to emit HTML out of COBOL, but fell short of it directly responding to HTTP requests. Instead, we licensed an RPC layer that sits behind Apache and translates HTTP calls through CGI to a listener on the COBOL side that then invokes COBOL programs. Those programs send back HTML strings through the CGIRPC interface and, well, out comes a webpage in your browser.

We're still using it to serve XML and have turned it into a makeshift web service that helps power a traditional web application.

But, honestly, this is way cooler.

throwaway-18

11 mesi fadiscuss

The difference between Software Engineers (or Developers) vs Programmers; with the latter designation being a stretch for some.

throwaway-18

8 anni fadiscuss

I'm inbox zero type of personality and my workplace is incredibly email heavy. Reply-All with far more people than need be present is commonplace and it almost feels taboo to remove someone. What you end up with in a situation like that is inbox overload, synchronous conversations in email and lots of anxiety because now I have 2,000 emails in my "inbox" and just the thought of categorizing them now exhausts me.

For that type of culture, I much prefer slack. The synchronous conversation can happen, you can choose to pay attention or not and, generally, someone will @ you if they really need your input. The one thing I wish slack had was a way to mark comments as "decision points", much like what I heard stride was doing. Hopefully that'll get merged into slack after the buyout.

throwaway-18

8 anni fadiscuss

Worked quite a while for an "Internet Cafe" SAAS company. If you're confused by the quotes, these internet cafe companies basically sell internet time to users and with each minute purchased, you also get an entry into a sweepstakes where the prize is a jackpot. The sweepstakes entries would be redeemed electronically by way of slot machines, video poker, etc. They're basically legalized gambling. I suppose that in and of itself isn't unethical, but we didn't exactly operate by by the book.

In order for this to be legal, the sweepstakes games have to have a defined number of entries as well as a defined number of winners and losers. None of our games did, it was just too prohibitive. We did provide to our customers, by law, our average payouts and our games did adhere to those through averages over time. But there were many occasions where the games didn't pay out jackpots regularly or paid them out too frequently, hurting stores that were using our software. Our recourse was to provide them more "entries" to distribute to sell to their players, which of course cost us nothing.

Business was good for quite a while, but stricter laws and states cracking down really killed profits. I just feel like any type of gambling in unethical, it seems to really pray on people's dopamine addictions. And these internet cafes, in particularly, are largely occupied by retires who, I'd wager, can't really afford to be throwing their money way.

Years later, my Aunt and Uncle became addicted to gambling on those casino boats and have now lost the house my Grandmother left to them when she passed. I don't necessarily believe in karma, but that certainly made me rethink it.