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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Wow, hadn’t thought about that one in a long time. I thought it was an old Scott Hanselman blog and I was correct! I’ll have to reread it, been years now.

    I’m not sure there’s much why to it exactly. I feel like a small fraction of people I’ve met in life were truly passionate and excited about the work they did. Most had some passion for an art, or a hobby, or for their kids very commonly, but people who really want to grow and master their craft are somewhat rare generally. Most folks just want to do well enough to keep their jobs and then go home to whatever they actually care about.







  • I came into the industry right when XML fever had peaked as was beginning to fall back. But in MS land, it never really went away, just being slowly cannibalize by JSON.

    You’re right though, there was some cool stuff being done with xml when it was assumed that it would be the future of all data formats. Being able to apply standard tools like XLT transforms, XSS styling, schemas to validate, and XPath to search/query and you had some very powerful generic tools.

    JSON has barely caught up to that with schemes and transforms. JQ lets you query json but I don’t really find it more readable or usable than XPath. I’m sure something like XLT exists, but there’s no standardization or attempt to rally around shared tools like with XML.

    That to me is the saddest thing. VC/MBA-backed companies have driven everyone into the worst cases of NIHS ever. Now there’s no standards, no attempts to share work or unify around reliable technology. Its every company for themselves and getting other people suckered into using (and freely maintaining) your tools as a prelude to locking them into your ecosystem is the norm now.



  • I wrote a powershell script to parse some json config to drive it’s automation. I was delighted to discover the built-in powershell ConvertFrom-Json command accepts json with // comments as .jsonc files. So my config files get to be commented.

    I hope the programmer(s) who thought to include that find cash laying in the streets everyday and that they never lose socks in the dryer.




  • It’s sad but i stopped writing answers or comments on SO years ago. I used to have all these optimistic ideas about people working together to collectively grow our shared knowledge. I guess Wikipedia and the Internet Archive keep barely hanging in there, but if anything those cases prove my point: without one extremely strong personality to hold the corruption in check, all these collaborative “digital commons” projects are a leadership change away from completely selling out all the work put into them. That can be feeding everything into AI but it’s also monetization schemes and EULA changes to claim ownership of user submitted content and locking the public out of your site without accounts and subscriptions.

    And usually the public’s only recourse is to tear it all down and start again, waiting for the next con artist to come along and steal the village’s prosperity.





  • To be fair, this is also how VS looks when you open a project fresh from the clone. Or after updating .net versions. .NET is awful about losing references and then claiming thousands of errors. Sometimes just running the build will fix it by relinking the DLLs it couldn’t find.

    But also yes, VS with a team can be “fun” if people don’t sync their formatting settings. I once had a junior that kept converting spaces to tabs on every file he’d touch. You’d get it fixed and then he’d screw up his settings again with a VS update or something.