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I had a similar idea once when answering a Stack Overflow question[0].

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/1831841/61938


Quoting your comment: "You definitely don't want to hire the person who thinks - bizarrely - that using library functions is a sign of weakness."

So true...I've failed interviews, because the interviewee did see using library functions as a sign of weakness.


I just wish that in those cases the interviewee gives feedback and allows you to rewrite instead of just failing you. I mean in practice nobody writes library functions themselves unless absolutely necessary, but I get that for some positions you have to demonstrate that you can write lower-level code if you have to.

I think that it was probably a poorly designed question, but surely you could throw the interviewer a bone by giving a custom answer after they reject the library.

I love how your answer was straight, to the point and leverages existing standards, then scrolled up to the question and had to go through someone else's thorough, multipage response. Full marks to both answers!

I do absolutely love the other answer!

This is what drove me to uninstall Facebook, twitter, etc. I use their websites if I occasionally want to visit. I don't want notifications hooking me into my phone.


> There’s a name for misalignment between business intent and codebase implementation: technical debt.

I wish we'd stop redefining this term. Technical debt is a shortcut agreed upon with the business to get something out now and fix later, and the fix will cost more than the original. It is entirely in line with business intent.


Exactly. The quote is a great definition of a bug, not debt


Software is not a liability, it's an asset. If you make it for less then it has a shorter shelf-life. Tech debt is a nonsense term to begin with.


I'm going disagree with you. My assets don't wake me up at 3am when they stop working....the best software is no software.

My line of reasoning with an example:

I own a car, and the car itself isn't the value I get from the vehicle. The value is being able to go distant places easily. If I could snap my fingers and travel instantly I wouldn't own a car.

So, software is the value delivery vehicle, but generally not the actual valuable thing (remember that the vast majority of software are CRUD apps that are a step above excel that mainly handle bookkeeping).


I'm speaking from the perspective of business and accounting.


I would love it if something like Github would accept donations from a repo and parcel it out to the repo's dependencies somehow. It would sadly make Github even stickier, but it would be a great feature.


I remember making a very simple adventure game from scratch in BBC Basic in the mid 90s. Good times. Code immediately lost on reboot.


> their policy is not to accept RDMS engine specific queries

Why? Is it so they can switch in future?


Earlier Rails avoided database specific features so apps could stay portable using only ActiveRecord. Since then Rails has added much better PostgreSQL support: JSON/JSONB, hstore, array columns, GIN/GiST indexes.


Then they don't have to troubleshoot advanced queries.


That's the point of what the person you replied to is saying.


it's hard but not impossible. Unless Apple didn't learn the Google Maps/Maps lesson.


It is pretty much impossible. How are they going to build the data centers on the scale required when all the RAM and GPUs in the world are bought up for the foreseeable future?


Totally agree. Banks use durable queues a lot to make sure things get processed. Or at least they used to.


The analogy could be: “Queues are the like the todos list of your team. The todo item (message) stays there until it is successfully completed. It can be handled by the producer (monolith) or it can be handled by someone else (microservices).”


Fascism requires an authoritarian state. If you don't want the horrors of the 20th century, be it fascists with a world war, or socialism with even more deaths despite being in peacetime, you don't want authoritarianism to take hold, and you want to move power out of the state.


>"you don't want authoritarianism to take hold"

I think the EU is well on its way of accomplishing just that. Not that it is unique in aspirations


> It drops every message that doesn't start with your secret::

Depending on how internet-proof you want to make this, I wonder if it might be better to sign with a secret and attach the signature to the message instead of directly sending the secret.


I considered that! But thought for this “first public” release it might be overkill. Definitely one of the possibilities for later


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