this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2022
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Oh irony of ironies, today is a perfect example of what I'm alluding to in the blog. I was unable to post this all day today because the recent server update caused some problem with a component that Lemmy uses for pictures.
Software sucks.
Note, I'm not trying to drag Lemmy's programmers here. They can't help the fact that the software tooling landscape is a wasteland. They're the victims in this, not the perps.
Many use cases, many hats. Most of us play multiple roles in our lives, whether we know it or not -- and so wear multiple hats.
We're all victims, to a degree, of poor software design, and we're all responsible for it to a degree as well. If for no other reason, because we make some compromise for some other perceived gain. We literally enable bad software every time we use it.
Thinking of you here, Google, and your compatriots Facebook and Twitter.
Not just to be argumentative, but rather to suggest that there is something we can all do about it. Even those among us who are not programmers or engineers can raise awareness among both other users and service/software providers, and refuse to use bad software and crappy insecure web technology.
One thing we can all do (users and practitioners both) is STOP ACCEPTING EXCUSES. Buggy software is broken software. Period. Shove this in the practitioners' faces (and accept that it will be shoved into ours!) and stop standing for it.
One of the reasons we in this industry have gotten into this state is that we've convinced the public (and ourselves) that this is normal. We've shot ourselves in the foot for so often that we think walking around leaving bloody footprints behind is normal.
And we're about the only branch of "engineering" (scare quotes because I can count on one hand the number of software makers I think use engineering principles–and I don't number myself on that hand) that tolerates the kind of cowboy bullshit that is normal. Cowboy civil engineers get sued to perdition and/or jailed when their output is fundamentally broken. When mechanical engineers make broken shit, they go bankrupt from the returns. Yet when software "engineers" product total and absolute shit they get away scot free and, indeed, they often, bizarrely, manage to sell the repairs as "new software".
Excellent commentary. Excellent use of markdown for emphasis. 5/5