Well on the flip side, I somehow ended up doing legacy projects with a dude that has been coding for decades and is still actively developing in VB and asp.net. Weirdly, the guys not dumb - he asked me for an API and I blew his mind with generics and cut the code down by a third. I then introduced him to the concept of (primitive) components, he isn't quite sold on the importance of code reuse, but every time I delete 1k lines of old code and replace it with a 20 line function my soul grows

When we do code reviews, it's basically pair programming sharing screen... Usually we just push everything and wait for bug reports, because this crazy ass company has been using a reference book, a calculator, and hundreds of people were manually re-entering things by memory into QuickBooks until January 1st this year. They were thousands of dollars off in the second week... We thought it was a bug. It was all user errors

He's been working on this system for 15 years, I ran into a table with 126 columns the other day. Somehow, this dude manages to swim through a database with hundreds of tables and just as many triggers with rawdog sql.

It's fucking wild...I split my time between that and working on my virtual assistant that brainstorms it's own development with me, and an app that I'm trying to make into a unified fediverse client.

I know what a tight ship looks like and I push for best practices when I think there's something to gain worth the fight, but the sheer spectrum of software dev is incredible. My legacy guy told me about what's been taking all his time lately today - he has to build a system to screen scrape from an emulated IBM mainframe... And I spent my morning working on a unified activity pub interface and my evening testing my weird observation that LLMs speaking UwU seem to perform significantly better

My point being, there's a sweet spot between methodology/process, and it's very rare to hit it. And also, software dev is playing in realms beyond human comprehension, and no matter how orderly if seems it should be, every senior dev who still writes code is superstitious, and often correct to be so

Notify the people you have to notify for your blockers, then embrace the absurdity

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk