I have been on the 'receiving' end of such persons actions. We had one guy who worked probably 50% of his time on using not F#, but another "nice" thing. It never worked well and he spent an incredible amount of time patching it and fixing issues with it. I threw it out the day after and replaced it with some older boring technology, and the problems just went away.

Bravo. Yeah, I learned my lesson.

It also means when there's an outage due to X during christmas or whatever, then you're the only person who can reasonable work on it. Great work.

How is software "speech"? Do you consider all software "speech"? Do you think any form of software should be allowed, no matter what?

I don’t think software is speech, but to play devil’s advocate for a moment; if money is speech then why can’t software be speech? Both propositions seems equally ridiculous, but the Supreme Court has affirmed that money is speech.

The Ninth Circuit affirmed that software is speech in Bernstein. It's the reason cryptography is no longer heavily restricted by the US.

Yes, all software is speech and any form of software should be allowed.

If not, who decides what software is allowed or not? Will I need to get a license from the government before I push my PR to a repo?

What if you made the same argument for photography and freedom of speech?

> Yes, all photography is speech and any form of photography should be allowed.

> If not, who decides which photography is allowed or not? Will I need to get a license from the government before I publish a photograph online?

You see the problem here, don't you? There are many cases where a photograph can be illegal.

Sure. There are also many cases where any kind of speech can be illegal, depending on the context and content of the speech. That does not mean that form of speech is not constitutionally protected.

Legally, whether photographs are speech seems to come down to whether they are taken with communicative intent or not.

This is within the well known (and tested) limits of freedom of speech... which neither TikTok or WeChat software were found guilty of (with or without due process).

Do you consider blueprints and mechanical diagrams to be speech?

Under the US constitution and given legal precedent, absolutely.

Why would it be scummy? Do you think the authors of the email app is trying to trick the local kennel club members into install their open source email client unwillingly?

Yes, this is what my co-workers refer to as an if-statement.

All programming is just if statements. That doesn't mean systems can't be complex.

If you're creative you can get away without conditional branches: http://www.jucs.org/jucs_2_11/conditional_branching_is_not/R...

Not true; if the conditional branch goes backward then it's a (possibly do-) while statement. Also subroutine calls.

Counternitpick: Those subrouting calls and while statements are compiled to conditional jmps. If you squint your eyes it's just a fancy 'if'.

"It's no use, @a1369209993 - it's IF statements all the way down!"

Apologies to William James' apocryphal quote.

This is not about how it translates into code. I see a lot of value in this diagram when compared to the half-assed "requirements" most PMs put in their JIRA tickets.

That is my takeaway: PMs and non-developers - you must think through the entire workflow. When you don't, your engineers will and will either pepper you with questions that you are not prepared for or they will decide for you.

As an engineer, I consider fleshing out incomplete workflows to be one of the largest parts of my job. I've found the technique of saying "hey, the specification doesn't mention what to do in this situation, based on X/Y/Z elsewhere in the specification / this other similar feature, I'm operating under the assumption that it should work like <description of your best guess>. Let me know if that's mistaken". Then I make sure I have a commit of the state of the code, and start building based on the stated assumption.

A large fraction of the time, the PM just goes "that is correct", and the spec / ticket / whatever gets updated. When the answer is not "that is correct", you do lose out on whatever work you've done since sending that message, but writing code you eventually throw away isn't the end of the world. Also "that is not correct" responses often highlight areas where either the developer misunderstood what the PM was envisioning or the PM has a misunderstanding of what the system can do or how their proposed feature interacts with something else.

For this to work, you need:

1. Some variety of asynchronous channel that the developer can push stuff into at whatever frequency they want, and that the PM periodically catches up on entirely.

2. The developer to have a working understanding of how existing systems work and the system as a whole, from the business level.

3. The flexibility to modify specifications between the initial conception and implementation.

If you have all of those things, the PM doesn't necessarily need to think through the entire workflow beforehand -- it's nice if they can do that, but you can still ship working features without that and sometimes that is the pragmatic way to do it.

I'm exactly on the same page, this is uncanny!

I find myself creating a lot of these diagrams to share with PMs (along with sequence diagrams, system architecture diagrams, decision tables, etc.).

Systematically articulating all of these different conditions isn't necessarily the strong suit of a PM, but they're generally quite capable of understanding and providing input to such documents.

I mean, the chart is still useful to have, and it'd be a couple of methods probably had I written it. But it's not a huge state space, and most of the transitions are fairly reasonable.

I can imagine it was quite a lot of work to come to such a clean and relatively simple chart.

Coming up with this chart from a generic ticket like "impl notifications" is one of the hardest parts of being a developer.

Code is generally the easy part once you know exactly what you're doing.

> one of the hardest parts of being a developer.

Not least because it's really the product designer and product owner's job to make this kind of chart.

Which they never do to a satisfactory level (in my experience). So it still falls on the developer to do it properly, then PO just copies it for their presentations.

Is anyone "signing off" on the deploys or is it fully automatic? I can't really imagine it being manual 40 times per day, but just wanted to hear.

How do you handle the scenario that some developer pushes a send_me_all_the_credit_card_details() function to the code base which does something 'evil'? Do you rely on the reviewer "doing their works properly" to handle that?

I'm not saying formal "signing off"-steps in processes handle it, but some companies does them for that reason.

We generally require 2 reviewers, and no sign-off on deploys. For PCI-compliant code things work a bit differently, but tries to follow this as closely as possible.

Some of the issues I have had with the new design is pretty amazing. For example, when you open a specific submission it's opened in a "lightbox" which basically contains all the comment. If you click outside of the lightbox it's automatically closed which I guess is OK. So some time ago they made a new release and broke it so that if you clicked on the scrollbar to scroll down in the lightbox to see what people had commented then the lightbox with all the comments closed.

I submitted some complaint in their redesign subreddit but immediately random people replied to say that this was as designed and I should use keyboard to scroll, and not the scrollbar. But then the issue was that when the lightbox was shown it wasn't focused so I first had to use mouse to click in the lightbox to focus it and then use keyboard arrows to scroll.

Such a joke. Amateurs.

It really is a good example of everything that is wrong with the SPA approach today. Browser history abuse, skeleton/placeholder text rendering instead of actual content, never-ending loading spinner on the browser tab, problems with authentication between sessions. Just open up your network panel and try clicking around and watch your console light up like a christmas tree. Then switch to the old layout and compare the two.

To put a cherry on top of it, the new layout now intersperses ads into the post lists and styles them to look like posts.

Additionally, ever since reddit decided to host it's own media, it no longer possible to directly link to a video or image. I don't want to send a link to my friend of comments about a gif. I want to just send him the damn gif. For this reason alone I'll continue to use imgur.

I'll be really bummed out the day I can't click "switch to the old layout", but I'm sure the time when they're removing that is coming.

It looks like we're finally seeing a series of decisions being made that caters stockholders instead of users of the site. They managed to hold out for this long, but I guess the day has come where it has finally happened. The big difference between reddit and all the other sites that have done this, is reddit used to be the hip place people went to get away from these kinds of user hostile moves.

The only question left now: is reddit so entrenched in it's position that it won't lose ground to a newcomer from the fallout of these decisions? Probably, but I know I'll definitely be keeping my eye out for competition that is gaining steam.

Always good practice to rename 'bugs' and 'flaws' as 'features' and 'design'.

If there was another vote to reverse the Brexit-decision and people voted for that in majority, you could stop the madness and accept the results. Things change. Being stubborn is rarely the best option.

True. And even if no-one has changed their mind, the result may well be different. Leave voters, being older, are expiring at a much faster rate.

> Then, how do you recover?

In case this is not a rethorical question: Using the backup codes or a copy of the barcode you printed.

Regardless of what method you use I assume you want a secure backup method.

> but you can get a new sim

Maybe easily if you are a private person and happen to lose the phone in your home country during opening hours. I tried this method once but the company just forwarded me to the internal helpdesk of the company I work for (this is a good thing, but previously they issued SIM cards to me). Got a sim like a week later.

Maybe some larger tech sites would choose not to publish?

The EULA was never the stick for them. Intel can say "kill this story or you never get swag and engineering samples again" and it's done.