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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 6th, 2023

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  • To OP’s point, this guy DOES sound pretentious in a very writerly way. However, I felt just like him on my first cruise not too long ago. I reluctantly went with my girlfriend so I didn’t have to “make friends”… but the excess, the hard-working and undervalued employees, and the crowds were just as poignant obvious. The food was fine but not special, a point of disappointment after hearing so much about how great cruise food was. This was very late in the pandemic but the ship was all the way full and the price could have bought us a nicer trip by way of premium economy airline and 4-star hotel. I was one of maybe two or three people i ever saw wearing a mask. Still got covid. My hope is that I never have to go on another cruise.



    1. Some people have mentioned it already but turning human-readable code to machine code is like turning a precise cake recipe into a cake. A decent baker can do it. Any developer can compile existing code. Going from a baked cake to a precise recipe requires a chemistry lab and a team of highly-trained scientists. Same thing for code. You’ll need a highly-experienced and specialized programmer to turn a program into legible code. Its almost always easier to just rebuild from scratch.

    However companies do other things as well.

    1. Companies sometimes purposefully compress and obfuscate their code to make it hard to unpack. This happens a lot on the web where a website might have code sent to your machine in a format which could have been legible. But before they send it to you, they run the code through a program which adds extra steps, renames things, and reorders things and removes extra spaces… all to make it hard to read.

    2. Some companies will encrypt their code or programs to varying degrees. Some will do it at the storage level, such as DRM or modern disk-based videogames. The data in these games is “locked” behind passwords and keys which can only work if the program “calls home” to Steam or Xbox or whatever and those providers let the game be opened. It’s more complicated than this but that’s the basics.

    3. A lot of companies have moved their code “into the cloud”. That means, instead of giving you a full piece of software, you only get the front-end, or the pictures and words you see on screen. The actual program lives on the company’s servers which you don’ have access to. You only get to send those servers inputs, and they return outputs back to your screen.

    4. Companies can make their code secret from internal developers by breaking programs up into smaller pieces. Say you’re a developer at Apple. You might be assigned on the specific part of the system which opens apps from the home screen and may only get access to that part of the system so if your development machine gets hacked, the hackers don’t know ALL the inner workings of iOS.

    I’m sure there are more ways but this is a start.




  • I have a friend whose team uses Scrum as an internal auditor at a utilities company. Their audits are treated as epics while specific deliverables or findings are stories. After a few weeks of growing pains, he likes it a couple of years after implementation.

    Myself? I’ve had mostly bad experiences working in various IT and Dev roles both as a IC and team manager. Maybe it’s because I’ve been trained on using it, but I still believe in the methodology and blame greedy implementations. I see management/customers count or haggle points, sizes, or hours and it’s like staring down a speeding freight train.