Category: Shorts

This category contains posts short enough to not scroll through and overlook them 🤣… I hope

Empathy in Partnership

Posted on by Morgan

Partnership—aka living together—can be challenging, but it also opens the door to step up and lead by example.

  • Don’t take it personally if your partner is mad at you. It could be they feel unsupported, overwhelmed, or just tired.
  • Don’t respond in anger or with resentment if your partner yells at you. Stay calm and see how your help or support can improve the situation.
  • Don’t try to convince your partner at a bad time, like when they’re in a rush. Maybe they just need some time alone.
  • Don’t get mad if your partner can’t decide about simple things. Instead, try taking care of some of their mental load.
  • Don’t get mad when your partner makes mistakes, and don’t “remember that” later just to make them feel bad. It’s hurtful.
  • Don’t answer right away—listen and acknowledge your own mistakes, even if you want to justify your behavior. Keep those explanations for calmer discussions.
  • Keep your harsh words in your head.
  • Support your partner when it’s very difficult for you or when you feel like you’re imploding, because that’s how you grow into the partner they need.

Real DevOps do/dont – a list

Posted on by Morgan

[hint: this is not a serious post, I'm sorry if you feel attacked by this]

Inspired by Google search results for "Real Devs dont" (https://www.google.com/search?q=%22real+developers+dont%22).

  • Real Devs don't use UI - they use CLIs instead (https://terminaltrove.com/).
  • Real Devs don't need an IDE like VSCode, instead they code in production using Vim (and of course real devs use Nano. No, Emacs, https://xkcd.com/378/ ).
  • Real Devs don't use frameworks, they use libs.
  • Real Devs don't comment their code, there is no time for that.
  • Real Devs don't test their code, instead they throw all changes in production to save time.
  • Real Devs don't use their trackpad, instead they do practice touch typing (https://www.typingstudy.com/) and learn every app shortcut by heart, or build their own.
  • Real Devs don't need unit tests, instead they build programming skills.
  • Real Devs don't use debuggers, instead they stare at the stack trace for hours.
  • Real Devs don't joke or laugh at work, instead they blame every failure on poor colleagues competency.
  • Real Devs don't use Website builders, instead they code in raw HTML and CSS and throw JS away.
  • Real Devs don't trust anyone.
  • Real Devs use mechanical keyboards.

Honest tech definitions for dummies

Posted on by Morgan
  • AI Agent: a cheap junior employee who has root access to your system and production and will fake competency and waste your money. Have fun.
  • All-in-one calendar/messenger/file sharing app: oh, look, they generously manage your most sensitive data with good intent and cheap costs: your security and privacy is not a problem it seems. Run away even if it's free.
  • Anti-AI: someone using AI but bitter about it officially.
  • Application logs: something you stare at while thinking about the sense of your life.
  • Backups: something everyone is supposed to do but never does. Tip: you can have world-class data backups for free, feed them to some LLM prompt or share them in private LinkedIn messages or in private GitHub repo, they will likely leak later in some hack or some LLM output.
  • Bugs: something that occurs to you because you didn't RTFM.
  • CDN: a disaster waiting to happen.
  • CI/CD pipeline: a glorified shell script that compiles your code, usually wrapped in YAML or in Groovy or a messy mix of both. Nobody cares it until it breaks. If you are a developer, blame any pipeline failure onto the CI/CD tooling pretend your code works on your machine.
  • Coding: some ancien art you go back to after wasting 4 days debugging AI-generated code.
  • Contabo: cheap plastic VPS.
  • Cloud: a big garage with computers, related to random outages and expensive certifications.
  • CloudFlare: a tool to protect robots from humans trying to use internet.
  • DevOps person: someone debugging your code and your production environment.
  • Docker: a packager for your bloated app and your dependency hell.
  • DuckDuckGo: a private search engine hosted by big tech and using big tech search results and funded by big tech. Yeah very private.
  • Ecosia: a green washing search engine.
  • Git: a simple version control tool to make your life miserable.
  • Google search: a search engine for ads.
  • Hetzner: cheap VPS for your piracy stuff self hosted business applications.
  • Home hosted: piracy stuff or very sensitive stuff running on a Raspberry with zero backup. Do not mixup with Self hosted.
  • JavaScript: sugar for the web.
  • Kubernetes: because Docker wasn't complicated enough, this is a glorified infinite loop that restarts your bloated apps when they crash, and they will. It's also good to have on a resume.
  • LLM: a tool for text generation you can use to save you from developing skills. Some people call it general AGI. Ok, AGI, go win the lottery for me.
  • Newsletter: legal spam nobody reads.
  • Passkeys: a tool to prevent humans from using a tool on multiple devices.
  • QR Codes: links that force you to be glued to your phone and run a crappy app to avoid talking to human beings. It's the modern way to ordering anything. If you want I can generate infinite QR Codes for only 10$ per month.
  • Quantum: a marketing term to make any bullshit sound more legit. Oh, there is it, a quantum LLM.
  • Reboot: something you do when you are too lazy to RTFM.
  • RTFM: reading the manual is something you never do unless to prove someone else wrong or when it's time to understand the programming language you are using for ten years.
  • Self hosted: some barely secured docker containerized app running in some cloud like Hetzner. What is "self" about it? You decide. Maybe the fact it's installed by some human following a recipe. Impressive.
  • Spotify: a scam acting like a glorified Winamp clone that randomly removes content from your favorite playlists, rob you and artists.
  • Substack / Bearblog / Dev.to and other blog platforms: a recycle bin for your ideas.
  • Seedboxes: A place for exchanging free Linux distributions,.NOTHING ELSE of course.
  • the Onion, Le Gorafi: satire websites that compete with D. Trump for the most stupid headlines.
  • URL shorteners: a good legal way to ease phishing attempts. It's also a tool used to hide mostly useless sometimes good links behind magic ephemeral links. You remember that good site? Was it blb.lb/8378hdkf? Or goo.gl/hdk792? Who knew it would be such a terrible idea. Oh, did you see this new quantum URL shortener?
  • VPN: a glorified proxy.
  • Web scraping: a way to fix the lack of APIs. Also a lazy yet professional way to CTRL+C / CTRL+V content from websites.
  • YouTube: ads streaming service.

Flow

Posted on by Morgan
  • Cannot really stop coding while in a task. Coding is fun.
  • Cannot really stop improving after solving a task. I'm in the flow and each improvement unlocks another.
  • Cannot really stop bug fixing before solving it. Interruption is frustrating and I need to kill this problem.

Related

Continuous improvement is addictive because of the desire to reach perfection and repair the broken window (cfr Broken window theory).

Thanks to Vincent L. for the thoughts that inspired this blog.

Instagram

Posted on by Morgan

As a reminder of how shitty those social media can be, I'm feeling obligated to write this short rant.

This morning, using my secondary empty and idle Instagram account to do some research, I end up discovering a nice content through the home page feed, and I'm trying to share it with my partner.

For some reason, the share does not reach my partner, so I want to find the content again and I navigate backward and this triggers a home feed refresh. My home feed is now completely unrecognizable and this causes immense frustration.

Last week, I was about to revive my main Instagram account, and this kind of bad UX reminds me that the benefits are not worth the immense frustration and non-sense of navigating an endless loop of evaporating content. No, Meta, you won't fool me again.

Fear of missing out ? not worth it.