I'd be happy to just go into a company and write unit tests for their code, but in most cases that would require dictating huge design changes to a lot of their code. If I take over a code base, I like to start writing unit tests for new development and bug fixes (Write the test prior to fixing the bug.) Last project I worked on was an old C code base with hundreds or possibly thousands of global variables. In some cases there were multiple global variables for the same value, and they got used in different places and often had to be set to different values in order for the code to work correctly. It might not have been too bad to go through and make sure it was just passing everything it used, but it was a lot of code and it kind of all needed to be changed at the same time. Much too much of an effort for the team that was working on it.

Or is just complex and unfamiliar. The problem with these frameworks is they work great when they work, but you only ever see them working because they've been published with the most trivial example. When you actually start trying to do things with them, you have to know implementation-level details of the framework in order to make it work for you. By the time you've invested all that time, you may as well have written something less generic that actually does what you want.

Oh and when I say they work great, I was kind of lying. I have a favorite example. A while back a developer I was working with wrote some Spring/Hibernate code to pull records in from the database and print a billing report. Soon as he handed it off to me, I thought "What happens if I throw 100000 records at this?" Well what happened is that it crashed. So I cut the number in half and it still crashed. Down around 30000 records, it started taking about half an hour and THEN crashing.

Turns out he was using the framework to pull all the records from a couple of different tables and doing the join in Java. The SQL join I wrote to test the code took a couple of minutes to run on a million records and returned the correct output. On a hundred thousand it was neighborhood of 10 seconds.

Now the Spring/Hibernate people will be quick to point out that you can edit some XML file or something and make the framework do a join for you, thus solving that problem. And that is true, if you know a fair bit about the framework. And you'd have to know a fair bit about all the other frameworks they used on that project, too. By the time you got done learning all the frameworks they were using to the level of detail where you could actually be that effective with them, you could have written the application they'd built 10 times over.

Fortunately this story has a happy ending. The team ended up deciding to run the original developer's code against the billing database several times a day so that it would never have so many records to process that it would crash, thus solving the problem once and for all!

Remember: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few!

Short sighted leadership making cars no one wanted had nothing to do with it.

Heh heh. Now current workstation has the Monkey Virus!

Oh, I thought someone just took a shit on my Slashdot today. So... It's going to stay that way, huh? Huh...

Most people do not have a problem with the jackboot of authority, so long as it is on their feet rather than their neck.

This is the worst crime of all.

"We don't like change" is the rough translation.

Those icons look no uglier than the old ones.

I'm curious to see how often they have random people tell them they're their father, or ask them if they can lend a hand. It might not be that many, if they can also crush bone with their bionic hands.

I'd tell her to never apologize for who she is and never let anyone tell her she can't do something because she's a girl.

Also if you have an indoor skydiving facility near you, I'd take her to do that and spring for the video. I'd say 6-10 minutes each. You may as well keep experiencing new stuff up until you die, and it's quite memorable. Hell if I was you I'd go on a tandem skydive too. What have you got to be afraid of at this point? And maybe a hot air balloon ride, too. You'd be surprised how easy it is to find a hot air balloon pilot in a given area, and that's something you can take the entire family to do. Knock out that bucket list and make some memories for everyone!

What should you do with people whose belief systems you cannot stand? Tolerate them? Or ostracize them?

Isn't it easier when the intolerable beliefs are all on your side? Then you can insist that others accept you, while feeling self-righteous all the time. However, the moment that someone else barges into your kumbaya scene, you feel not the least bit tolerant towards their opinions. Funny how that works, isn't it?

Anyone who ever wondered how good people can support tyranny, bookmark this comment. A healthy helping of ignorance combined with unshakable faith that those other people are wrong.

Oh, Jesus... Jesus Christ!

Learning is an essential part of reading. Failing to comprehend, or worse, guessing at a meaning and guessing wrong, does yourself a disservice. Story? Who even said we're reading fiction?