Why not just use what you have until you can afford to and/or need to upgrade? SAS drives are more expensive because they typically offer higher performance and reliability. Hardware raid may be “old” but it’s still very common. The main risk with it is that if your raid card fails, you’ll have to replace it with the same model if you don’t want to rebuild your server from scratch.

I’ve been running an old Dell PowerEdge for several years with no issues.

Soap Opera Effect

My oldest child is the only one who calls me by my first name. When I adopted her, I told her she didn’t have to call me “dad” unless she wanted to. I’ve heard her refer to me as “dad” when she thinks I’m not in earshot.

Where’s “accidentally group chatting state secrets to randos?”

Oh man. “Inner restlessness” is probably my least favorite ADHD symptom. I’m not outwardly hyperactive but my defective little brain sure is.

I used to treat it daily with Jim Beam but that’s not a good way to live either.

Now I take my bed time meds (including melatonin) about 3 hours before bedtime and put on my blue light glasses. It’s not perfect but it’s better than it used to be.

Management often views software engineers more like machines that spit out code rather than actual engineers who design software. I can’t tell you how many projects I’ve been on where someone up the ladder is unhappy with the time estimate given to complete a feature so they either bring on a contractor or pull a team from another project

Invariably, the additional “help” makes a giant cluster fuck and the people who are actually familiar with the code are now stuck having to scrutinize every PR and fix a ton of defects rather than contributing to feature development. Then the feature takes twice as long to develop as originally estimated. Management scratches their head, shrugs it off, and repeats the same mistake the next time.

Battleships were an interesting chapter in naval history. They were first developed around 60 years before aircraft carriers, increasingly designed with the idea that they would be able to hit enemy targets while remaining out of range of returned fire. That ended up being an unrealistic expectation. Those 16 inch guns can lob a 1 ton shell nearly 24 miles but not very accurately at that range.

Battleships probably outlived their tactical usefulness. They were definitely good for projecting force. Few things say “I’m going to obliterate you” like a large, fast ship armed with 9 giant-ass canons.

You just need a reminder to check your reminders.

• Stores putting out Christmas merchandise before Halloween.
• People who use their phones while driving.
• Littering.

“Use the court depositions from the victims paid crisis actors. Those women got trafficked and assaulted on purpose so they could make [future] President Trump look bad.” – MAGA

If it’s not leaking oil then it’s not a Chevy smallblock.

Core memory unlocked.

🎶Stick-to-it-ivity
If you’ve got that stuff called Stick-to-it-ivity
You’re gonna do all right.
Old Man Adversity gonna have his bluff called
Stick-to-it-ivity never lost a fight.🎶

One of my old bosses used to say, “the choice is often not between right and wrong, but good, better, and best.”

I agree with that sentiment for the most part. Different styles is fine. But sometimes you run into someone who is trying to use a socket wrench to drive nails and all you can do is just kind of watch in amazement and wonder how they arrived at the conclusion that this was the way to go.

First One:

Big ASP.Net Core Web API that passed through several different contract developer teams before being finally brought in house.

The first team created this janky repository pattern on top of Entity Framework Core. Why? I have no idea. My guess is that they just didn’t know how to use it even though it’s a reasonably well documented ORM.

The next team abandoned EFCore entirely, switched to Dapper, left the old stuff in place, and managed to cram 80% of the new business logic into stored procedures. There were things being done in sprocs that had absolutely no business being done there, much less being offloaded to the database.

By the time it got to me, the data layer was a nightmarish disaster of unecesary repo classes, duplicates entities, and untestable SQL procedures, some of which were hundreds of lines long.

“Why are all our queries running so slow?”

We’ll see guys, it’s like this. When your shoving a bunch of telemetry into a stored procedure to run calculations on it, and none of that data is even stored in this database, it’s going to consume resources on the database server, thereby slowing down all the other queries running on it.

Second One:

Web app that generates PDF reports. Problem was it generated them on-the-fly, every time the PDF was requested instead of generating it once and storing it in blob storage and it was sllloowwwww. 30 seconds to generate a 5 page document. There were a list of poor decisions that led to that, but I digress.

Product owner wants the PDF’s to be publicly available to users can share links to them. One of the other teams implements the feature and it’s slated for release. One day, my curiosity gets the best of me and I wonder, “what happens if I send a bunch of document requests at once?” I made it to 20 before the application ground to a halt.

I send a quick write up to the scrum Master who schedules a meeting to go over my findings. All the managers keep trying to blow it off like it’s not a big deal cause “who would do something like that?” Meanwhile, I’m trying to explain to them that it’s not even malicious actors that we have to be concerned about. Literally 20 users can’t request reports at the same time without crashing the app. That’s a big problem.

They never did fix it properly. Ended up killing the product off which was fine because it was a pile of garbage.

Brandishing pencil

Don’t rush me. I’ve still got a few years.

I definitely do not miss VCR’s “eating” the tape.

You should note that it’s from Project 2025 for those that won’t open the link.

Didn’t have to click the link. The lying and false equivalences gave it away.

Who? Us avocado toast swilling, quiet quitting, not consumery enough losers who still live with our parents?