Git allows me to write code as much as I want. But GitHub does more than just Git. If you don’t remember the details of the next task you need to work on and GitHub is down, that’s a problem. As a senior I spend a lot of time reviewing PRs. That’s considerably harder when GitHub is down.
I used to like that. But then I graduated college and got a job and I don’t have the energy to deal with that crap. I just want my computer to work. The only time I fuck around with things is when something isn’t working the way I think it should work and the frustration reaches critical mass. Dicking around with a non-critical system can be fun, since if I break something on it my main PC is still fine. But I’d pretty much always prefer spending my free time on other hobby projects like programming or resin casting.
I’d much rather be a wizard living in a dark, forbidding tower that people only approach in times of great need and when they do they bring a sacrificial offering of homemade baklava to placate me
Yeah, I’ve had more than my fair share of people thinking I’m a wizard because I’m good at hunting down information and applying it. At my last job it got to the point where people either thought I was IT or that I was the magic computer wizard of Ox or something. “Hey, is Jira down?” “IDK, I’m not IT…” “Can you restart it?” “No, because I’m not IT…” But then I’d tell them who could actually help them so they’d always come back to me the next time they had a problem.
Have you not had friends or family come to you to solve their computer problems? Their problems are almost always some tedious, boring, “How do I make program X do thing Y?” It’s just a technical literacy skill check (how well can you navigate modern apps) not an actual “do you know how computers work” problem. Tedious as fuck. God save me from that shit.
If my girlfriend was a programmer bringing me some interesting technical problem, maybe. But even then, I spend 8 hours dealing with that shit, the chances that I want to deal with more of it after work are slim.
IMO that’s less idiomatic Go, more just plain old clearly written code. Whenever possible, the nominal (non-error) path should stay at the same level of indentation. Indentation should be reserved (as much as is possible) for loops and atypical conditions (including errors).
Maybe if you didn’t make unqualified blanket statements people would take you more seriously. If I trained my own LLM and kept it for my own personal use, in what way is that fascism? Because according to you it is, since all AI is fascism.
Ok…? That doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft was enshitifying the software they bought before “AI” was a thing. They didn’t suddenly start doing it when LLMs happened.
If we’re talking about the Linux kernel or Netflix’s video delivery infrastructure, maybe. But the majority of developers are not working on those. And I’m still going to call it “unavoidable technical debt” because for all intents and purposes that’s what it is.
If your project is easy to maintain (aka low tech debt) that means it should be easy to understand the overall structure and it should be easy to understand any given component. So a new dev should be able to quickly figure out what part they need to change and how to change that part.
Some large, complex systems (like an OS) are unavoidably complex. Maybe it’s not fair to call that tech debt, but it’s still functionally the same thing - stuff that slows down development velocity due to difficulty of understanding. It’s just (probably) unavoidable given the domain.
But the majority of software projects aren’t that complex. The majority of software is apps and libraries that aren’t terribly complex. Monsters like operating systems and million to billion user scale products are outliers.
“How easy is it to onboard?” is functionally equivalent to “How easy is it to understand?”. The biggest factor in maintainability almost always boils down to how easy it is to understand. So, difficult to onboard almost certainly means difficult to maintain, and thus is tech debt.
So… are you using nothing but FOSS from activist projects? That doesn’t seem like a big pool, from what I’ve seen. Or do you mean support as in with your time and/or money?
The ecosystem is slowly migrating to Wayland. It will probably take another decade but at some point your choice is going to be Wayland, or ancient unsupported systems.
Git allows me to write code as much as I want. But GitHub does more than just Git. If you don’t remember the details of the next task you need to work on and GitHub is down, that’s a problem. As a senior I spend a lot of time reviewing PRs. That’s considerably harder when GitHub is down.