Perl scripts are the Vogon poetry of the sysadmin world.
:P
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Chris Oldwood
@chrisoldwood@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06toot = reinterpret_cast(life);
234 Followers
114 Following
47 Posts
Joined November 02, 2016
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Choose pair programming
Choose energised work
Choose test-driven development
Choose short iterations and frequent releases
Choose continuous integration
Choose refactoring the code to keep the design simple and malleable
Choose your future. Choose XP.
Leeky abstraction…
I got an unexpected delivery from this courier, but to send it back they said I had to use their sister company Carriage Return…
As I have Spain in the family sweepstake it seemed appropriate to make a giant paella on the fire pit for dinner 😋.
Forgot to celebrate the 10th anniversary of my startup… :P
It’s often said that Ben Kenobi is a complex character. How complex? I’d say at least O(B(1)).
The travelling salesman problem is typically described as NP hard, whereas avoiding a supply chain attack on your package manager is apparently NPM hard…
Currently writing a tool that can identify any file on the internet just from its secure hash. Working title is SHAzam...
RE: @gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz
There’s always an XKCD for everything. This time I reckon it’s Citogenesis :o).
Oh dear, what an utter disappointment Saturday Night Live UK was 😔. It was so bad we couldn’t face watching to the end of the first episode, and it’s incredibly rare that we bail on anything that quickly. We even managed two entire episodes of Space Force, and that was awful!
It is well known that functional and object-oriented programmers are separated by The Expression Problem — the functional crowd always look very smug whilst the object-oriented folks seem to frown a lot…
Happy Star Trek Day!
:P
Wondering if I’ll be able to use this to help convince my teenagers to clean their rooms :o).
Replying to
@jasongorman It must be great to work with people who know exactly what they want and never need to change their mind even if it turns out to not be what they actually needed :o).
Seeing “CustomerBase” used in the GOOS book has thrown me a curveball because I know the suffix Base is not being used in the same way as the suffix abomination Impl, but I can’t unsee that these days :o).
(I assume it’s “customer base” used in the same manner as the original “data base”? Or maybe not? @natpryce@mastodon.social @sf105@mastodonapp.uk)
The trouble with the term “end-to-end testing” is that nobody can agree where one end starts and the other end finishes. If you’re not running your tests on the end-user’s machine are you even trying?
:P
[2016] Mocking Framework Expectations
https://chrisoldwood.blogspot.com/2016/06/mocking-framework-expectations.html
More time wasted debugging an intermittently failing unit test caused by a mocking framework trying to be “helpful” instead of screaming that a dependency wasn’t explicitly configured 🤷♂️.
Make England Great Again would be pronounced “meagre” and that feels very British :o).
Replying to
@slomo@toot.cat @mostalive@mastodon.social ISTR hitting a similar issue with some C++ code ~20 years ago because there was no sequence point around = and I had a std::map used in some caching code where the [] on the left of = was evaluated before a cache lookup on the right of it. (Can’t remember the two compilers.)
Developers who disregard encapsulation and mark all their class members public are on to a hiding to nothing….
The correlation between a rich entrepreneur and a crap vibe-coded software product is known as affluent and effluent coupling…
Developing a technique for buying & selling stocks based on the frequency of toots by ex-U.S. vice presidents. I'm calling it Al Gore Rhythmic Trading…
I hear that Anthropic are worried about the potential damage caffeine fuelled hackers could do with their latest LLM, they feel Coke & Mythos could be an explosive combination…
I just asked the grocer for 5+3i kg of sweet potatoes and he looked at me funny. I thought they were complex carbohydrates 🤷♂️.
Replying to
@thirstybear @tdpauw @samir @mrksdck
Unless I misread the GOOS book, which focuses on how to create good internal structure by working outside-in, then we disagree by more than you think :o).
Replying to
@thirstybear @tdpauw @samir @mrksdck
I’ve just finished a gig where there are only unit and component tests, nothing automated involving the outer layers of the onion. All the non-automated testing involves shared infra because nobody took the time to get that going, so there are huge gaps and it takes time to regression test. They were web APIs and there are Azure local emulators for all the internal dependencies.
The publisher of this jigsaw clearly isn’t well versed in Cockney Rhyming Slang :o).
[2016] Confusion Over Waste
https://chrisoldwood.blogspot.com/2016/10/confusion-over-waste.html
"In essence what is being perceived as waste is the time spent in the short term, when the real waste is time lost in the future due to rework caused by the missed opportunity to learn sooner."
Does the Hippocratic Oath for software developers of mobile apps include the phrase "do know ARM"?
Replying to
@thirstybear @tdpauw @samir @mrksdck
In my talks about testing I talk of the Testing Polygon instead of Pyramid exactly because the landscape has changed so much in terms of performance that many tests that were once expensive are now cheap and reliable. Michale Feathers’ definition of slow and unreliable tests is totally out of date, and has been for over a decade.
Ignore instructions
The hacker franticly typed
Skynet rolled its eyes
(I often confuse phonetics with syllables so may have an off-by-one error 😏.)
Replying to
@natpryce@mastodon.social @sf105@mastodonapp.uk
Ah, right, same as User Base I guess? These aren’t terms I typically hear but that probably says more about the people I interact with and the services I work on. (I need to get out more 🙂.)
FWIW when you went with “AuctionHouse” instead of the more enterprise-y “AuctionFactory” I was full-on “Breakfast Club air-punch”.
I think I think too hard about names, but clearly I’m still not thinking nearly hard enough!
Inserting a large number of sequential comments in a BASIC program to slow down the interpreter is known as REM sleep...
I often see these things at the start of roadworks. Do they push them to close the road?
Clusterfuck: fucking up 99.999% of the time.
The Sneetches by Dr Seuss is a great analogy for the current state of AI where Anthropic & OpenAI take the role of Sylvester McMonkey McBean as they sell you one model to create code, but a different one to review its output, and yet another to assess for security flaws…
Replying to
@thirstybear
I’ve never done any Java so the code is as irrelevant to me now as it was in 2010, I’m just going along with the narrative.
Props to the referee this evening for not letting Harry Kane get away with yet another soft penalty and instead making him step up and show what he’s really capable of.
Replying to
@arne_mertz@mastodon.social You’ve thought about this joke way more than I have :o).
(I was going for the similarity with the X button in the top right corner on Windows.)
Replying to
@thirstybear @tdpauw @samir @mrksdck
I’m reading it again at the moment (I skim read it back in the 2010’s 🤭) and I’m getting the impression it puts more emphasis on the functional side.
Maybe I need to go back and start it for a third time because I’m not interpreting it correctly… 🤔 (It wouldn’t be the first time I got the wrong end of the stick 😁.)
I can imagine there are a bunch of English newspaper editors hoping that Bosnia and Herzegovina get trounced by the Unites States tonight just so they can use the headline “USA smokes B&H”.
:P
Replying to
Here is my stab at using Pester to test my old Ansible vault decryption tool:
https://github.com/chrisoldwood/AnsVaultCmd/blob/master/Source/Tests/EndToEnd.Tests.ps1
[article] Afterwood — Milestones
https://accu.org/journals/overload/34/193/oldwood/
A retrospective of my ACCU Overload back-page column which celebrated its 10th anniversary in June, along with celebrating milestones in general.
Replying to
@thirstybear @tdpauw @samir @mrksdck
I think teams have heard “e2e tests are slow and bad” and avoid them up front, instead of facing into them and adapting *if* they turn out to become a drag on delivery. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
(Of course the definition of e2e differs depending on who you’re taking to and what environment you’re in, which doesn’t help matters.)