Extinguished Engineer

PCF_LABEL_AWESOME Here for software stuff. Cursed with eternal optimism. I want to make it all better. Make Agile Great Again! Views are my own.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

This is also the story behind my current profile name.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@bretajohnson I've had to deaden myself. It took a long time. I resisted. I couldn't get my head around management saying they want us to be engaged when they really want us to give up.
But it's done and I'm at peace, even happy.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

Why do I have imaginary conversations? Because whatever it is, I enjoy explaining it, but there's no realistic chance it's ever going to come up.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

I used to say that a little bit of message was okay in a movie. Just don't overdo it. Now I wish they'd just quit. The problem isn't even the message. We just don't need messages. They're addicted to it.
The only message should be whatever the point of the story is. Heroism. Love. Persistence. Corruption. Tragedy. If there are meta-messages that involve somehow educating the audience, they become the point of the film, and they're not entertaining.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@jamonholmgren It's very surprising. I didn't see it coming. It's also awesome. Speaking only for myself, the changes couldn't have come at a more perfect time.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@kristijan_kralj I just want this industry to support me for maybe five more years. This tells me that even after I retire I'd likely be able to find some part time work if I wanted it.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@colderwild @fandompulse No, I mean that apparently no one cared. It won a ton of awards, and deserved them. It actually never occurred to me until today that many accents were American.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@Volknasty @fandompulse I hinted at alternate meanings in my post. I respect everyone's opinions. I just have my personal reasons for wanting to stay far away from certain cultural differences.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@JJmoida @fandompulse I understand certain issues with the film. I don't understand others, like the wrong type of armor, the accents, or deviation from the source. I don't think strictly adhering to the poem would work as a film.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@fandompulse For years only the so-called director's cut was available for streaming. At one point a character used an anachronistic expression - "in that department" - that sounded wrong.

The theatrical cut was not only perfect, but it was a PG film with occasional mild language.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

The words "modern audience" have been used in different ways. But are we not a modern audience? Those words alone are not a red flag.

Watch Amadeus (1984, the theatrical cut that won best picture.) That was for a modern audience. It also happens that the main characters had American accents. The beauty of the film was how it showed that despite the centuries in between, people then were like people now.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@bretajohnson @RyanRodemoyer2 They're all employees

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

The 80s. I was 10 or 11. Everything clicked when someone gave me a printout of a text adventure in BASIC. I converted it to work on my TRS-80.

Then, years later, the next time was learning VBA by recording macros in Excel and reading the code it generated. Around the same time I started making web pages for our intranet and learned classic ASP.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@bretajohnson @RyanRodemoyer2 No, all internal. It helps to create an environment of casual, unhindered communication. An email feels more like sending a letter. No one uses it. I feel like I can reach anyone, ask anyone anything, and people reach out to me too.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

That DevOps stuff can be brutal. It's usually built so we can see what isn't working, and we get some obscure error, but we don't have the access we need to see the whole picture. We can't decide to stop using what doesn't work, but we own the outcome. It's only an occasional part of our job and everything changes in between cycles, so building proficiency isn't just difficult - it's impractical.
At least the people aren't difficult. If they were it would be unbearable.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@notch I like it, but then I encountered "keyof typeof." I never, ever want to understand that. It's like TypeScript is this new and improved thing, then it makes some weird, unholy connection with its JavaScript side.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

No, this was not worth my time. But no one made me click the link to a question on Quora about whether Hulk could punch Superman's head off. That's on me.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@Sc_Meerkat @voidcompiler What usually happens is fake Agile. What is happening? Totally real Agile. The difference? I talk to my users. I'm trusted to come up with a solution. I'm able to ignore useless processes and make something happen.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

I'm a developer. I asked some users what they spend the most time on. The answer is calculating something using data we give them, when we could just give them the answer.

I came up with a proposal for how we could do it and gave it to them. Would this work? Is it good enough? We're having a conversation. All of this is over Slack.

This is so easy. It boggles my mind that in two years, our Product Owner never brought us this problem. It would be more valuable than most of what we've done. We've spent those two years building them a screen full of data, squeezing in more and more, so they can read it all and figure it out for themselves.

Why did neither Product nor UX surface this? All we have to do is talk to the users. I can't count how many times they've told us that we're not competent to talk to users about this stuff. That's their job. If we're nice, maybe we could join the meeting, but only if we agree not to speak. The incompetence is staggering.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

We should keep a few developers around who don't use AI. It's like how the appendix stores bacteria to replenish your gut biome if something bad happens.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

If someone doing good work makes you look bad, maybe you're just bad

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

When Product says, "This is what the users want," they mean
- I wrote down what they said they wanted but didn't question it.
- They described a problem. This is my solution. I'm assuming it's a good one.
- I described this to them and they didn't say no.