Well I failed badly in my mission to blog every week of 2017. I guess life and stuff just got in the way in the end. I’ll try to be more consistent in the second half of 2018. Anyway, I bring some news: I have a new blog engine, and we are hiring at Stack Overflow! New blog engine I was previously using WordPress but had many issues and concerns with it.| David Haney
In case you missed the big news in the industry this week, a GitLab employee accidentally deleted a ton of production data and took their platform down for hours. It was only when everything was on fire and they were in deep trouble that they turned to their backup systems… only to find that none of them actually worked. Backup Prod Data Regularly Not exactly a groundbreaking statement, right? Everybody knows this.| David Haney
I was working on my fireplace this past weekend. Specifically I had just finished ripping down the old surface to the red brick, and then preparing the brick surface with a layer of thinset for tiling. I spent all of Saturday cutting tiles and then placing them on the fireplace surround and hearth. Even with help it took 11 hours to do, and about 8 hours of it was measuring and cutting tiles.| David Haney
Today an article was brought to my attention. One that, at the time of writing this post, had hit the front page of various sites (including Hacker News) and had been shared over 2,600 times. The article is On Secretly Terrible Engineers, which is a criticism of the tech industry and the mentality which it holds towards hiring both new and experienced developers/engineers. Spoiler: I strongly disagree with most of this article.| David Haney
The Problem I think that most devs would agree when I state that the definition of success in the corporate world of development places less emphasis on “good” code and more emphasis on “working” code. Working code is code that can be released to production on or before the deadline, regardless of performance or even bugs in most cases. As a developer, you ultimately feel as if you’ve failed when you toil for nights on end to meet steep deadlines and churn out crappy code.| David Haney