#lazy devs

[daily-devops]

My programming language of choice is stackoverflow copypaste.

[icepotatofake]

i keep thinking of this story my friend told me.

He’s a project mantainer on a specific open-source project, which means he has rights to check in code and act on issues other people have raised.

some rando came barging in saying “YOU NEED A 64-BIT VERSION OF THIS”. 

now, look. the benefits of “64-bit” (in contrast to its predecessor, “32 bit”) are mostly around how much memory a program can consume, and there aren’t really any serious downsides these days except that some computers more than 5 years old won’t be able to run it.

regardless, it’s work to make the change, and it’s good to understand why you need to do something before you just go off and do it. if the problem is that, e.g., the application is crashing, just going to 64-bit might not solve it, because a bug somewhere else in the program could be causing the crash for any number of reasons. If the application isn’t running on a specific variant of Linux, it might have to do with the lack of another required program, and nothing to do with 64bit support. 

so my friend, reasonable guy that he is, says: “well, why do you want this? are you having trouble with memory consumption? are you running on an OS that doesn’t have 32-bit support?” 

and the rando posts an image meme that says “TROLL SPOTTED” and that’s it. that’s his entire contribution. 

to this rando, 64-bit support was worth the development effort simply because it was More Better. It didn’t matter that it was better in a specific situation with a specific set of circumstances. It didn’t matter that it also had some (in this case, fairly minor) limitations. It was just Better, so someone should Do It. Questioning this “more better” mindset is something that is so foreign to Rando that it immediately read as a troll!

I think about this a lot when I hear people asking for their favorite MMO to move to DirectX 12. There’s a bunch of press material that goes out saying “DirectX12 is Better Than Ever! Faster! Shinier! More Productive!”. So much of that fluff gets taken uncritically. Never mind the fact that DX12 is only on Windows10. Never mind that to use DX12 instead of DX9 would require a massive, massive overhaul. It’s better. It’s shinier. It’s an upgrade. If you’re against it, you’re a Lazy Dev who Hates True Gamers. 

That’s kind of what I mean when I talk about techno-fetishism. They aren’t researching risks and rewards, balances and tradeoffs. They are considering the technology as an isolated object of its own, something that slides neatly into place like (not coincidentally) a new graphics card or faster processor or going from an iPhone 5 to an iPhone 6. They are buying into the consumerist narrative of technology, plug and play, new is better than old, what could possibly go wrong.

It’s a very naive viewpoint that no one who works in this field would ever endorse. Over here, we laugh about the impossibility of a “one line fix”, because even changing one line of code has the ability to completely fuck you up in unexpected ways for a month. But consumers are Alienated From Our Labor. They just see this process as a black box where they Give Money, Get Shiny. 

[daily-devops]

Eng1: So.... I carefully create a machine with RabbitMQ on it... I add three users, each with their own password... one is admin, one has only write privileges (enqueue) and one has read-write privileges (dequeue&delete). Guess which one the developers are using for fucking everything?

Eng2: ADMIN! Because it’s easier. And developers are deliberately fucking with us.

[indiegamehq]

Hank: Zombie Hunter Now Available for Android

Read the entire article at: http://indiegamehq.com/hank-zombie-hunter-available-android/

Hank: Zombie Hunter Now Available for Android

Lazy Devs has released their debut game, Hank: Zombie Hunter, for Android. Years have passed since the zombie apocalypse ravaged humanity, and the humans have managed to quarantine the zombie population. This containment will not hold forever as the zombies are beginning to break their way out....