kodemager's comments

Is the USAs debt really “crippling”? It’s enormous and looks dangerous on a graph, but if the country wanted to, it could pay it off in a couple of hard years considering it’s “only” around 100% of its GDP. Hardly crippling in any real economic sense when you zoom out to the nationwide macro level.

Are millennials less productive than previous generations? In my country, we sure aren’t. We’re building more things and we’re building them faster, more efficient and with higher profits than ever before. Not just “creator” businesses, in my city alone we have torn down and build new buildings at such a pace that the previous two years of covid alone have seen more “work building houses” jobs (sorry my English isn’t up to task, construction jobs?” than we did in the entirety of the 80-90’s combined… take that gen X! (Or something).

A lot of millennials went and got themselves a higher education in my country. Probably even more so than in the USA because in Denmark you can get any university degree you qualify for while being paid to study, since we handle that stuff collectively and through taxes to give everyone equal opportunity. Has the fact that we too scorned craftsmanship professions throughout the 90ies and 00s has a negative impact? Sure. Are millennials who went to university migrating to become plumbers; electricians and so on? Absolutely.

The real difference between my millennial generation and my parents generation is what we are paid for our efforts. I work a high paying job, I work a second job as an external examiner for CS students which twice-four times a year pays me an extra months worth of my primary job as salary. Yet to see the same wealth increase my parents saw from simply owning a house, I’ll need to do some hardcore investment and saving, or hope that real estate continues rising (which it won’t).

My parents saw their house increase from 200k to 4 million Danish KR. I do own my own apartment, and it is in an area that’s fairly sure to increase in value, but to see the same increase, it would need to go from 3 million to around 50 million. Adjusting for inflation, a realistic estimate will be that I can sell it for maybe 6 million if I’m lucky.

So despite being more productive, more efficient and more financially great for the over all economy, I will benefit less than my parents did. Not only that, but they got to retire at 60, I currently get to do so at 73 unless I pay for all of the pre-73 years myself.

Should you loathe your own generation like the author does? Fuck no. Try to understand them instead and you may just realise why people are fed up with wages that haven’t increased without getting eaten by inflation for 30 some years.

I’m lucky enough that I can chose and pick where I work, I can’t image how not being able to do so as a millennial or below must frustrate.

How do you know though. Maybe business are simply investing less money into Facebook because the ROAS isn’t 6-10x times anymore.

Maybe 100% or this is on Apple, but maybe it’s also because nobody under the age of 20 uses Meta platforms. I can only speak for my country of course, but if your target isn’t in the 40+ category then Facebook or Instagram advertisements rarely pay off in any sort of data we collect on it. In my line of work Facebook works, but it doesn’t work better than targeting banner adds on financial websites or financial news papers, and you still only start the onboarding journey with that, the real sale state waaaay later. 5 years ago the sale journey started on Facebook, and now it just doesn’t.

It’s anecdotal but the adds I get on DuckDuckGo by it matching what I search for tend to be better than the targeted adds I get on Google or Facebook which are typically advertisements for things that I have just bought.

Like when I search for hiking shoes, that’s when you should advertise, now for the next two months. I’m not going to buy a second pair for another 20 years after all, and if it’s to reassure me I made the right purchases then they shouldn’t be for variating brands.

But I mean, you’re probably right, why else would various sales decision spend so much money on advertisement companies?

I think the “pay with your privacy” model is probably coming to an end though. At least here in the EU that seems to be the long term plan, and I think Apple might agree with me.

> if executed right

I think this right there is the biggest issue for the companies that sell consumer data. Google has had so many golden eggs, office365 before Microsoft, the cloud infrastructure before AWS and so on, and they keep fumbling the ball because their organisation is geared toward a very different form of sales.

The fact that Instagram didn’t become an Etsy styled platform for artists when it was the main platform for sharing semi-professional “hobby” work should tell you everything you need to know about how little Facebook understands markets that aren’t selling privacy data. Because even if they opened up now that ship has sailed as less and less people who produce things rely on Instagram as a platform because the younger audiences aren’t there.

Maybe, but those of us who grew up in the wake of Chernobyl are likely never going to support nuclear power regardless of the facts. You can ignore that fact, but that doesn’t mean society is somehow magically going to readjust to what is “right” or “scientific”.

I say this, not in defence of the anti-nuclear generations of Europe but more so to explain why the political climate is how it is.

Beyond this comes money. Our technology sector is invested in basically every sort of green energy, except for nuclear. All our advantages in making money lie in things like wind and solar power, and if we were to truly adopt nuclear power, it’s very likely that all that money would leave Europe and go into Chinese or Indian technology. Which may be great for the planet, but you’re just not going to see European politicians stand in line to transfer energy sector jobs in the hundreds or thousands out from Europe.

It is what it is, but this isn’t likely to change in the next 40 so years.

Import is slowly becoming the standard, but working with typescript professionally modules has easily been the most annoying part of the Node experience.

It works pretty well, and then you need to use something like Azure Functions and then suddenly it doesn’t. For various reasons.

My most recent example was using lodash, which works perfectly fine with import with typescript targeting esnext in node16, but then needs to be setup with require when you target an azure function and commonjs. I mean, maaaybe you could avoid it by using mjs, which is currently sort of needed to move into the node16 functionality in azure functions, even though they sort of run node16 just fine in part of them without it, and you sort of don’t want to use mjs files and so on.

I’m sure it’ll get there in a few years, but it is no doubt annoying to have to fight the toolset ever so often. Over something that feels like it should just be working.

That last part isn’t really exclusive to node these days though, is it?

There are a lot of assumptions about Microsoft in this thread and they basically all boil down to people not understanding what it is Microsoft does.

They sell solutions to non-IT enterprise organisations, and while it’s reasonable to assume that a lot of HN simply aren’t in touch with this world, it’s one of the largest markets for IT software there is in the world, and the only real competition Microsoft has in this area is AWS.

With several decades worth of experience in enterprise organisations in the European public sector, and quite a few years in the European financial private sector, Microsoft has been the sole business partner in terms of IT that has always been a solid pick. There seem to be this notion that Microsoft sells shitty products by manipulating IT managers, and that is just wholly untrue. They sell the software people want, and they sell it in a package that includes real world telephone support with their actual headquarters. Not some chat-bot or forum like Google, not some outsourced call Center like Apple, but real phone lines directly to Seattle. When something big goes wrong on any of our user facing solutions, which is basically anything office365 including sharepoint Microsoft will call us, on the hour, every hour, with updates unti things get resolved. This is essentially the most valueable thing to any IT manager in an organisation of 20.000 employees where maybe 50 are IT related, because it lets you tell the organisation exactly what Microsoft is doing to resolve the issue that is currently stopping your business.

The reason Azure was capable of sneaking past AWS and securing itself a healthy market share wasn’t only that it makes sense to live in Azure when you already have Office365, it was that Amazon didn’t realise how much of a deal phone support meant to the European Enterprise market. They very quickly picked up on it though, and are now in some areas like HDPR a better option than Azure.

Mean while a company like Google had office365 before there was office365 and have some arguably interesting services in Google Cloud, but they will never sell anything to enterprise because Google still doesn’t understand how to sell things to enterprise. It doesn’t seem like Google really cares in terms of gsuite or Google Cloud, but they do care about education, and, still they struggle with delivering what we want from them even though they ask us and we tell them. Apple is in a somewhat similar boat, except they don’t really care what we think. They do things the Apple way and never reach out.

Anyway, the result is that Microsoft is a great business to business partner. Especially in recent years where they have inhoused more and more of their services so you almost never have to rely on some 3rd party “gold partner” or whatever they call themselves that essentially all suck and always have sucked. The only partner we have currently is for licensing, and even this is an area that I hope Microsoft inhouses because it’s just such a stupid mess.

In my eyes a lot of what Microsoft sells to private customers is know how. They don’t give Office365 to students because they are nice, they do so because it means that every hire we onboard already knows excel. This means it’s incredibly hard to compete in the office space. Similarly everyone we hire knows windows, some of these people can’t tell the difference between an android or an iOS devices when they call IT support (no I’m not kidding) but they all know windows. I know that a lot of techies want Linux to be a competitive choice for users in areas like the public sector, but those are the people who would need to use it, you can’t imagine how expensive retraining 20.000 employees who can’t tell an Android and an iOS device apparat to use Linux.

So as private users, we’re not really Microsoft customers. I mean, we are, but not really their primary customers. Because Microsoft makes their money in enterprise, and that position has probably never been more secure than it is today. Because what is the alternative to office365? Nothing. And when you already have your AD and licensing tied up to AzureAD and all the other integrations between Azure and windows + office365, then the business case to not use Azure as your cloud environment dwindles. It sometimes does make sense to use AWS, as I stated earlier, but not often.

As such Microsoft along with Apple (who have the private market of non-techies locked down) are probably some or the safest stock in the world of technology. I’d still rather invest in green energy though. Who doesn’t need energy?

Which is his right, at least if you support free speech. It’s no different from people refusing to buy products that are made in sweatshops or whatever else you can think of. Spotify is a commercial product, if they make decisions that make people not want to buy it then that’s just the free market regulating itself.

Until it’s the government doing it, it’s not a problem.

I think your definition of storytelling is too narrow. When I took “storytelling” as a university class 20 years ago it had nothing to do with having moving parts on a website, but the concept is the same for both this article and interactive articles. Storytelling is simply a tool that enables you to tell and present a long story in a way that that makes people read all of it. I’d say this article succeeds as much as that as an interactive article would.

In decades of software development in Danish enterprise and smaller companies I’ve never worked in a place that didn’t use windows. I don’t think I’ve worked in a place where using WSL wouldn’t be more of an administrative hassle than it was worth either.

Windows isn’t such a bad place to develop these days, depending on what you’re developing of course, but I’ve never had issue using Python, dotnet (as in the cli, not visual studio) or anything related to typescript or node in general.

I don’t particularly like using windows. I can’t tell you why, I used to like it, but I haven’t since I switched from 7 to 10. Which is sort of ironic considering that developing on windows has gotten much better with windows 10, but well, it’s probably just my personal opinion. So I actually often work on things on my personal Mac, which is sort of easy in todays environment if most of your assets live in the cloud which ours do. But I don’t mind using windows, about the only thing that annoys me these days is that you use “cd” instead of “ls” in the non shell terminal.

You’d wonder why they have corporate sales. I’ve worked in enterprise for a long time and we’d laugh at the notion whenever someone suggested we buy any Google service because easy access to phone support when things go wrong is one of the key selling points in enterprise.

It’s why Microsoft has done so well for itself in this area over the decades. Sure Office helps, but the fact that your operations guys can be on the phone with their Seattle based offices, and get hourly updates where Microsoft calls you, when something big goes wrong is pure gold to any IT manager in any enterprise. Not only because it lets you solve issues faster, but also because you can tell the organisation that IT is on the phone with Microsoft’s head offices and you are working on a solution with them.

I recently picked up TypeScript and I sort of agree with the author. It’s just so much cleaner to use Types instead of enums. That being said, I don’t think enums are bad if there is a good reason to use them. Checking if something is a type of X isn’t one such thing in my opinion, but that’s probably religion.

Namespaces mKe no sense to me. It’s probably because Microsoft drives TypeScript, but even though I was a C# developer for 10 years before moving on, they’ve just always been terrible to me. Their functionality is the sort of thing that is nice in theory, but really terrible in real world projects that run for years with variously skilled developers in a hurry.

Private is silly to me, but this is mostly because classes are silly to me. I can see why you’d want it if you use a lot of classes, I just don’t see why you would do that unless you’re trying to code C# in TypeScript. One of the things I loved the most about switching from C# to Python was how easy it was to use dictionaries and how powerful they were. The combination of TypeScript interfaces, Types and maps is the same brilliance with type safety. But once again, it’s sort of the thing where classes sometimes make sense, and when they do, so might private.

You can fire people for misconduct.

If I had an employee that I repeated told not to get drunk and crawl around hitting on coworkers. I would fire that person if they didn’t stop. To be perfectly blunt, I would have fired them right away, but I’m Danish, we can do such things with little repercussions since it’s so blatantly insane that they would have no ground to defend their actions.

Metzen Knew about the toxic “bro-culture” while he was in one of the management positions directly above some of what turned out to be the worst sexual offenders, and did nothing about it, for which he apologised on his own Twitter post scandal.

Michael Morhaime similarly was the head of Blizzard doing the worst of the sexual misconduct and people don’t things like “cube crawls”.

I’ve worked in big enterprise, I know how easy it is to turn the blind eye to things (maybe not drunk employees litterally crawling around to harass women) but still, but I fear that the toxic culture may be as old as Blizard west itself, and that it likely only grew into the sexual misconduct that it did following the growth of World of Warcraft and the huge influx of new hires (including a lot of in-office women which had been rare up till then).

I agree, but how do you boycott China? Every piece of hardware that I own has parts in them that was manufactured in China and where I live there aren’t alternatives.

I too deleted my Blizzard account in the wake of the HK nonsense, but it’s not like I had bought anything from them since Diablo 3 released considering I refunded my Warcraft 3 remade, so it felt a little like virtue signalling that nobody probably noticed.

Especially because we subscribe to Disney+ (I have young children), and I still buy a lot of things that were likely made by near (or possibly) slave labour. I know it’s still better to avoid what you can, but I can’t help but feel a little hypocritical about it.

At least with Blizard it turned out to have been a very good call when their toxic culture was revealed.

> This already allows autocomplete for the attributes to work.

So does the other way around in several SQL engines.

If you write something a long the lines of select x.ID, y.NAME from bla.bla as x join hum.hum as y on x.ID = y.FK in msSQL you’ll get autocomplete on x. and y..

You’re right that it’s more intuitive to write the from first of course.

I build and operated an employee database in accordance to the Danish OIO model for years, I even sat on a comity to define either models within the OIO model set for the public service.

These days I work with millions of entries from solar production.

I’ve never had to use complex SQL more than one time.

You use tools like SSIS or APIs on top of it to get and store the data.

I know you “can” create a lot of stored procedures and views, but as I’ve already said, you really, really shouldn’t do that exactly because it’s so terrible to work with for so many people.

Honestly though, SQL with an Odata api on top of it is one of my favorite ways of storing and retrieving data. If you have to actually transform the data, you do it with SSIS or similar tools that are much more efficient top level layers that are also testable and reusable.

But to each their own I guess. The join logic never bothered me much, and that seems to be an issue for a lot of people here.

That means onedrive for business uses sql server as it uses sharepoint online, interesting.

I’m curious as to why you find sql to be clunky, I find it extremely on point in most cases. I mean, how would you write a SELECT that was better than:

SELECT whatever FROM thisplace?

I know you can make it clunky with parameters and crazy stored procedures, and I’ve myself been guilty of a few recursive SQL queries that most people who aren’t intimate with SQL struggle to understand quickly, but I consider those things to be bad practice that should only be done when everything else is unavoidable.

The fact that SQL is still the preferred standard sort of speaks volumes to me about how good it is. We’re frankly approaching something similar with C styles languages. I recently did a gig as an external examiner, and it took me a while to realise that some code I was reading by a student in their PDF report was Kotlon and not TypeScript, because they look so alike.

I’m an external examiner for CS students and around 90% of the subjects we test them in is stuff they’ll never use in the real world.

It’s obviously anecdotal but in several decades or real world work I’ve never heard the words composition and aggregation used, and I’ve frankly never seen them really implemented intentionally in code either.

I sort of feel the same way with things like linked lists, double linked lists, trees and so on, though I see the value in those, but not enough for them to take up half a year of learning along with various sorting algorithms.

I have no idea to balance the “useful to know” with too much theory though, but I do know that almost everyone who graduates is around a years worth of real world coding away from being a programmer.