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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Same experience with my relatives. I had some family whose Macbooks were no longer able to update (for Apple forced obsolescence reasons). They run Mint now, and have never had a single problem since I first set them up.

    Well, one of them called me because they couldn’t figure out how to attach a file to an email… But that problem would have been identical on Mac OS.



  • Yeah but you get a nice ramp-up period where you’re allowed to be bewildered and unproductive. In that time, you can probably pick out two or three grandiose changes (ideally with hot new technologies) to throw on the pile before that period ends, and use them as resume padding and interview stories for the next job.

    Unlike the old developers, you aren’t complicit in the mess until a few years go by.


  • There’s a second-order thing going on though with tech debt that makes it different than just maintenance: Tech debt is when you address a problem in a way that makes future problems more difficult to address. So if the wire-and-tape fix is actually robust, easy to work around, and/or easy to reverse, then it wouldn’t be tech debt. But if it made it harder to unclog/clean the tap, or to fix the next leak, or install/remove things around it, then it would be like tech debt.




  • E x a c t l y! On Windows/Mac, you’re less inclined to be charitable, because most of the time you’re facing down artificially-imposed limitations on how you can interact with your own machine. They seem to say “You’re too dumb to be allowed to mess with that,” which is a tolerable slight if it Just Works every time… But when it doesn’t, ohhh boy…