Teochew Thunder

A Question of Luck
"There are tons of things that affects the odds one way or another, many of which have nothing to do with my aptitude or attitude."

Film Review: Black Mirror Series Four
"This wasn't a bad episode, though the plot left me a bit baffled at times."

Branching With Switch Statements
"Some languages, like Python, omit the break statement altogether, in favor of a break by default."

Five Phases of Programming I Went Through
"I had reached the point where learning new programming languages was cool and all, but what I really wanted to do was learn to do new things. As opposed to learning to do the same things in new ways."

Why Mask The Password Field?
"Of course, hiding any kind of input the user creates on screen, just by definition, is inconvenient."

Take ownership of your career, please
"Our careers are only thing we can have control over. How does it make any sense to cede that control to someone else?"

Film Review: Black Mirror Series Four, Redux
"This is vintage Black Mirror, all right. Extra emphasis on human beings being scum. Love it!"

Ten Professional Hazards Of Writing Code For A Living
"We're not trying to sound smart when we break out the tech jargon, cross my heart. Mostly because we are smart, and know it."

That strange feeling that comes with achieving that prize
"Living like you're on your last dollar isn't a lot of fun. Let me tell you what is even less fun - actually being on your last dollar."

Profanity-laced Content Over The Years
"While in principle, I have nothing against swearing, I think overuse of it ultimately detracts from what this is supposed to be - a tech blog."

Separating Text Editors from IDEs
"Text editors edit text. It could be a block of code, a poem about dinosaurs or a dissertation about why dolphins are such jerks."

Spaghetti, waffles, and their relevance to tech work
"But would that mean men are better suited to tech? Only if you think software development is nothing but programming."

How worried should software developers be about Devin AI?
"If, as a software developer, you have predicated your entire career around your ability to write clean, beautiful, well-documented and nicely structured code, you have spectacularly missed the point."

Five Funny Tech Webcomic Strips
"And if there's anything I'm crazy about, it's puns. Tech puns. Especially the really bad ones. The programmer dad jokes."

The Tree of Newspaper and Toilet Roll Tubes: A TeochewThunder Project
"For every day I remained unemployed, I added one more branch."

What's the best programming language for beginners?
"No developer plies their trade without consulting a reference of some sort. Textbooks are a valid source, but for the most updated material, we turn to the internet."

A Software Developer's Vacation in Penang
"It was easy to tell that I was a tourist, despite my skin color fitting right in with the demographic - I was grinning like an idiot in the oppressive heat and obviously happy to be here."

Glassdoor has just become entirely too transparent
"The only way for Glassdoor to guarantee that it will not divulge those names, would be for Glassdoor to not have the ability to divulge those names."

The Fuss Over Flexible Work Arrangements
"It's not simply a matter of enshrining Flexible Work Arrangements in law. That is a child's point of view. Adult professionals need to be better than that."

Googlers Fired For Protesting Project Nimbus
"Google made that bed, and now they get to lie in it."

Some use cases for JavaScript's Spread Syntax
"The syntax can't be used by itself as a value. It's actually a series of comma-separated values. "

Is it really ScarJo, and why does it matter?
"Seriously, between Sam Altman and Elon Musk, what is it with tech company CEOs doing stupid shit and acting like consequences are for lesser mortals?"

When an absence of value doesn't equate to a NULL
"But NULL is a value in itself... and that value is explicitly no value."

Why Mastery of Programming is a Myth
"Let me counter the saying with this - before you learn to do something well, you first have to learn to do it half-assed."

Remote workers in Dell Technologies stand firm
"What's interesting is that Dell stated that those who opted to remain remote would no longer be considered for promotion... and a full fifty percent of remote employees didn't blink."

The time is now, or at least, soon
"There have been several examples of this throughout my life, where I had to go do something. Before, it was a matter of finding a reason to do it; but at some point, it became a matter of finding a reason not to."

Great Expectations and how to manage them
"Make no mistake; where you are concerned, how people treat you is ultimately how you train them to treat you."

The case against badmouthing your former employers publicly
"My former employers are history. Over and done with. Shrinking objects in the rear view mirror of my life. I have bigger fish to fry."

D3 and HighCharts: Pros, Cons and Comparisons
"When it comes to hammering out a standard good-looking solution quickly with minimal fuss, HighCharts can't be beat. At least, not by D3."

The day Microsoft stood still for CrowdStrike
"The irony here, of course, is that CrowdStrike was employed by these companies for the express purpose of guarding against malicious attacks much like this outage."

Software Review: XAMPP
"XAMPP condenses the horribly complicated process of setting up an Apache server with a database, regardless of whether it's on a Windows or Mac platform, into a few simple steps. What's not to love?"

Singapore's Smoking Samsui Woman Controversy Through a Web Developer's Eyes
"The URA, similarly, seems to be afflicted with the kind of characters that expect to be taken seriously (even when they talk nonsense) simply because they're the URA, dammit."

SGActive Plus: How much of a plus is it?
"All said and done, I'm in favor of any proposed solution that will allow me to speak of the SGActive app in the past tense."

The Muratori-Martin debate: Clean Code, yay or nay?
"That's not to say that code shouldn't be beautiful and clean; far from it, but it shouldn't be the primary or overriding goal, at least not in the business context."

Five Hilariously Unfortunate Names in Tech
"But ask any Hokkien speaker how to pronounce the name of Elon Musk's pet Artificial Intelligence company, and you might get a snigger."

App Review: Duolingo
"This app is great for learning a new language. It won't give you native-level fluency, but it will absolutely take you from zero to some significant level of proficiency provided one uses it diligently and consistently. "

Why people should (and shouldn't) hire older software developers
"Yes, some of us older folks can be rigid and stuck in our ways, but the nature of this industry weeds such people out fairly quickly."

What Iswaran's sentence means for those in positions of authority
"MPs should be seen and not heard; in fact, they should preferably not be seen either."

INFO

A collection of technical snippets and ruminations on the web industry and tech in general. Much of it is opinion-based, and as such, I fully expect people to disagree.

As with most opinion-based content, your mileage may vary.

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Posts for 2024