Teochew Thunder

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.

John Woods

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

Martin Fowler

If you think it's simple, then you have misunderstood the problem.

Bjarne Stroustrup

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

Larry Wall

Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.

Linus Torvalds

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Brook's Law

4

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."

9

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

19

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

23

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."

16

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

26

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?"

1

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

10

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."

14

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."

18

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."

26

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."

30

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."

14

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."

21

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."

24

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

29

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."

3

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."

7

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."

19

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."

25

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

31

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. "

6

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?"

10

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."

16

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."

28

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."

2

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."

7

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."

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