Thank you for highlighting that. The example was intended to show the (maybe exaggerated) pathological state of web development and certainly not an example to be followed.

In seriousnes: yes please use a11y friendly markup. It helps your SEO, but more importantly it helps your visitors that use accessibility tools.

It doesn’t have to be hard. I use component libraries that abstract it out and adds the necessary aria attributes and semantic markup for me.

As a bonus my web app development is closer to using the rich component libraries I enjoy in desktop apps. Just be aware of the absolute mess of npm packages that come with it.

That on delete cascade is evil. I love it.

As a developer who has mostly worked with web, but also dabbled in some native app work: It’s not that the web UI frameworks are so much nicer. The native libraries I’ve used, at least, are actually much nicer to work with. I’ve worked with Delphi, Java Swing, various Windows frameworks, etc. React and friends are a chaotic mess in comparison and HTML was not designed for app development. You want a button? Here’s a div, go ahead and style it. Thanks, let me add 500 npm packages to my project.

No, the main reason I prefer to develop web apps is because they’re effortlessly cross-platform and automatically updated and distributed. No maintaining multiple versions. Updates are basically instant and happen across your user base. No code signing or paying to compile code on a Mac. No asking for install permissions on stupidly locked down enterprise workstations. Just deploy and go.

I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve needed to create a native app due to some restriction like local file access or device access. Most of the time you’re just entering values into a database, so that can just be a website. PWAs are a pain to develop but they are much easier to deal with once they’re in the wild.

YMMV of course.

Yep. Use free tools like gitguardian, gitleaks, etc. and run them in pre-commit hooks. Makes it a lot easier to catch.

And if you leak one by accident, change it immediately. There are bots trolling sites and repos for this information.

It only happens with ISO weeks. An example is 2006. Each of the weeks belong to different years (so 2005W52 and 2006W52 are different), but each can contain days from another year. So for example Sunday 2006-01-01 is part of week 52 of 2005. Week 1 starts on January 2. Then at the end of 2006 you have another week 52, but that week is actually part of 2006.

It’s a bit of a cheeky thing to point out, because at no point is a day in two different weeks, and the week itself only belongs to one year. It’s just that you can’t assume that any given day belongs to the same year as the week it is in. That is: 2006-01-01 is in 2005W52 not 2006W01.

Yep, but the year of week will be different for each.

Use a date library. Life is too short to make your own. The new Temporal library in JavaScript is quite good.

Even better: two weeks with the same week number can exist in the same year.

Fair point, and taken. Interviews are a two-way street: the candidate should ask about everything that matters to them, and the company should ask about everything important they want.

To avoid situations like this, it’s best not to assume anything unless you ask first. Windows is the de facto standard in business, yes, but not everywhere and not in every industry.

If your work OS matters to you enough that you will pass on the job if you can’t pick, then you should ask. I would not want to hire someone who will be miserable in the job. And as a middle manager I probably don’t have enough pull to make an exception just for this guy anyway.

Rock stars play by their own rules and they will get whatever they ask for. For the rest of us, we just have to take what we’re issued.

Why would you not be very clear about this right at the start of the interview process so you’re not wasting everybody’s (including your own) time? If this is one of your absolute show-stoppers, then say so up front and we can either work with IT to get you what you want, or decline and move on to the next candidate.

Yeah my first thought too was this is just a way to introduce voter id under the pretext of national security. It will create chaos, give plausible deniability for throwing out votes, sow doubt and fear, and prevent poor people from registering to vote. Business as usual, in other words.

I have recovered many times from a broken window session in Linux by switching to a console with ctrl-alt-fN, logging in, and either killing the offending program or just rebooting gracefully.

In Windows my last resort before the nuclear power button is Task Manager with ctrl-esc or ctrl-alt-delete.

I can only say I hope you’re right. I don’t like the way things are going, but I need to do what I can to adapt and survive so I choose to not put my hopes on AI failing anytime soon.

By the way, thank you for the thoughtful responses and discussion.

You’re not wrong, but in my personal experience AI that I’ve used is already at the level of a decent intern, maybe fresh junior level. There’s no reason it can’t improve from there. In fact I get pretty good results by working incrementally to stay within its context window.

I was around for the dotcom bubble and I expect this to go similarly: at first there is a rush to put AI into everything. Then they start realizing they have to actually make money and the frivolous stuff drops by the wayside and the useful stuff remains.

But it doesn’t go away completely. After the dotcom bust, the Internet age was firmly upon us, just with less hype. I expect AI to follow a similar trend. So, we can hope for another AI winter or we can figure out where we fit in. I know which one I’m doing.

I’m a senior working with junior developers, guiding them through difficult tasks and delegating work to them. I also use AI for some of the work. Everything you say is correct.

However, that doesn’t stop a) some seniors from spinning up several copies of AI and test them like a group of juniors and b) management from seeing this as a way to cut personnel.

I think denying these facts as a senior is just shooting yourself in the foot. We need to find the most productive ways of using AI or become obsolete.

At the same time we need to ensure that juniors can develop into future seniors. AI is throwing a major wrench in the works of that, but management won’t care.

Basically, the smart thing to do is to identify where AI, seniors, and juniors all fit in. I think the bubble needs to pop before that truly happens, though. Right now there’s too much excitement to cut cost/salaries with the people holding the purse strings. Until AI companies start trying to actually make a profit, that won’t happen.

Very true. I’ve been saying this for years. However, the flip side is you get the best results from AI by treating it as a junior developer as well. When you do, you can in fact have a fleet of virtual junior developer working for you as a senior.

However, and I tell this to the junior I work with: you are responsible for the code you put into production, regardless if you write it yourself or you used AI. You must review what it creates because you’re signing off on it.

That in turn means you may not save as much time as you think, because you have to review everything, and you have to make sure you understand everything.

But understanding will get progressively harder the more code is written by other people or AI. It’s best to try to stay current with the code base as it develops.

Unfortunately this cautious approach does not align with the profit motives of those trying to replace us with AI, so I remain cynical about the future.

Thank you for the recommendation. I would consider it again if my day job switched to Linux (unlikely).

I did try Rider on Linux a while back, but just couldn’t get my head around it. I’ve become too used to Visual Studio on Windows (with Resharper).

I don’t do a lot of C# outside of my day job, though, so VS code is fine for my uses.

Unfortunately I can’t help you there. I just use plain old kde plasma on Fedora. If your favorite code editor supports Language Server Protocol (LSP), you can probably get it to do code completion for C# one way or another. Vim, neovim, Kate, and many others do.

I just use VS code with c# extensions on Linux. It works fine. I also use vim with lsp support for C# sometimes.

If you want more, you may also want to check out Rider from Jetbrains.

This 100%. For a little extra help, there are tools such as gitleaks to help. I suggest setting one up in a pre commit hook.

Pinned (major.minor.patch) versions and ignore-scripts should be the default. It’s insane that the default is to execute untrusted code from the Internet.

It reminds me of back when IE would let me download a bat file and execute it

/Getoffmylawn