“we need more resources” is bounded by the rate at which you can incorporate new teams members without absolutely destroying your productivity, or having a bunch of untrained fools running around breaking things (of course the later is standard at many places already, so I guess it doesn’t always matter).

The right answer is usually : “No”. Or at least “Prioritize”. Or “This is what we need to get it done” at which point they might start to get software takes time to make decently, and they don’t want software that doesn’t work decently in the first place.

Never touched it? A website? What about updating frameworks for security issues?

This, to a point.

Other things help :

• Unit test to help catch regressions. If you are confident in your test catching a good portion of bugs from refactoring, at least you feel confident refactoring. Worst case, at least you ensured your code is testable. There is nothing worse than refactoring untestable code.
• Self-documenting code and when it fails to self-document, comments or refer to a wiki page.

Which distro?

Now I want to become a scientist so I can name something after a pun.

If a TODO passes code review, more than one person fucked up.

1. Those apps are simple
2. Those apps target a wide audience, hence have more budget as a result
3. Those apps are made by large, well oiled (you’d hope at least) companies. You don’t want my honest opinion on most small software development boxes. This industry grew faster than mentors became available for the newbies, so many devs including seniors still don’t know what they are doing.

Takes time to become ubiquitous.

Learning to deal with “unmaintanable” codebases is a pretty good skill. It taught me good documentation and refactoring manners. It’s only a problem for you if management does not accept that their velocity has gone down as a result of tech debt pilling up.

Code should scream it’s intent (business-wise) so as to be self-documenting as much as possible As much as possible is not 100%, so add comments when needed. Comments should be assumed to be relevant when written, at best. Git comment should be linked to your work ticket so that we can figure out why the hell you would do that, when looking at the code file itself. I swear some people seem to think we only read them in PRs (we don’t). Overall concepts used everyday, if they need to be reexplained, should probably be written down (at least today’s version). Tests are documentation. Often the only up to date one?

Git wasn’t used all that much in the 2000s. As far as I know it became popular in the 2010s (though it was always a thing in some circles I think) and then just supplanted almost everything else.

Also keep in mind some shops tend to follow larger tech companies (microsoft, etc.) and their product offering. So even new products might not have been on git until MS went in that direction.

IIRC they all learn some physics at engineering school. Even the software engineers.

100 years is ambitious only if you want to remove all of the cars. There are plenty of milestones that can be attained fairly quickly :

• Smaller cars. Less energy, materials, etc. Safer for other road users (you don’t get hit on your vital organs, better vision for the driver and everyone else since pedestrians can easily see over the car).
• Less car use is available now, if we just empower the alternatives (make bike usage safe, make public transport good enough)
• No more cars in cities. Bikes + trains mostly do the job, you can rent a car if you leave the city, or park it at the outskirts.
• Even smaller cities used to be liveable without a car. This could be brought back, but that’s probably a tough hill to climb.

Generally, you can replace some comments with variable names or comment names. Which means you must already be in the habbit of extracting methods, setting new variables to use appropriate names, and limit context to reduce the name (Smaller classes and methods means shorter names can be just as expressive, because the context is clearer). It lowers the number of wtfs per minute you get reading code before you even need whole sentences to explain why things are done in a certain way, because the names can be a powerful hint.

But realistically, you end up needing comments for some things anyways.

This. Especially if your team does not follow SOLID principles (as then someone fixes a bug in a base class method that shouldn’t be shared. This fixes an issue in a subclass but introduces one in another. Rinse, repeat.

Yes and no. I mean sure, if you are going to leverage this to gain a significant edge in the market, that works.

If you add a tool to the project, that you need to understand to maintain some parts of it, which adds to the learning curve of someone joining said team, then the gains have best be worth the effort.

We adopt so many librairies/plugins/tools over time that adding more complexity than you need this way is just terrible.

Yeah, but it’s easy to overuse it. If your for loop is much longer. For a few lines I’d agree, don’t bother using something longer.

Code should scream out it’s intent for the reader to see. It’s why you are doing something that needs to be communicated, not what you are doing. “i”, “counter” or “index” all scream out what you are doing, not why. This is more important than the name being short (but for equal explanations of intent, go with the shorter name). The for loop does that already.

If you can’t do that, be more precise. At the least make it “cardIndex”, or “searchIndex”. It makes it easier to connect the dots.

I’m glad they are finally doing something about climate anxiety.

There’s a whole list of 8 points over what constitute a cult.

I don’t remember the whole thing, but it was something like : Cults don’t let you leave. If you do leave, your family and friends who are still in the cult will not speak to you. Cults control you in details. They make sure you are tired at the end of the day, too tired to think for yourself. Cults make you dependent financially. Once you are that deep in, leaving means starting over economically.

There’s more, but it is different from how most people experience mainstream religions (I mean there are pockets here and there that are very cultish, but really the religion as a whole is a different beast that just works differently than an actual cult).

A little from column A, a little from column B. Looking at the media coverage over Bernie vs the other candidates, he had the deck stacked against him. Which doesn’t mean that someone like him couldn’t eventually win. It takes longer for the message to get through. in this environment.

I think the more dire the situation gets, the more people will start to get involved themselves, and then they’ll spend more time listening.

The part of the equation that can change, is the consumer variable.

No. I mean yeah, but we can change in so many more ways. that matter more. I think we need a multitude of approaches.

You can get active politically. Call your representative. Help get a better one elected if you can help out (and keep an eye out for a better one next time). You can learn to have those difficult conversations with friends, neighbor and family if you are good at that. Not all of those work for everyone. Some will swear up and down that direct action is better than getting involved in local or provincial/state elections. Then do that which you think will work.

As far as consumption goes, I tend to think withholding your consumption won’t do much (there are plenty of people who don’t care who will keep consuming, and we will look like a rounding error). However, I think support for alternatives matter more (whether they be habits which we spread in the population, or alternate products, like legumes instead of meat. Which I guess is also kind of promoting a habit. By forming communities that live our values, we can cause other people to be exposed to them and see how it can work out in practice. Hence eating more vegan foods bring those out. My hope is that such movements (and sometimes, as for vegan foods, markets) will grow exponentially at some point if it catches on.