Thanks for your thoughtful comment, but inverse video works better for me. High contrast with the background plus low overall brightness, and videos don't look washed out.

Because of low vision, I sit close to the monitor, so that light mode is like staring directly into a 100 watt lightbulb. Bonus answer: Dark mode consumes less energy on emissive displays like OLEDs.

The thousands-of-programmers model assumes that the most time-consuming part of software development is typing the code into an editor. Designing the software is really the biggest piece of work, and it is more difficult to serialize because of the need to agree on a contract between any two communicating parts. Building software as pipelines or loosely coupled modules can help with this, but there is only so much available concurrency in the design process.

You don't have to worry (so much) about technical debt if you are never going to update a program once it's delivered. If it's going out on a ROM for a video game or it's the landing program for a Mars rover, it's either good enough or not, but you'll never update it. On the other hand, if you're deploying every day, like for a web-based business, then you're always maintaining code, and technical debt is a killer. The way you make someone care about technical debt is to make them responsible for it. Reviewing module tests to ensure they cover the whole interface is one way. Making the person who submitted the broken code fix it is another way. A third way is to show managers that repairing tech debt after a bug is reported is more expensive than taking the time not to insert it in the first place. Technical debt is compound interest. It makes everything more expensive. If you're in a continuous maintenance cycle, it will eventually choke you. You'll have to staff up again and again to fight the growing mountain of debt. It's a business-killer.

Yes, absolutely. Some days I am just not inspired. On those days, I just crank out something and hope I can come back later to fix it. I often find that the next time around, I have a much better solution. The problem is, this only works if your employer is understanding enough to let you run your own show. Such employers are rare, of course.

traffic light

Laser printers are a better deal nowadays than inkjet printers unless you need photo-quality full-color prints. Even then, color laser printers are pretty good for things like posters and charts. Laser toner doesn't dry out if you use it infrequently (because it's already dry). It's only a bit more expensive than an inkjet cartridge and prints many more pages. I'll never buy another inkjet printer. My Brother MFC-L2717DW b&w laser printer only cost around $200 and has been utterly reliable for two plus years now.

It depends on how replaceable you are. If your advice is generic, if any PhD in your field can give the same advice, then maybe you have to work for free now in order to maybe ride the gravy train later. If your client will have difficulty replacing your knowledge, and needs it to advance his business, then you can be more firm with him about payment. Since you aren't a regular employee working with them on a day-to-day basis, I suspect the situation may be closer to the former. It's clear that your client is already riding the gravy train. There are thousands of small businesses sucking hungrily at the government teat, particularly in the defense and aerospace industries. It's reasonable that you get a taste of this. One thing you can do is provide off-the-cuff, one sentence opinions for free, but suggest that a more careful analysis is called for, and ask him if he has money at this time for a study. There's a lot you can do to shape his response so that it makes you more money. Ask your business friend about how to do this.

I agree that reinstalling windows to fix a software problem in windows is both unacceptable and most likely futile. However, to fix a hardware problem, like a flaky hard drive, or a computer that is left running and sometimes stops because it runs down its battery, or to fix a software problem caused by a third-party vendor (Dell comes immediately to mind) it is a far more reasonable solution.

It isn't even clear to me that you are experiencing a software problem, but rather a cheap old flaky laptop pushed past its expected lifetime problem. You acknowledge that your hardware is failing, but blame the software. The very first version of Windows you ran probably needed periodically to be rebooted. It's magical thinking to believe that this is no longer the case. Try reinstalling Windows and the newest drivers for your geriatric laptop. Betcha your "software" problem clears right up. You have standing to complain if you fix your hardware and reinstall the software (to fix possible hard drive problems) and Windows is still borken.

So, it's microsoft's fault that you use a flaky old laptop with a bad keyboard and never reboot or update your software? Those bas+ards!

Joe Walsh, Life's Been Good To Me So Far

I wouldn't say the style is the same as K&R, but *I* learned C++ from the book C++ FAQs.

Unit testing: very much yay. I've been doing unit testing steadily since about 1999. I have my own simple unit test driver. Tests are static member functions. It can all be statically linked with an executable. No tests enabled equals no overhead in size or time. The two places I've worked that did unit testing also had the highest code quality of the places I've worked. I've used a couple of open source frameworks for unit tests, but they seemed unnecessarily complicated to me, and it's annoying to have to separately compile test executables. Writing unit tests helps me wring out my designs and of course avoid regressions when I change things (which happens all the time).

You must be very hard on mice. I have a pile of working mice removed from equipment that no longer runs. I hand 'em out to my kids when they destroy one, but even they can't seem to wreck mise as fast as they accumulate. My current mouse is a very ordinary J-Tech Digital vertical mouse I've had since the pandemic. Must have cost me all of $25.

I sometimes asked in job interviews, "What are your favorite and least favorite programming languages?" The followup question was "What is your favorite feature in your least favorite language, and your least favorite feature in your favorite language?" The purpose of these two questions was to see if the candidate actually thought about the tools they use, or were they just a fanboy. If a candidate went to a decent university CS program, they were exposed to some very different languages, so they would have a basis for this opinion. If they were self-taught, they might only know one programming language. I would take it easy on such a candidate if they admitted their limits, but not so much if they were a fanboy.

The point of a professional society is not to place blame on the professional. The purpose is to require that professionals as well as companies follow a body of good practice. If the standard of practice is followed, and a bug still gets through, you can defend a lawsuit by saying, "We followed the standard of practice so we cannot be held liable." This is how medicine works (in the USA). Step 1: spin up a professional society to set standards of practice (so lawyers don't do it for us) Step 2: make companies liable for buggy software. Right now they are protected. Step 3: create a certification exam and require that project leadership has passed the exam if companies don't want to be liable. Accountants have the CPA, Lawyers have the Bar exam, mechanical and civil engineers have the Professional Engineer exam, doctors have the Board Certification exam.

In the US, Einstein's estate or it's successor pursues copyright of his image very aggressively. You don't want to mess with Einstein pictures unless you know their provenance, and what the copyright situation is. Just taking them off Wikipedia doesn't make you safe.

No, I've always been a morning person. I can't code anything difficult after 9 PM. I go to sleep at 11:30+/-. I sleep soundly until 4AM, when an alarm wakes me so I can turn my disabled wife over :-(. It takes awhile to get back to sleep, maybe 30 minutes, but then I'm asleep until the morning alarm at 8:40. Sometimes I will wake up as early as 8 on my own. When I was working, I went to sleep at 11 and up at 6:30, and by Friday I was a zombie from the missing hour of sleep, so clearly what I needed hasn't changed, just now I'm actually getting it.

So, the very rich founder of a software company, in a country where employers treat workers like slaves, thinks the serfs should work 70 hours/week. I suppose his megayacht is a slave galley too. He gets all nationalistic about this self-serving opinion, because if he didn't, it would be even more obviously self-serving. *I* think that if developers were paid for every hour they worked, you would hear this kind of opinion far less frequently. If they were paid time-and-a-half for overtime, you wouldn't hear it at all.