dshacker

You're absolutely right - this is not X, but Y.

----

I'm absolutely tired at work on how many people are writing with em-dashes with obvious AI prose. I feel a little bit insulted but then I remember we all participate in this charade.

I'm not sure how to prove otherwise, but this actually happened to me. I don't understand this kind of comments saying "FAKE" for views or blog-posting. This is something that happened to me, and I can say for sure people were really pushed in this situation to ship faster every time.

It really demotivated me when this happened, I just kept seeing the PR open, but then I saw the changes applied before the PR was merged, which made me very confused. I then had an alert placed on every one of the updates made by Mike to make sure he didn't do this again. People were against "reset reviewers on commit" for "agility".

I think people can be in hard conditions, needing a job, under pressure, burnt out and feel like this is their only way to keep their job. At least that's how it felt with Mike.

At the end, I spent a lot of time sitting down with Mike to explain this kinds of things, but I wasn't effective.

Also, now LLMs empower Mike to make a 1600 line PR daily, and me needing to distinguish between "lazyslopped" PRs or actual PRs.

I mean, there are some exceptions on when 1600 PRs are acceptable (Refactorings, etc) but otherwise agree.

What really bugs me is that today, it is easier than ever to do this (even the LLM can do this!) and people still don't do it.

Thanks! Fixed.

Right, I think there is always a balance between being strict on code reviews, and just letting people ship stuff. I've also seen the other end of the stick in which a senior employee is blocking an important pr over "spacing".

To be honest I'm not a native english speaker, so I might be using words wrong.

Thanks for sharing!

Comparatively to other companies, (amazon meta) I feel like Microsoft is "nicer"

Same experience for me, I still remember at IC1 getting 7k stocks over 5 years as my "stock bonus" for the year. which meant getting 1 or 2 MSFT stock every 4 months :D

Right, but there is even an implicit pact, you get lower-than-market compensation but you get better benefits and long-term stability. At least that's the mental math you did when joining the company and comparing offers between employers.

Yeah, I was afraid of generalizing throughout the company. I think compared to other companies it seems to have a benefit of being more "nice". Maybe it's mostly targeted towards tech roles at that?

I mean yeah, in theory. I just found it really hard to work on multiple changes at a time vs git branches. Back in SD i used to have 2 or 3 machines + multiple VMs to be able to work on multiple things at a time. So I wouldn't say no need. In git I can do work, submit, switch, do work submit switch.

Shallow clone of all of office, not onenote.

You’d be surprised at the amount of people at Microsoft that their entire career have been at Microsoft (pre-git-creation) that never used Git. Git is relatively new (2005) but source control systems are not.

How did you program the WIFI driver? How do you even start creating a WIFI driver from BASIC? (Is it in basic?)

For context, if we tried this with “vanilla Git”, before we started our work, many of the commands would take 30 minutes up to hours and a few would never complete. The fact that most of them are less than 20 seconds is a huge step but it still sucks if you have to wait 10-15 seconds for everything. When we first rolled it out, the results were much better. That’s been one of our key learnings. If you read my post that introduced GVFS, you’ll see I talked about how we did work in Git and GVFS to change many operations from being proportional to the number of files in the repo to instead be proportional to the number of files “read”. It turns out that, over time, engineers crawl across the code base and touch more and more stuff leading to a problem we call “over hydration”. Basically, you end up with a bunch of files that were touched at some point but aren’t really used any longer and certainly never modified. This leads to a gradual degradation in performance. Individuals can “clean up” their enlistment but that’s a hassle and people don’t, so the system gets slower and slower.

Great quote from him here.

php_final_final_v2.zip shipped to production. A classic. I had a similar experience with https://www.ioncube.com/ php encryption. Everything encrypted and no source control.

Even with this, there were many surprised people. I'm still amazed at all of the people that can ignore everything and just open their IDE and code (and maybe never see teams or email)

RI/FI is similar to having long-lived branches in Git. Imagine you have a "develop-word" branch in git. The admins for that branch would merge all of the changes of their code to "main" and from "main" to their long lived branches. It was a little bit different than long-lived git branches as they also had a file filter (my private branch only had onenote code and it was the "onenote" branch)

I didn't even know Microsoft SourceSafe existed.

Yeah, it was a whole journey. I can't believe it happened. Thanks for your comment.

I never got paid! Sadly enough.

I was very reminded of watching this years ago while writing my blog.

Neopets was really cool. I remember a lot of cool techniques to get positioning right, css, tables, and 1x1 gifs :D

Minecraft modding rocks, you see a lot of inefficient code but it makes it so nice to jump into Java. Khan academy hit different back then :)

It's amazing how one single purchase changed so many paths!

These files are too big! Lets remove pagefile.sys

Ted Chiang is one of my favorite novelists. His way of writing is mentally engaging and FUN. One of my favorite books is his compendium of short stories "Exhalation". My favorite story is the one where you can talk/interact/employ your alternative selves from other universes. Highly recommend.