Even in this scenario it’s feasible for standards to change. ISBN-15 becomes a thing and suddenly you have books that never get an ISBN-13 so your primary key constraints cause an error for trying to insert a null. Granted, you can see a lot of these changes coming but again, they come on a schedule you don’t control.

Got hands on experience with this. Wasn’t my design choice but I inherited an app with a database where one of the keys was tied to a completely separate database. I mean at the time it probably made sense but the most unlikely of scenarios actually happened: that other database, the one I had zero control over, was migrated to a new platform. All of those keys were synthetic so of course they were like, “Meh, why we gotta keep the old keys?” So post-migration my app becomes basically useless and I spent 6 hours writing migration code, some of it on off hours, to fix my data.

So it’s questionable whether a foreign key of a completely different system is a natural key, but at the very least never use a key YOU don’t control.

Nah, my company still uses Java but an open source version (Eclipse Temurin). We haven’t used Oracle Java in like 4 years.

One of the hardest issues to troubleshoot is a bad assumption. Be glad you only spent 2 hours on this.

One of the reasons I think JS gets a lot of hate is the tooling is a bit of a mess. If you go that route I encourage you to generate or find a barebones project to start from. Getting that very first “Hello World” app to run can be a massive pain in the ass.

I also don’t think the requirement to a desktop app and website in the same language is being fair. It’s definitely possible but different languages have different strengths. It shouldn’t make your brain explode to deal with more than one language and I think you could benefit from a shift in mindset. When I’m in JS world I know l I’ve gotta let go of performance and security desires (i.e. JS in the browser is a “clear box” and users can fully control it). When I’m in Java I know those things are highly important but also to not stress about “presentation”.

Damn. I meant to say Dungeons. 🤦

We’ve used the “scaled” approach for a whilen and we make tags to release. Every time we have a long-lived branch that isn’t main/master something gets fucked up or we spend an extra few days just to reconcile the conflicts. Luckily we’re service based so supporting multiple versions of a product is very rare.

With proper context I’d also say JS because I would hope popularity would lead to improvement. I like writing JS but hate building, troubleshooting, and installing it.

I feel for you. My director likes to tell us how to solution things (i.e. how to develop software) because he was a dev long ago (not even an architect) and he has an aneurysm every time we say, “but this way is better.” He’d rather arm wrestle with other teams to make his process the best process than let us do something that works just as well within the current landscape. I also demo to him WAY more than the people that will actually use the product (i.e. internal teams).

Hoping this is true. The biggest annoyance with typescript is needing some kind of compiler. Haven’t used Bun or Deno very much, both of which natively support TS, but there are still incompatibilities with the way Node does things and how certain modules were built (CommonJS vs ESM). I like writing JavaScript but the tooling is utter crap.

100% this. If the job stresses you out so much you can’t enjoy your time off then that’s a toxic environment. If I think about work on the weekends or evenings it’s because I’m excited about it.

Very stark contrast to a typical day at my job.

“Looks like there’s a broken link on this page. No problem, we can get that fixed up in a day or two after we tackle the 32 vulnerabilities that cropped up since the last time we changed that page."

If you’re lucky this statement is actually true 5% of the time.

Oh, this one stings. My company uses a proprietary platform for it’s most critical records but we require a technical certification to even use its API. Pretty much an entire division said, “Fuck you! We’re not tying up our people for 3 months to study and acquire a certification. We just won’t use it!”

When it comes to programming you’ll find there’s rarely a right and wrong, it’s usually a question of “meets requirements” or not. She’s your customer and she says not to use breaks or it doesn’t meet the spec (be thankful that customers in the business world are rarely this specific).

Awareness if not prioritizing energy efficiency. We rarely give any thought to services that run 24/7 even though they’re only used 8/5 or we don’t care how many CPU cycles a process uses even though it has no SLO for runtime. Most companies probably think it’s a question of dumping millions of carbon units into to the atmosphere or becoming luddites.

Evaluation is fine but I’d like to eliminate the overuse of leetcode style questions. I’ve used those skills in exactly two places: school and tech interviews. If the tech job is actually for a scientific/biotech company then it’s fair game.

Also, schools don’t really prepare students for writing production code (if it’s a compsci degree). I learned about unit testing, mocking, dependency injection, environment configs, REST APIs, and UI/UX on the job.

Well, I say it’s a PITA but I mean that’s kind of security in general. It’s probably just my companies mismatching of old and new protocols that make it a bit challenging.

I’m curious how you handle API security. It’s a bit of a PITA with Spring but I couldn’t imagine handling all of it with one-off libraries. If you have a basic CLI type of program or something not meant to receive external traffic I can see how Spring can be overkill.

I use GitHub and GitLab about 50/50, but I’d use nothing but GitLab if forking and pull requests across platforms was near seamless.