So has anybody else noticed how every single piece of tech that's come out of Facebook/Meta has turned out to be over-hyped bloatware that doesn't really serve anyone's needs except their own, or...?
Weird, it's almost like when you make your developer interview process needlessly complex, you optimize your engineering team for producing needless complexity.
Every writer needs a good editor, because every writer loves everything they write, and will make it at least 2–3 times longer than it needs to be, in the belief it's much more interesting than it really is, without someone there to say "no, actually, a lot of this is not that great and you should just get to the point," and what I'm getting at is: Taylor Swift has needed a good editor for at least five years but especially now.
We as developers often get to make our own technology decisions.
But have you ever imagined what it would be like if our users could vote on how they wanted the things they use to be built?
Have you ever stopped to think what a massive privilege we enjoy, being allowed to pick what we think is best for us, over what any user might pick for themselves, given the requisite understanding?
Have you ever stopped to consider that simply by virtue of being a developer, we already make a better salary than a significant portion of our users ever have, and experience technology and the web in a way many of them never will?
Have you ever thought about how often we just ask those people—the ones on shittier phones than we'll ever touch, on shittier networks than we'll ever use—to pay the price for our privileged decisions?
It is infuriating how often things that I pay for and that are web-based just don't work on Android because it's from Apple and they're incentivized to make it painful enough that I want to buy their hardware.
(Today's case in point: Apple Music Replay. It's just an infinite login loop on Android/Firefox, and there's no way to use it not in a browser. Apple clearly doesn't give a shit, because this kind of thing happens all the time. "Thanks for your monthly fee, now fuck off.")
I guess in fairness, Google breaks things all the time too. My YouTube app just shows the dark overlay on top of the video permanently about 30% of the time. Today, i hit a bug that made it impossible to close the app.
I think I'm just more frustrated with Apple because a) I have literally no recourse except to buy their hardware; and b) I'm not constantly surrounded by people telling me how genius Google is and how great and user-friendly their products are.
There are few things in the world you should trust less than a CEO in an acquisition, promising "things aren't going to change."
Yes they fucking are. You just took VC money. That's how it works. VCs buy things to extract money from them. Change is a VC's goal, and they will fire everyone in your organization and strip mine it down to the copper in the bathrooms without a second thought if it gives them the ROI they want.
I was part of an acquisition at Flywheel, almost exactly five years ago, by WP Engine. "Nothing's changing," they repeatedly assured us.
Today, I can't even find a reference to Flywheel in a cursory search of the company's website. I hear most of its office space has been leased out, and they just went through another round of layoffs.
"Nothing's going to change" might be true in other, less short-sighted industries. But in tech, it's always a lie.
I used to wear a wrist brace, for pain from working on a computer all day.
It just occurred to me today that I don't even know where my wrist brace is; I haven't worn it probably since October, when I started using the MoErgo Glove80 keyboard as my main daily driver.
Keyboards like this take a lot of time to adjust to, but if you have RSI from typing (or want to avoid it), I'd definitely say it's worth a look.
@danilo@paulca I do like the Moonlander too, and it's better than a standard keyboard, but it's nowhere nearly as ergonomically optimal as the Glove80.