Hard-mode Dev

Those skills you built trying to integrate the latest buzzword with your ad management platform? Then cleaning out issues bubbling up in code that predated the buzzword by a decade or more? Those are useful.

Not the code, dumbass. Or the buzzword. The system thinking.

The systems people use every day are broken, and we can help them. Get a crappy job, or volunteer, and make things better.

With $buzzword? No! I swear to god if I see you deploy one container for this I will judge you so hard.

The techniques beneath the tech

Our careers have taught us ways beneath the tech to organize, simplify, and secure processes, without completely rewriting them. Sometimes a faster horse really is all they need.

I’ve given this as like my one lightning talk ever. Because it’s been a special interest for a long time.

Just. You know. Take the chance. Help people with what they’re already doing today. Learn what they’re doing. Move slow and fix things.

For a little while I thought my current job—processing and distributing inmate purchases at a state prison, handling bubble sheets and paper receipts without so much as a shared laptop—was me abandoning tech.

Okay yes the pay is worse. So much worse. Oh lord. Have I mentioned my ko-fi recently?

ko-fi.com/brianwisti

But it's just hard-mode dev. I'm using the same skills.

Verifying receipts at the end of the day, making sure there are no unexplained gaps? Way easier if you sort them first. There are a couple hundred receipts per day. Shell Sort is surprisingly easy to do by hand.

That list I put on the wall for customer accommodations? That list helps us build a cache—two of them, actually. Set aside orders for customers who may not be able to come in during their scheduled hours here. There, we put orders for those who can't stand around in 110F Sonoran sunlight waiting their turn.

Making explicit the requirement that orders only go to purchaser or trusted authority? Bit of a stretch, but that's kinda null checking. The behavior is undefined if the wrong person gets an order, because—especially as a new employee—I have no idea who did get the order.

My rules for when an order can be picked up? Task scheduling, obviously.

I have hit so many speed bumps in dev that I recognize them in new contexts.

The folks who trained me did all their processing at the end of the week, which is a multi-hour process. The second I was running my own shop, I switched to daily sorting of that day's business, with a Friday quality check. Knocks at least an hour off total time for that task.

They hand-counted receipts. If the count was off, dig through the (unsorted) receipts to find who they missed. Side effect of sorting: easier to just flip through and look for gaps.

I didn't change any of the processes. I just sanded off the edges.

CS without computers—for the greater good

What I'm saying: we learned algorithms. How to do the thing better. Even those of us who skipped school and couldn't stay awake through a Freecodecamp CS Foundations video.

We can use what we learned to improve non-digital routines, which has a notable ripple effect.

You don't even need to get a crappy job. Find places to volunteer, see where their flow gets stuck, and offer to fix that one bit.

Do it. You know you want to.

Hey, if you have a non-crappy job

and also did i mention the ko-fi

i really should mention it more often

ko-fi.com/brianwisti

Started as a Mastodon thread. Toot storm? Anyways, see the original train of thought:

masto.hackers.town/@randomgeek/114999440918184132