Microsoft has a new assasination target

A client’s team spent a full week adding a CSV export to their admin panel. Two engineers, clear requirements, maybe a day of actual work. The rest of the time went to understanding existing code well enough to change it safely. That’s what I call codebase drag: when the codebase makes every task take longer than it should. It doesn’t show up in any dashboard or sprint report.

What an ol' classic in the age of AI!

I've been scrolling around and I'm wondering what sort of projects everyone here is working on? I have not worked on anything in awhile but I wanna see more projects and maybe that'll change haha

I’ve noticed that Oracle APEX rarely comes up in developer discussions, especially compared to modern frameworks and cloud native stacks.

But in enterprise environments, it seems to handle data heavy applications, internal tools, and workflows surprisingly well, especially when paired with a solid database setup.

From what I’ve seen, it reduces a lot of the overhead you would normally have with full stack development while still being scalable if designed properly.

Curious to hear from others. Are people actually using APEX in production, or is it still considered niche?

So to preface, my work is pretty cool, they are good about setting goals to learn things that interest you and putting you in those teams to help out in a small capacity.

My normal job has never been programming. Though Ive been the goto "IT" person at almost every job ive been at, I mess around in most of my free time with computers (installing Linux on stuff, networking NAS stuff, remote desktops virtual machines r pi setups emulators , very simple bash scripts etc all the stuff we lemmings do in our sleep ) but ive never technically coded outside very small vba code learning stuff and watching a lot of videos on multiple languages. Ive just never been able to actually figure out what I'd want to make or be able to stick with it. Also I have mild dyscalculia so I generally get really confused at math especially algebra. I can do it but im really slow.

Ive always wanted to be able to do coding. I feel like I can't be a real computing nerd without that. I just find it so hard to focus when i don't have a real goal or the goal is really small and uninteresting (hello world over and over is not that helpful )

So anyway, this project is just to take excel macro calculators and convert them to apps to be used mainly on iPads but also browsers etc. They've chosen Mendix for this purpose.

Ive not used it before but it seems like a very simple graphical drag and drop style of "programming" (not sure if you can really cal it that) but I'd like to hear if you guys have dealt with it...

Generally, how can I help out on this project (and tbh, try to prove that I'm somewhat smart at this stuff..)?

I need to scan very large JSONL files efficiently and am considering a parallel grep-style approach over line-delimited text.

Would love to hear how you would design it.

Also vm repo

If I were a better developer, would I have worked on more products people love? No. Even granting that good software always makes a well-loved product, big-company software is made by teams, and teams are shaped by incentives.

When people say “taste,” what they actually mean is experience. Pattern recognition built up over years of doing the work. But calling it “taste” instead of “experience” does something subtle and harmful: it makes a learnable skill sound like a gift.

Why GitHub Actions is the Internet Explorer of CI, and why Buildkite offers a better path forward for teams that care about developer experience.

[...] Coding agents are now also introduced to production codebases. After 12 months, we are now beginning to see the effects of all that "progress". Here's my current view.

[...]

All of this compounds into an unrecoverable mess of complexity. The exact same mess you find in human-made enterprise codebases. Those arrive at that state because the pain is distributed over a massive amount of people. The individual suffering doesn't pass the threshold of "I need to fix this". The individual might not even have the means to fix things. And organizations have super high pain tolerance. But human-made enterprise codebases take years to get there. The organization slowly evolves along with the complexity in a demented kind of synergy and learns how to deal with it.

With agents and a team of 2 humans, you can get to that complexity within weeks.

It’s a popular joke among software engineers that writing overcomplicated, unmaintainable code is a pathway to job security. After all, if you’re the only person who can work on a system, they can’t fire you. There’s a related take that “nobody gets promoted for simplicity”: in other words, engineers who deliver overcomplicated crap will be promoted, because their work looks more impressive to non-technical managers.