work of art!

Strange but I smelled a fraud as soon as I finished reading the NYT article.

This is the second time in my life that this has happened to me.

First time was when I interviewed at this social media startup which had raised a 100 mil during the pandemic, and promptly collapsed, all numbers there were cooked.

Maybe vibe coding gets so good that we completely trash what was written and build from zero. I've seen that with badly written code as well, easier to rewrite than fix the un-goldly mess.

Yes, if you know what you want exactly it is not difficult to rewrite. Writing is the easiest part of coding.

The challenge is knowing exactly what is needed. No matter how bad the code, it is never easy to justify a rewrite .

In a large and old enough code base, documentation is always incomplete or incorrect, the code becomes is the spec. Tens or hundreds of thousands of hours would have been expended in making it "work". A refactor inevitably breaks things, because no single person can fully understand everything.

There is a reason why it is a well know principle don't fix what is not broken. Same reasons why we still have banking or aviation systems still running mainframe and COBOL from 70s.

A rewrite requires the same or likely more number of hours of testing and adoption in a typically much shorter span of time in ironing out the issues [1]. Few organizations either private or public have the appetite to go through the pain and if its money facing or public facing component it is even harder to get buy-in from leadership or the users of app even.

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[1] During the original deployment the issues(bugs or feature gaps) would have been incrementally solved over many years or decades even. During the rewrite you don't have 10-20 years, so you not only have to expend the same or more number of hours you will have to do it much quicker as well.

Rather than encouraging immigration they come up with this.

The problem is with the media pouring endless attention on these tech bros and bestowing the mantel of expertise in every field on them - philosophy, politics, religion, sociology.

So now they spout their mouth off and the media hangs on their every word and debates it.

Could not happened to a more usurious company.

LinkedIn itself is far from great, but this seems like a good thread to share my LinkedIn tip of creating a job alert using a search query like

rust embedded NOT lensa NOT jobot NOT alignerr NOT mercor NOT “crossing hurdles”

The circular deals are getting old - it's like rearranging the chairs on the Titanic's deck.

I can understand why Amazon, MS and Nvidia invested - nefarious circular deals, but Softbank? I mean who the heck is giving Masayoshi Son money to invest? Behooves me!

SQL Server was pretty good until they went the Oracle way with their licensing shenanigans, but even with that they were a lot cheaper than Oracle. In fact SQL server was one of the few great products that came out of MS.

SQL Server started as a source fork of Sybase.

Having done both, with much better tooling. Sybase never had anything comparable to SSMS.

I remember MMC snap-ins.

Having written a rust client for it, even their documentation is absolutely stellar. You just read how the protocol works from the PDF and implement it.

Can't say the same about Oracle.

For the risk of getting downvoted:

MS SQL is today stil a very good product, using it now for more than 20 years in different applications.

And: The free version with max up to 50 GB (?) of DB size is a very good option for smaller environments/apps

50GB sounds like nothing, but I believe you in the quality. Most big bucks paid databases need to be high quality though, otherwise they would fail as products

I was a SQL server DBA early in my career, I've not used it in the last decade, glad to hear that it's still a great product.

My first job was a SQL DBA. 15 years and 5 companies later, this startup I'm at (which got acquired recently), still uses SQL Server. It has stood the test of time.

Actually one of the very few really good MS products at all?

Visual Studio is also great and widely adopted.

But what else do they have? I had some good experiences with Exchange years ago, but this is just my personal experience, since most people seem to hate it.

What else do they have that is considered a good/solid product that you would recommend to someone?

It's exhausting - sometimes it feels like you are continuously redirecting a deviant child who just won't give up on his shenanigans.