I love their music but I avoid watching performances. It ruins it for me. I did not to see that GIF.

The most recent Bond films, including Skyfall, were all about people being sad. (Except No Time To Die - no one knows what that was about.) We're meant to appreciate how deep they are because of everyone's profound inner pain. It gets old fast.

"Heavily influenced by the Beatles" is hard to nail down. It gives them way too much credit. We would not be in some musical dark ages if not for them. Every successful band playing at that time had some influence.

It's entirely subjective, including "serious." I don't even know what my top 10 are, but nothing by the Beatles would make that list.

Being polite is even more polite when you fake it.

Dogs

People go on and on about their talent. Ok. They just don't have individual songs that are as good as those by other bands. Being a few decades earlier doesn't make their music better. It's entirely subjective. I say they're overrated.

People misunderstand this. It's not that the Beatles were bad. They just don't live up to the hype. That's what overrated means.

What else do they do during that day? Are there less important activities they could cut? If they have to write at home because they have to play volleyball in school then clearly volleyball is more important than writing.

If they're new, questions. If they're experienced, figure it out. If it takes too long, questions, but if they're experienced, figure out what's wrong with it so they have to ask questions. One fast question always beats an hour of figuring it out.

"My name is Susan if you need anything." What is your name if I don't need anything?

I agree with Allen in principle, but I've also landed on a good team, and over time I've acquired some autonomy. It's a house of cards, though. It's always one reorg or management change away from getting worse.

We've gotten better at writing maintainable, well-architected code within the team. Not perfect, but definitely adequate. If you take a step back and look at our larger ecosystem of microservices, those improvements are undone. Everything problem we've fixed locally still exists at that larger scale where it's much harder to see or improve. There's no will to address it or even acknowledge it. The classes within a domain are reasonably well-designed with clear responsibilities. At the service level, ten services participate in what should be single responsibility. One might "own" data, but it allows others to freely update it, making it effectively shared global state. I can test the services we own easily and reliably. The larger system they're part of is full of bugs. Dozens come out, and countless are hiding. We end up doing a lot of slow, unreliable manual tests, which is exactly what we'd do if we hadn't designed our services to be testable. No one looks at the larger system from the outside the same way that I look the pieces we own. I don't know why.

My company could function with maybe 1/3 fewer developers and managers. That's a very rough guess. We would need more product-minded developers, a major process overhaul. It would require prioritizing architecture.

I wonder how many they've hired since then. Something must have really been off at Twitter, and I'm sure some other companies. I've never worked anywhere that could afford to lose that many people. There's bloat, especially in management, but not to that degree.

I didn't debug much in 2025. Now it's over. I don't know if I've stepped through code once in the past six months.

I want to like Korean shows and TV. There's a lot of it. But without fail, it seems to get dragged out and the climax is sentimental and weepy. Someone makes a noble sacrifice and everyone else is crying about something. It's not a bad thing. They like it, and so do lots of other people. I just can't get into it.

I want more of this.

My software dev career started with Excel. I could make it do some crazy stuff. The problem was that people made some awful slop and I kept getting stuck with it when they moved on. It took a while to escape Excel.

The domain model is where we enforce prevention of invalid states. The database doesn't need to enforce that. The data in it is correct because it's only modified by the application, through the domain model.