Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Hey Boss, look here!
I made a magical X-ray app that displays our code as wiring.
Here is the shiny, neat program that Bob wrote 15 years ago, right before he left us:
And here is what it is today, after Tom took it from Bob, and Jane from Tom, and Mick from Jane, and me from him, porting it to roughly four new platforms, and adding about 240 features from customer requests (150 of which were urgent):
Problem is that now your boss is just going to say Claude can trace those wires for you.
boss: new feature and revenue stream unlocked, hey Marcus let's build this!
Claude - I can't deal with this let me cleanup rm -rf /
Wireless it is.
Claude will remove everything for you. Can’t have technical debt if there’s no code.
New Clod same as the old Clod.
But this one is Clauder
Thing is, if they would give Mick and Jane enough time with Claude, they could make it look like Bob's work again, but it would still take time - and tokens too.
You could probably coax Bob out of retirement for the amount of money in tokens it would take to achieve that
I don't know what tokens really cost, but so far even burning them without care for efficiency, they're costing about one day of my salary per month to six weeks.
Or, ya know, run open source models internally if you actually find them helpful.
Sure, just need $3000 for an extra GPU with at least 24GB ram to load any reliable models. Tested Qwen 3 with my 3060 and it hallucinated a Legoland theme park next to a village with a population of 500 in the middle of nowhere.
I forget what the latest I ran the numbers on was, but $100K up front and $20K per year running costs seemed like it had a decent chance of being useful to our department of 10 software engineers, which isn't bad, but it's an LLM on par with 6 months ago's frontier models.
If I could get those prices for a local instance of Fable 5, I'd be pushing the paperwork to make it happen.
i had the explaine this to my project manager. how are you going to have all our project completed by the skin of our teeth after mandatory overtime, over and over again, and not convince the client to pay for a refactor, AND not calculate a stacking buffer for project complete times? the tech debt will be paid, he has to choose the terms before it’s chosen for him
If "mandatory overtime" is needed outside the realm of multiple catastrophic surprise events on a company-ending scale, your "project manager" is absolute shit.
Overpromise, underdeliver. Looks good from my house!
As someone who has managed racks, that first picture isn’t usable after day 1.
There’s not place for extra cable length to go.
Zip ties?!? I’d make you cut every one of those out.
Every cable needs to be tied down.
Cable tracing requires cutting.
There’s no service loops.
That’s because this is a broadcast rack (probably for sports) sending SDI over all those cables, notice it’s all BNC not Ethernet. This is probably in a truck that needs to get packed up and shipped to the next game/race/whatever and so doing it all in Velcro with service loops is asking for shit to fall apart on the road for you to find with like a 24 hour timeline until the event
So that’s why shits locked down, it ain’t web server shit
Point still stands, OP is making a poor comparison.
If boss understands that, then he'll also understand tech debt.
Might be a poor comparison, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad way to present it to thier boss. If the analogy, however flawed, communicates the underlying idea to the listener, then it was effective.
The concept here is very related to why "ceci n'est pas un pipe" is/was compelling.
I'm a developer who occasionally is the 'smart hands' (for our networks team) for some equipment in our office.
Fortunately ours is all Velcro tied so tidily adding an extra cable was awkward but ultimately trivial.
So, please educate a novice who wants to do right: what do you mean by every cable needs to be tied down? You mean individually?
In the 1st photo adding any cable would mean zip tying it down individually.
Ah, right. Unless replacing every zip tie along the cable route.
Which would suck.
Tightly bound cables/wiring is my pet hate. Even if there's room to add stuff it makes tracing anything a nightmare.
I would absolutely prefer to trace something in the second pic.
to me, it matters if its backplane or frontend patchwork. just my 2 cents
Cable porn vs cable gore
Time to get out the old tone generator.
