Notices by Jaycie (jaycie@mastodon.social)

We're so quick to frame crabs as cruel for pulling each other down when they try to escape buckets, yet we too rarely focus on the person who put them in the bucket in the first place.

The same goes for the idea of mantises eating the heads of their mates (apparently an artifact of lab conditions) and of the "alpha wolf" idea (wolves were forced into the company of unfamiliar wolves), among other facets of "common knowledge."

How many assumptions about human behavior follow this pattern?

The postal service illustrates good software interface design:

Senders only have to drop their message in any mailbox and can then walk away without a thought to whether the receiver moved or whether the message will be delivered by plane or by horseback.

Receivers only have to check their mailbox when they want to without a thought as to when the messages arrived, in what order, by what transportation method, by which delivery person, or from which point of origin.

There's a non-zero chance that a given software developer who looks incompetent to you was adept in their specialty but dragged far outside of their skill area by management that treats devs as fungible resources.

Software development opinion:

The threshold at which adding tests to code turns burdensome is very, very high. Higher than you think and higher still.

Only an astounding lack of regulation and standardization in the industry allowed a lack of thorough, automated, and regressive tests to be anything but the baseline expectation.

We need higher, enforced standards in order to overcome the profit motives that continue to oppose good software engineering practices, before yet another data breach.

Maximize your game's FPS: Foxes per second.

Today is #SubtootYourCrushDay.