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there is nothing with worse karma than a cat
Tuesday, April 27 2021
This morning the plan was to assign me a developer from the Ukranian outsourcing team so I could pick his brain and begin inheriting the code he'd written. I picked Yaroslav, the frontend developer, because I'd been working on frontend code and had some questions, such as, "How the fuck do you develop in a world where every change to the code takes three to then minutes to compile?" It might've been a better meeting had Yarolslav not been slightly-patronizing through his thick, almost impenetrable Ukranian accent. I could only take an hour of it before I told him I would need to work "offline," that is, without him.
The day was full of stresses from this seemingly-undoable project, and at the end of it I just wanted to drive a car. So I got in the Subaru and headed out to 9W. On the way, in that wide pull-over area northbound near where the railroad tracks cross US 209, someone had parked a ratty old truck emblazoned with the words "FUCK BIDEN" painted in patriotic colors. Part of Biden's success comes from the fact that, as an old white man, he doesn't really trigger people. But there's always somebody.
I was looking for hardware storage bins, but there didn't seem to be any at Home Depot. On my drive to Lowes on Fran Sottile Blvd. just after the intersection with Miron Lane, I swerved around the seemingly-sleeping corpse of a mostly-white cat. I felt a twinge of dread from the evident fragility of life. But then I had another thought: there is nothing with worse karma than a cat. At Lowes, as I was checking out with my big plastic hardware bin and enough one-by lumber to build a small shelf, the nice woman working as cashier asked me if I had a military discount. I'd only ever gotten that question after cutting all my hair off, suggesting that without much hair I pass for ex (or perhaps current) military.
This evening while continuing to tinker with the stupid web app I am officially inheriting, I made a distressing discovery: an error that was generated by code I'd fixed continued to cause problems even after npm had auto-reloaded the app in a browser window. This meant that auto-reload was, at least on some level, unreliable for showing the state of the app. Since reloading the app without auto-reload meant waiting ten minutes for complilation to complete, it was looking like further development of this app was even less possible than initially imagined. Whatever has been gained by all the abstraction and modularity of modern web frameworks, a great deal has been lost in terms of responsiveness. In the old days, you slapped a couple italics tags around some text and it was italicized with a quick reload of the page, something that took a fraction of a second. The fact that, for all practical purposes, that web no longer really exists, means that a huge amount of human ingenuity can no longer contribute to web development. If I were a kid today starting out experimenting with the web today, I would quickly be discouraged and find some other, more fruitful application of my energy. I know, you can still slap italics around some text and have it be italicized. But it's hard to see how knowing how to do that can lead to working with a modern web framework.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?210427 feedback
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