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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • A merge from upstream once a day, at the beginning of the day.

    I’m working on a DevOps setting, and even though we’re a small team, we have about two to three changes going through the pipeline a day.

    If you keep your fork too long without syncing, it just get more complicated to merge, and more importantly if you need help from the upstream change author they’ll have moved on to another subject and the change won’t be as fresh in their mind as if you had merged the day after they pushed it.


  • I’ve had that kind of reaction - on rebases also - and most times it was in fact a code smell pointing to a case of spaghetti code.

    If you get to the point that you fear upstream merges/rebases into your WIP, stop for a second and ask yourself if maybe that might be an issue with too much interpendencies inside the code itself. Code should be as close to an directed acrylic graph as possible. (doesn’t count, I was not speaking of git! :b )


  • A process owned by any user will be able to exploit a userspace vulnerability, whatever this user is. Selinux, chroot, cgroups/containerization add a layer of protection to this, but any vulnerability that bypass these will be as exploitable from nobody as from any other local user. It will protect a user files from some access attempts but will fail to prevent any serious attack. And as usual when it comes to security, a false sense of security is worse than no security at all.

    Remember that some exploits exist that can climb outside of a full-blown virtual machine to the virtualisation host, finding a user escalation vulnerability is even more likely.

    The only real protection is an up-to-date system, sane user behavior and maybe a little bit of paranoia.




  • Each and every line of code you write is a liability. Even more so when you wrote it for someone else. You must always be able to rebuild it from source, at least as long as your client expect the software to work. If you feel it’s not worth it, you probably low-balled the contract. If you don’t want to maintain code, have the client pay a yearly maintenance fee, give the code and the responsibility to maintain it to your client at the end of development, or add a time limit to it’s support.

    There’s no “maintenance mode” software: either it’s in use and must be kept updated with regard to it’s execution environment, or it’s not used anymore and can be erased and forgotten. Doing differently opens too much security issues, which shouldn’t be acceptable for us all as a trade.


  • Forewarning : ops here, I’m one of the few the bosses come to when the “quick code” in production goes sideways and the associated service goes down.

    soapbox mode on

    Pardon my french but that’s a connerie.

    Poorly written code, however fast it has been delivered, will translate ultimately into a range of problems going from customer insatisfaction to complete service outage, a spectrum of issues far more damageable than a late arrival on the market. I’d add that “quick and dirty code” is never “quick and dirty code with relevant, automated, test coverage”, increasing the likelihood off aforementioned failures, the breadth of their impact and the difficulty to fix them.

    Coincidentally , any news about yet another code-pissing LLM bothers me a tad, given that code-monkeys using such atrocities wouldn’t know poorly written code from a shopping list to begin with, thus will never be able to maintain the produced gibberish.





  • Others has answered the specific cases where TTM is paramount.

    When time is less of an issue, in my experience it’s in no particular order a mix of:

    • product owners or similar role wanting “everything and right now” for no reason whatsoever, except maybe some bonus;
    • bosses bossing around to try and justify their existence instead of easying progress ;
    • developers being not much more than code jockeys with a tendancy to develop by StackOverflow copy/paste;
    • operations lacking time, resources or knowledge to build a proper CI/CD pipeline - when it’s not an issue of operations by ServerFault copy/paste;
    • experts (DBA, virtualization, middlewares) being kept out of the project, and only asked for advice when things go terribly wrong later.

    All in all, instead of short term profit, it’s a lack of not-so-long term vision and engagement from everyone involved. They just don’t care.

    Yeah, I’m the one in charge of fixing the mess, why you ask?









  • Unplug your mouse. Seriously. Do it. It might sound like the “kicking and screaming” method but you’ll learn to rely on your keyboard even for GUI tools and you’ll vastly improve how fast you navigate your computer. You should find yourself more and more in the terminal, obviously, but you may learn also some nice tricks with everything else.