Seattle Forrest

The whole team is. We're not allowed to work on new features until we make good on some quality debt. This should be more common among software companies.

wgscott

I take it this is not about measles, Apple or Garmin?

Hondo Gravel

I thought you were going to talk about mosquitoes. I’m washing gnats off my sunblock right now.

hazetguy 

I have absolutely no concept of what you are talking about. Go Team!!!

spinnaker

You don't happen to work for Nintex in Bellevue do you ?

FiftySix

Thank. You.

On one particular line of machinery I work on, the software appears to be upgraded willy nilly. Whenever I have a problem with said machinery, the first thing the manufacturers techs tell me to do is upgrade the software.

Boo. That usually introduces new problems that had nothing to do with the original problem. New software installed into a machine with older hardware is often the wrong, wrong, wrong answer.

canklecat

Hmmm... mebbe this explains the recent glitches being cleared up with Wahoo Fitness?

genec

Whenever the software folks kill a few bugs, the bug relatives come to the funeral.

And remember, "it's not a bug, it's a feature..."

Seattle Forrest

Microsoft.

genec

Oh crap, you'll be locked up forever...

On the plus side (for the rest of us) I hear MS is going to a real Linux kernel in win 10 soon.

RubeRad

LOL, is that a common term, or did you make it up? It's fantastic! At first I thought you had to get a motel or couch-surf because of termite tenting

I work in software too, I think we keep a pretty reasonable balance of bug workoff vs new features per release.

IMO we've see a real uptick in software quality over the last few years by switching tooling and process. We used to CM with clearcase and bug-track with clearquest, but we switched to git (actually an entire atlassian suite including jira for issue tracking and bamboo for continuous build/test). The transition was painful, but worth it. Navigating DRs/commits/branches through the browser is super convenient, and it's enabled us to add peer/manager review of all pull requests into the baseline, which I think is the biggest factor.

I'm just a tiny bit sad that I missed out on ever using subversion, because it's the best possible name for a software CM tool.

RubeRad

I remember!

We recently had an issue where one of our customer reps discovered that a capability was broken, turns out tracing the history (back more than 10 years, and contacting an old friend who retired a year ago) it was not broken, it was unintuitive but intended behavior, but not what the poorly-designed interface implied would happen. And it was even documented (cryptically) to behave that way.

So I used that old line ('since it's documented, it's not a bug, it's a feature') on the customer rep as a joke, they got really mad!

Happy ending, it will be resolved in our next release; corrected to behave intuitively according to what the interface implies, and the documentation clarified and expanded.

RubeRad

Windows subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a real thing now. I haven't played with it much yet. I just run linux at home and try to avoid windoze as much as possible. (I get enough of it at work)

(No offense Forrest)

leob1

Software is the only product that can be sold unfinished or broken.

Fixed it.

RubeRad

That's not true, broken products are sold all the time, that's what factory recalls are for.

Seattle Forrest

I didn't make it to, but I've never heard it before either.

Changing to git has been a bit of a meaning curve for me, and it's a different paradigm compared to something like TFS, but I'm coming around to like it.

Being able to browse code in your favorite web browser is great! Boss asked about a big the other day and how to broke, I was able to send a url that goes to a diff between two versions of a file. Confirmed his suspicion and got an attaboy. The tools let us do meetings and code reviews through Code Flow and Skype, so they're letting me work from home.

Seattle Forrest

I know Linux is more innovative than Windows. No offense taken. I run Windows because I know it, and it runs software I need. Now I kind of feel obligated to say good things about MS because they're treating me well. But it's true that Linux has more innovative features, and at 0% of the price.

RubeRad

Innovative maybe, more secure certainly (although how much due to better architecture vs smaller market share so hackers less interested I don't know).

But still Linux has not achieved the holy grail of being usable by a 'normal' user. I am often having to run to the forums or stackexchange, to figure out how to do something I don't know how to do, or fix something that broke.

I recently got a sweet laptop with a powerful GPU, and setting up Ubuntu for OpenCL so I could teach myself GPU programming was a nightmare. And then I closed the lid while a GPU program was running, and that broke video card things so bad I ended up reinstalling Ubuntu.

But other than that, I'm not pushing cutting-edge hardware, there's just constant issues of varying severity.

My son's cheap thinkpad, I could not manage to get the dual-boot to work. I tried everything I could find on the web about uefi/legacy, nomodeset, etc etc. The live usb boots up just fine (so why can't the installation do whatever that's doing?), the install seems to go fine, but then selecting ubuntu from grub ends up hanging. I gave up in the end, my son's got linux still installed, but he can't use it.

genec

Do you ever watch broadcast weather... one of the few jobs in which one can be half right, and still get full pay.