The entire modern web tech stack should be thrown in a dumpster, ignited with gasoline, and blown up with a nuke for good measure.

if you’re making a user-facing program, you should always design with the possibility that it will be run on some truly dogshit hardware and you should make sure that they still have a good experience. good computer hardware is a luxury on the world scale, even before the rampocalypse

related, but the answer to the question “who still uses {x} these days?” is almost always way, wayyyy more people than you think

I’ve talked about it before, but I really hate PDFs. Specifically the things PDFs are used for. If you aren’t planning to print something and will only ever look at it on a screen, HTML is better. It’s so frustrating when you’re going to a website, you know, a thing that serves content in HTML, and then some piece of information is in a PDF.

systemd does a lot of things very right and a mayor reason that linux is in a way better place than 15 years ago. 27 unmaintained tools are not better than one that is professionally developed.

Cloud computing is the biggest breach of privacy out there that we’ve adopted whole hearted.

If you don’t prematurely optimize your code you’ll never optimize your code.

I know people are advised against premature optimization because it risks you wasting time on something that ends up unused.

But let’s be honest, once you get something into a working state will you ever be afforded the time to go back to it? Even if you are, are you really gonna choose to uproot code and do a refactor on it and potentially everything relying on it?

Rather than waiting until your hacks and workarounds run out and you absolutely have to do a refactor, I would prefer spending more time upfront to make sure it is efficient and flexible before moving on.

Linux should be forked at a pre-ai date.

I remember on Reddit several years ago I said that automatic bitlocker is the curse of installing W11 on a laptop.

I got down voted so hard. One comment even said you should be thankful because encrypting by default should be the norm.

But yet if I add any thunderbolt device to my windows before I boot it, it requires me to input my 25 character bitlocker key… that’s hosted online within my Microsoft account.

Bitlocker enabling by default without user input is horrible. Hosting the keys online is also horrible. It could be so easy to socal engineer into your Microsoft account.

Not a programmer, but I hate softwares that use python, why the fuck it requires 10 million dependencies to function?

Unit tests are overrated to the point of being harmful. They have their place, but that place is certainly not “the base of the testing pyramid”. They are useful for a very specific type of “units” - and using them anywhere else just messes things up.

The unless keyword is an abomination

HTML/TeX/etc are real programming languages that just happen to be declarative as opposed to imperative.

You should not be using AI at all. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2026/ai

I just got out of an interview where they pretty much told me they will ask me to vibe coded the tool they’re working on. LLMs do not make your code faster, and you are not more productive using it. I will never change my mind. We coded for 70+ years without it. You’re gonna end up with some subtle hard to reproduce bugs that are intermittently reproducible, and code that is nearly unmaintainable, and nobody knows what it does or how it works.

Good luck with that.