cephalopod 70% @octopus@cybre.space

so, don't normalize these things. don't train your friends to see advertising strategies as friendly human human behavior.

don't be a dirty sneezer.

train yourself to always check if this is something *you* really want to do, don't allow yourself to follow instructions reflexively.

by all means share something with your friends if you think they'd appreciate it. Your friends trust you and trust is valuable. don't let 3rd parties cash in on that trust you've built.

advertising defense tip (con't) //

as in, advertising/spam/content scraping twitter accounts know that they get the better engagement of their cute dog tweets if the body of the tweet is something like "D'aww! you have to see this cute pupper"

same with with 'Relatable' accounts, with their "Share if you agree!" "Fav for X, RT for Y!" "Retweet if this is you too!"

it's very much like a virus, aping the structure of Content but only contains the bare minimum needed for hosts to replicate it.

advertising / parasitic meme / IRL mind control defense tip //

be very wary of unsolicited instructions. default to not following them, even if it's an innocuous thing you might have done anyway.

in the marketing industry they call these "calls to action". examples are things like "Play now!" "Download for free!" "CLICK HERE!!!" "Like and subscribe!" "Call your representative today!" which, are at least straightforward and easy to spot.

So is: "Look at this cute puppy!" and I _detest_ that.

in our split team/sprint showcase, sibling team had a burndown that was very nearly a horizontal line, despite stuff on the "sprint accomplishments" slide

boss says: "I know the burndown doesn't look good, but you really stepped up to resolve $(serious production bug that wasn't technically in their code) and I'm proud of that"

out team: surprisingly normal burndown, entire accomplishments page is "we plan to do stuff in the next four sprints"

boss: "so what did you actually commit to again?"

this goes back to earlier discussions about how since our 'definition of done' includes being merged into a release branch

that maybe we shouldn't be closing tickets that aren't merged into the release branch yet?

on one hand I can see the source of confusion otoh the scrum master is the same person who told me to close the relevant tickets when I reopened them b/c *they weren't merged back to master yet*

this morning at work I explained to the scrum master that putting a version number on a JIRA ticket does not cause something to be in a release build

also that the release branch has had 0 things merged into it since the last release (several weeks ago)

go/no-go meeting is in ~2h30m w/ a targeted release date of day after tomorrow

me, last night, a fool: it's just another ORM. I know ORMs.

me, today:
select(foo.a, bar.b)
.from(foo)
.join(bar)
.on(foo.key.eq(bar.key))
.fetch()

ORM: *invalid query w/ 10+ joins*

I've been abruptly fired from 2 of my 3 previous post-college jobs, and abruptly hauled in front of Loss Prevention at a summer job before that… oh yeah, abruptly all-but-expelled from 6th grade, too…

It's something I get anxious about sometimes

it's kinda like:

devs: yes! *fistpump*
SM: yes this is good everyone is working together we are making progress, can we demo this?
devs: lol no we spent the last 3 hours just getting the application we need to make changes to to boot

SM: aaah, I see. But now we're ready to work on the UI right guys?

devs: no next we need to spend several more hours trying to figure out how to get an annotation processor to process annotations on a Spring bean in a library to be injected into a Stripes bean.

we're doing whole-team mob programming

this includes the scrum master, which is the closest they've gotten to code (they learned how to spell 'git' last week!)

we have our next sprint showcase tomorrow & they're so excited that they can see that work is happening & people are talking - they're the kind of person who deals in morale & positive thinking

Starting to understand the why's behind some of the questionable coding practices, too; there's a few ppl who really, really go out of their way to avoid typing - because they aren't touch typists. They always start by finding a block of code to copy and paste, even if it isn't all that similar to the code they need to write, then modify it (preferring to add rather than delete) until it works.

imagine you were some anthropomorphized DNA that desired nothing but your own replication

a pretty good trick is to be useful enough that humans cultivate you, you can get on every continent & even space that way

-but- humans fiddle with stuff, if they cultivate an altered version of you that doesn't count

therefore you must be both
-useful
-dangerous to modify

it's not a coincidence that this describes your production code