It is weird that quite a few developers comes up with advices where they seem to come from a world where they work alone, have not work with enough people, or with enough projects.
In this case, a `.gitignore_global` takes care of the usual suspects that he mentioned `.DS_Store files, IDE config, compressed files, etc.`. Even if something goes wrong, it is usually caught during the initial scaffold before critical files goes in.
If one is working with new, young, rookie developers, give them the typical lesson on the global gitignore, local, config, and to have dotfiles, etc. Give yours for inspiration or something to start with.
Edit: I know that mine is not the best of the dotfiles on the internet but this has helped me switch multiple devices, multiple identities (work, projects, personal, etc) easily. I recently cleaned it up and added automation, test, etc with Claude Code. https://github.com/brajeshwar/dot
> It is weird that quite a few developers comes up with advices where they seem to come from a world where they work alone, have not work with enough people, or with enough projects.
I wish there was a culture in the team I'm in now to share each others dotfiles (which I feel would lead into sharing so much more including tools, processors, etc), especially since I fall into that group of the new, younger rookie. I appear to work with people who have a lot of experience and knowledge and the atmosphere is seemingly otherwise not competitive (non profit organisation). Is this common? Is it going to be hard to find a team like that?
My daughter plays games like crazy. She plays a lot of them, started with MineCraft when she was young. I think they are all fantasy games.
She has defined a life she wants to live and is scarily detailed. It is sort of an NPC lifestyle. I believe she is inspired by the games she play.
She might change but for now she seems have a clean outline of how things will be, work, home, and everything else like a very finite number of friends, the things to own, no brand logos (or should be really muted/subtle), etc.
I'm curious how did you go about accessing the data source for projects liek these? I mean, I have seen quite a lot of interesting builds (even if they are AI-assisted) but I love the results.
Wikipedia as a data source is open to use for everyone which makes this project even possible. Without Wikipedia, I would have to rely on Ai generated results which is not optimal.
I’m all for productive people, brilliant engineers. I still get dirty with codes/work all the way down to the newly hired fresh out of college kids, to the production architects that shapes multi-million, if not billions, of P&L. I’m also very lucky to be included in key decision making, planning, negating amongst the boards of C-Suites, Directors, VPs.
A very personal view but many developers/engineers fail to see the overall picture. And yes, I was there and I went through all of the mistakes.
The things you see on the surface of those incompetent CxOs are just the tiny piece of the bigger picture. You cannot replace blames, decision in the face of uncertainty. Almost all decisions that businesses take have nothing to do with the proficiencies of technologies or engineering finesse, or even the best options, but mostly on “incentives” and who can take/own the “blame.”
“AI” replacing developers is evident because that is a rather tiny perspective and kinda easy to do the equation - developer can do that (good, bad, best) and can the AI do it - maybe, perhaps. So, replace.
A C-Suite took a decision to tick the final approval of a billion dollar deal with a service providers (amongst 10s of them). The idea might have sounded idiotic because there were 3 others better at the top than the chosen one. Even if all of the task and options were weighted with AI, but that last human decision is the Blame that the C-Suite took on, by betting his incentives on it (money, fame, pride, ego.)
I think a lot of this kind of talk treats the C-Suite as special, mystical "visionary" people who Know Things We Can't Know, and by virtue of this otherworldly magical power, are uniquely qualified to do their jobs. Like the average person with basic knowledge of his business and industry can't possibly choose one service provider out of 10 bids, or set business priorities, or drive and enforce culture. We're not talking about wizardry here.
People always dunk on me for saying this outrageous statement, but if you put me in charge of a random Fortune 500 company, I give myself a 50% probability of the company performing better than if its real CEO was in charge, and a 50% probability of it performing worse. I really don't think these guys bring as much to the table as they think they do and as much as the general public seems to think they do. Business success does not come from paranormal insight and abilities.
I think you could randomly nominate CEOs from the set of the general population with, say, a minimum of a college degree, and the randomly nominated CEO's performance would not statistically differ from "qualified" CEOs.
This is absolutely spot on. CEO/C-Suite/VPs are surrounded by gatekeepers (usually something like the PMO org, program management) who feed them with garbage info. Even if a top level leader is genuinely interested in making things better, they would never know because the gatekeepers firewall any competent person.
The gatekeeping org has the highest density of incompetence. They only hire incompetent because loyalty to the person hired is the most important. Gatekeeping orgs of various leaders protect each other, there is almost never any blame, it is things are good and they are going to get better, announce xyz initiatives/projects.
There are some exceptional executives out there with strong vision, ability to execute and build. Those are rare. The rest are just a bunch of people who had risen to the position because of whatever. They often don't have any special knowledge or skills and succeed mostly because of how the system works. For instance, I can't imagine what one would need to do to fuck up in a company like Coca-Cola. It's super well established, supply chains are golden, everything works,etc. So does success in such a company really mean the executive is some sort of visionary genius? Absolutely no.
CEOs are probably by and large less technically competent than the average technical line employee, but what companies are actually paying for is personal connections to power structures that can be leveraged for profit. Look at someone like Condoleezza Rice- almost certainly her political science doctorate imparted her with no real technical knowledge, yet she's served on the boards of C3.ai, Chevron, HP, Dropbox, Transamerica, Charles Schwab and a million other vague leadership positions for other entities in fields she almost certainly lacks any competence in.
> Almost all decisions that businesses take have nothing to do with the proficiencies of technologies or engineering finesse, or even the best options, but mostly on “incentives” and who can take/own the “blame.”
This argument always confuses me because it seems like lower level employees are the ones that get quickly dismissed when things get bad while a lot of C level executives seem to have some sort of compensation even if they fuck up.
- A developer continues to get paid if they accidentally write a bug that needs to be fixed, even if if it costs the business money to fix it.
- A CxO continues to get paid if they accidentally make a bad business decision that needs to be fixed, even if it costs the business money to fix it.
If you want a model where employees have to give up compensation for their mistakes, it would affect low ranking employees far more harshly than it would affect executives.
> A very personal view but many developers/engineers fail to see the overall picture. And yes, I was there and I went through all of the mistakes.
What is failling to see the overall picture? I hate this overall picture mysticism. I bet that if people where given the same role and information as the CEO they would be able to see the overall picture.
This is close to heart. To this day, when I mention Modular Scaling and Vertical Rhythm, quite a lot of developers and designers still have no clue.
I still start the stories with Mathematics and Musical Notes for product design. It is an effortless way to take “design is subjective” to being objective value.
This was magic during the early days, decades ago, and still applicable today.
My reason was the irritating, and equally convulated ways they go about where they are kept - are they part of drives, if I delete those albums, do I get more space.
I came from Picasa, (20+ years ago) eventually went on to Google Photos later. I kept that one as a back-up for a pretty long time, besides being a long-time paid user. I’m still on one of their cheaper tier for the family as Google’s services are such that we got to use one or the other (read relatives, friends, extended family etc).
However, I have made sure that if I have to walk or get blocked or something of the sorts that happens to people, I will just walk - no emotions attached.
Disclaimer: Article from my own personal blog, but I did blog about why and how I completely did away with Google Photos from our core photos collection (I still use it to host a bnunch of archives for friends, and families group photos).
In this case, a `.gitignore_global` takes care of the usual suspects that he mentioned `.DS_Store files, IDE config, compressed files, etc.`. Even if something goes wrong, it is usually caught during the initial scaffold before critical files goes in.
If one is working with new, young, rookie developers, give them the typical lesson on the global gitignore, local, config, and to have dotfiles, etc. Give yours for inspiration or something to start with.
Edit: I know that mine is not the best of the dotfiles on the internet but this has helped me switch multiple devices, multiple identities (work, projects, personal, etc) easily. I recently cleaned it up and added automation, test, etc with Claude Code. https://github.com/brajeshwar/dot
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