Post

@larryosterman.github.io

Sometimes I wonder how many engineering system improvements are driven primarily by anger... As in "This @#$@#$@# release script required me to do all this extra work, F-ck that s-it, I'm rewriting it".

20/8/26, 10:36 pm1 repost13 likes

Raj Chaudhuri

@rajch.bsky.social

21 Aug

I know pretty much all of my projects have involved at least one such. Just one time, my rewrite was definitely not an improvement. Hard lessons about coding in anger were learnt that time.

Larry Osterman

@larryosterman.github.io

21 Aug

In this case, our release process had five steps that involved running two nearly identical scripts which used two similar but different version numbers, hand editing three files to replace "Unreleased" with today's date, and if you didn't pass the "delete files" switch it failed. Insanity.

Larry Osterman

@larryosterman.github.io

21 Aug

Terrifyingly, I was chatting with a team member and the 5 step version was an improvement over the previous process.

Larry Osterman

@larryosterman.github.io

20 Aug

And I'm not going to get started on the phrase "Fuck that Shit", because ... *YUCK*, that's GROSS.

Heath Stewart

@heaths.dev

21 Aug

That’s certainly why I created our test resource provisioning scripts. Had to provision resources for a different library that was vastly different than the other I was working on. Later found other languages were different still. Big mad—and bewildered.

henry

@henrylsanders.bsky.social

20 Aug

Speaking from experience, a fair amount. Also righteous indignation- “what do you mean we have 3 slightly different copies of this library?!?”

Brian Hoyt

@hoyty.com

21 Aug

I started working on car dismissal at my school. Within a month I had a PowerApp to improve process. It grew to manage classroom dismissal, bus management and billing for after school. All because I was tired of how much time people were wasting. That was 2019. Still mostly using it today.