Thanks. I hate it.

Gonna go check my cinnamon.

But seriously, thanks.

Well that makes more sense, but it is still a lot of churn.

Sure, I mean it risks a lot of churn, but it hasn’t happened, in practice.

My team will debate the merits of a change until the cows come home, but they know that if they actually decide to make the change, I’ll expect them to put in all the necessary work to do it right. Ironically, that tends to curb their appetite for perfectionism.

Thankfully we’re all pretty much of like-mind. Nothing changes from project to project in the naming realm.

Yeah. Same here. That’s really why I get away with technically allowing a change during any retro. My teams appetite for refinements settled down after our first four sprints as a team.

Things might get interesting again, when we make our next hire; but I consider that part of the onboarding process. It should be worth the trouble just in case the new hire brings brings smart new practices we might have been ignoring. And whether anything changes or not, it creates a time and place for the new hire to argue their differences with the team.

We discuss naming conventions whenever we start a new project, and then it’s locked in.

That’s very practical, and really accomplishes the same net effect as my team’s policy, with less theoretical risk of thrashing.

A possible difference is that sometimes my team will insist on a refactor of some old code to update to the latest standards, at the start of a new project updating an old product.

As long as the code test coverage is acceptable to me, I’ll green light that effort as part of sprint zero.

We have tens of thousands of files in the project I’m in charge of, so we’d never consider such an extensive refactor.

Oh yeah. I would probably use my manager veto in that case. At some point it’s just too much work to verify the change.

We do have one big repo that we’re breaking up over time, and I insist that such changes be limited to the current actively developed component. It’s a unique case, because the vision for the repo is to get smaller as parts of it are decoupled (and released as open source). So we don’t deeply care if different modules have mildly different code standards, since they’re destined for separate public repos, in the long run.

I did do away with BEM when I started, because I despise that clusterfuck of a convention for more reasons than I care to explain here, but I waited until a new project to do it, and everyone agreed with me.

That’s some holy and righteous work you accomplished. All future developers on that effort owe you a debt!

Lol. Oh, right. I was kind of asking for clarification if tie fighters count, but I guess that’s a moot point. I had not thought about the impact of the battle at the start of Ep IV - probably leaves everyone too black out drunk for the rest to matter.

Yeah. Their own lawyers have the best chance, but there’s so many pages, combined, I wonder if even one of their lawyers has read everything

You might as well not have a naming convention then, since the project is going to be full of different conventions.

Oh, I skipped this. Lol. Obviously not. As a team, they can implement whatever convention change they want, every two weeks.

As manager, I expect them to update all active projects, in their entirety, to the new convention, each time.

And as I mentioned in my other comment, if their test coverage isn’t at a level that makes me confident in that kind of global change (70% tends to be plenty), then I reserve the right to table it - until they bring the test coverage up (on all impacted projects).

You allow naming schemes to change every two weeks? That’s just insane!

Yes. Everything is open for discussion every two weeks, during our retrospective meeting.

Of course, that doesn’t mean things will actually change that fast.

But let me push back a bit, too - a global find and replace on our entire source code would take maybe a couple hours. A substantial naming convention refactor would take maybe a couple of days.

The reason we don’t do anything that aggressive is we don’t trust ourselves to make the change correctly - not because it’s actually a difficult change to make. Where our test coverage is where it should be, it’s a perfectly safe change.

If my team tells me (in agreement with each other) that a change like that is necessary, my job is to go make time for them to get it done.

On the scale of requests my team has given me, a couple days to rename some variables is no big deal.

There’s absolutely stuff I won’t allow, as team manager, but flip flopping on variable naming is owned by the team, and I would allow it, within reason.

A couple fair-game manager reasons I might shut down a variable naming convention change are:

• The test coverage on that part of the code doesn’t inspire enough confidence to make any unnecessary changes. Improve the test coverage, and we will revisit.
• (Hypothetically) We made two similar changes in recent memory, and as manager, this is affecting our team reputation. Let’s make a plan to make this change in a way that does not impact our team reputation.

Anything short of those two scenarios, and - should my team present it to me in agreement - I go make the time for them to make the change.

A shorter version is: I’ll discuss and do my best to support whatever my team wants to change - every two weeks. It’s a small price to pay for some peace for 9 out of every 10 business days! (And honestly, it’s a big part of my success formula.)

Yeah. Usually different hardware, sometimes just virtualization.

Thanks to the open container initiative (OCI), I haven’t been tempted to dual boot in a several years.

But otherwise, is there a reason to use it rather than starting with Ubuntu and just install your own cutting edge features as you choose your own upgrade cycle?

I’m ride-or-die Debian, but I switch to Fedora when I need a more recent package set.

I do so to avoid Ubuntu/Snaps, which contains some closed proprietary bullshit, which I personally find to be a pain in the ass.

Exactly. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that Google’s clever privacy engineering isn’t enough to keep any of us safe.

Google’s expectation that we be okay with these practices feels like corporate gaslighting, to me.

To the best of my knowledge - from a spirited but doomed attempt to read Google’s privacy policies - Google is committed to deleting your location history after sharing it with 10,000 or so vendor partners.

Each of those vendor partners have pinky promised to comply with the rules outlined in the same privacy policy that I failed to read.

For context, I’m not convinced any living person has read the entirety of Google’s privacy policies.

Sadly, I’m quite confident - by the law of averages, human nature, and corporate corruption - that not all 10,000 trusted partners also deletes our location data history.

Google does take privacy preserving steps to anonymyze what it shares.

My educated opinion is that no amount of attempted anonymozation is sufficient for the breadth, scope and quantity of data that Google collects.

Shorter answer for you: yes, I believe that is a corporate lie. True only in technicality, but likely false by any reasonable persons expectation of what “delete” means.

TL;DR - Google makes (arguably insane) claim that it previously acted responsibly with regards to fingerprinting, and says they will begin acting irresponsibility with fingerprinting in February.

Practical take-aways you probably already knew:

• Today’s Google may do or say anything to make an extra nickel.
• Today’s Google, while it employs some excellent privacy minded engineers, has not demonstrated an organizational commitment to user privacy.
• It is probably wise to assume that the next serious data breach at Google will end marriages, get politicians arrested, get famous people canceled, fuel successful scammers, and have every other privacy impact you can imagine. We know the Google data pool is massive, and we have reason to believe it is incredibly personal. I’m aware that Google has anonymozation solutions in play, and I do not believe those solutions will be effective in a breach scenario.
• I believe that the average person will likely be better off ten years from now if they interact less with Google services.

I don’t think that’s survivable? I’m just imagining some of the space battles…lol.

Yeah.

It’s also just fun to talk about because it probably makes US healthcare CEOs nervous.

After all they’ve done to the rest of us, it’s nice to think of them feeling nervous. If they’re not going to feel our grief, or appropriate remorse, or empathy, at least they can feel nervous.

Oof. This is a pet peeve of mine.

As manager, I shut this conversation down via direct messages to each team member involved.

I remind them that they agreed during retro to live with the current set of decisions for exactly two weeks until next retro.

I don’t dictate much, but I do dictate that Slack isn’t an acceptable place for this kind of discussion, on my team.

The only related thing, that belongs in slack, on my team, is a link to the current accepted team standard - which will be open for review and changes again during next retro.

Alternately, if there’s no standard for this yet then my team knows they’re encouraged to wing it until we discuss at next retro.

And yeah, I’ve had to open an issue to revisit a variable name after retro, lol.

My team are an opinionated bunch, and they’re often perfectionists.

If we need to ask whether something belongs on this list, the answer is yes.

Except Babylon 5. For Babylon 5, the answer is a new language concept called a triple-yes.

Right. Becubs my node id cyogged.

Planet Money podcast did a bit where they followed up with people who fell for buying cheap pharmaceuticals from spam emails.

The assumption was that people paid the too good to be true prices, and then never got anything in the mail.

The weird twist was that everyone interviewed was really satisfied with the product they received.

Now, all disclaimers certainly apply: don’t trust a spammer with your life, there’s nothing to stop imitator scammers from joining the legitimate?! spammers, and people’s satisfaction is a poor measure of drug safety and efficacy.

But it does seem like a sign that someone is doing some of this already.

Yeah. I knew better, but it just didn’t occur to me until I was confirming my backups later.

Yeah. Absolutely. Even having been robbed a few times really messed with my head. I would hate to have to live with worse.

But I still figure people have a right to seek a safe place to be, and cornered people have a right to use violence, to reach a safe place.

I’ll allow there might even be other times when violence might be moral, since life can get pretty complex, but I hope to live my life without having to make that call.

But I believe that when cornered is the only time a human can use violence with a totally free conscience.

It’s why Sun Tzu advised we always give even our worst enemy an escape route. It’s much better to not have to fight at all, than to have to win a fight with a desperate enemy.