Obviously we don’t use Django for everything. But like with web-applications, a python script or a flask application is always more productive for us than .NET.

By the time we have an app running in Django, we’re not even finished with Entity modelling in a Core web-api.

I do think stuff like Blazor.Net is promising, but we’re not a technology company, we support thousands of employees who only care about how digitisation can make their lives easier as fast and as stable as possible.

.NET isn’t the best at that, at least not for us.

Dont get me wrong, I don’t dislike .NET Core, it think it’s great, I just don’t see how it benefits me.

We’ve been a C# house for several years, decades really, and I’ve always preferred it to JAVA so I’m actually excited for Core.

But we rarely use it. Not because it’s not great, rather because we’re more productive with flask or Django. For Core to really make sense for us, it’d would have to stop being so damn low level, but I guess that maybe it can’t without sacrificing too much efficiency. More importantly it needs better libraries for things that aren’t “built-in”.

I can certainly see why .NET developers welcome it, because they finally have good cross platform ability. At least until they need to do authentication on a non-standard SAML token, that though easily supported by ADFS but is a bitch in any .NET setup.

I know we aren’t most use cases, being the public sector and running a gazillion different tech stacks at once, but .NET has never played well once you stepped outside it’s comfortzone and it’s always been so low level that writing library extensions were a bitch. And that may have worked out, so far, but I just don’t see why people stick with it when there are more productive alternatives.

I say productive, because I don’t think .NET core is lacking technically, but delivering solutions on time and with minimum maintenance requirements afterward is just easier in python or JAVA and I’d imagine others as well.

But maybe I’m missing something?

To me it seem obvious that other animals would also possess various degrees of cognitive ability, I mean, we do.

I think the golden middleway is somewhere in between, where you do the upfront analysis and figure out what to do, why you’re doing it and with whom, but don’t lock everything down tight in an unchangable requirement specification.

I think methologies like service design can be really great, if you don’t know what you’re trying to do. I think agile methologies are decent for the actual development of software, but a software project is so much more than that, including benefit realisation.

I think it’s embarrassing that we can plan and build a organic house for thousands of employees, and deliver on time and within budget, but we can’t build a piece of software to handle the digital workflow of labelling and storing documents.

Hell, we plan city infrastructure and succeed, every year without going over budget. But building a piece of software to digitise vacation registration? Fuck no, that’ll go one year over time and cost four times what we expected, even though you could rightly build the same thing in a few months as a single focused developer.

I’ve seen all sorts of project management models in action, none of them work for software. But agile is especially stupid from the buyers perspective. When I buy a new house I wouldn’t sign a contract for an unknown amount of finished rooms within the agreed upon timeframe and budget either.

Mostly though, I think software developers just need to do better work, and stop blaming the project management for their own inability to deliver good work in a timely manner.

It’s also not “unlucky” to be wrong, don’t patronise your users.

We don’t even suffer from the faulty updates because we don’t roll them out right away.

I can’t put my finger on it, I wish I could, because it’s not terrible constructive to say that it just doesn’t feel nice to use. But that’s how it feels. It certainly also lacks the unix command tools. Git bash was a nice addition, though it’s hardly the same as a real unix terminal, but mostly it’s just that using windows 10 feels wrong to me.

I really love unix, I probably should be using Linux instead of a Mac, and I did earlier in my life. But with age I’m growing fonder and fonder to things just working, like when my wife sends me an iMessage and I pops up on my Mac. We could probably get something similar working with some other setup, but as long as we stay working the Apple ecosystem, well, it just happens automatically. Just like popping a thunderbolt cable in hooks me up to my 4K monitor with no setup required and no problems when I swhixh between different modes. Something that took ages to get working in Linux and didn’t really work for all the apps that didn’t support the change of resolution.

It wasn’t always like this, I actually really liked windows especially 2000, XP and 7, but since then it’s been a struggle to stay with it. So my story is almost the polar opposite.

Like hardware, where do you find a decent high quality windows laptop with a trackpad that works for the price tag of a 13” MacBook Pro? Sure the surface book is a sexy machine, but it’s almost twice as expensive and it can’t connect to my 4K monitor or an external egpu? Sure the xps13 would make Linux easier, but it’s trackpad is worse and it’s build quality is risky (coil whine).

I’m not really a Apple fanboy. I hate the walled garden, as much as I love what it does, but everything else is just so much worse. What I really can’t imagine though, living within a windows 10 environment, even with git bash.

Almost all of the interesting content I consume online comes from personal self-build blogs, HN or real news papers like the NYT.

I don’t think the content is worse, especially not when you pay for news. Now the NYT is a poor example of this, but the Danish equivalents, Information and Weekendavisen are not, in that one turns off it’s advertising when you subscribe and the other is simply not available for free.

I think in terms of the internet, you get what you pay for. For news the price is money, on HN the price is your ability to be relevant and fair and on personal blogs the price is the time it takes to find them, support them and make interesting responses to them.

The key thing that has changed for me, is how to find interesting things. HN is really the only option I know of, unless you get extremely lucky on a search engine. Because modern search results are so influenced by Alexa rankings and advertising that they very rarely lead you to the gems on the net. I do think the amount of shitty content on the internet, and unregulated/moderated social media makes the problem a lot worse, because it’s harder to find interesting things in an ocean of shit. But ultimately, I think there are as many interesting things on the net as there has always been.

I do find it interesting, that none of the websites I love the most, are powered by any of the popular JavaScript frameworks, well aside from the NYT, but to be fair, the thing I dislike the most about the NYT is it’s intrusive JS.

The teaching of Jesus and Buddha are really giving you the exact same advice. Self-sacrifice, honesty, hard work and being decent while you accept all the shit life throws at you and let it pass, because it will, are the ways to live calmly and fully in between the eternal struggle chaos and order.

I personally think the eastern approach was easier to comprehend than the western. Ying and yang are two dragons locked in eternal struggle, one is chaos one is order but within each dragon is a small piece of the other. Let too much of one dragon into your life and you will suffer, and since chaos lives within order (and vice versa) it’s also a fruitless struggle to chose one, because the other will always find a way to creep in.

You’ll find the same essence in the bible and the moral struggle between good and evil and a God who never tells you what he wants, but to me, it was much less clear. Perhaps especially because 90% of religions scholars are assholes and in the west you don’t meet the eastern assholes but you do meet a lot of shitty priests.

I don’t see why JAVA or C# should perform worse than JavaScript developers in terms of data structures or algorithms though. Documentation, CLI and environment, sure, but building things?

You could say something similar about go, but I think people who are choosing go, are choosing go. And by that I mean they are thinking about their options, most C# developers that I have known, simply throw C# at everything, even when they shouldn’t.

Visual studio does a lot of things for you without a CLI. Want to deploy? Right click on your project and do the UI wizard for it. I mean, even nuget has a gui.

On top of that C# comes with a ton of easy to use features from its library. Like AD integration is just a library that gives you everything you need, at least until it doesn’t and you have to write your own bits and things get hard, but until then everything is easy and it’s much easier than using an open source library for it. I think any C# programmer could use its basic functionality from VS without ever looking at its documentation, and while Django and flask integrates with AD as well, you can’t really say the same thing about them.

You don’t get that with most tools. Ironically I think the fact that .net core has moved to a more CLI sort of environment has made visual studio a worse option for it than visual studio code, but we aren’t really going down that road, so what do I care.

I do care about python support for visual studio code, and it’s damned awesome.

None of which is interesting.

Google is still good at finding specific things. Like when you commit an act of google programming or want to buy a book. But it’s really terrible and finding interesting content.

You could say that the web is flooded with shit, and be right, but HN is evidence that not everything on the internet is terrible, google just isn’t your portal to it anymore.

So we visit HN, but that means google has become yahoo, aol search and all those other search engines it replaced by being a combination of relevant, interesting and exploratively fresh.

I mean, 2018 was the year I adopted DuckDuckGo as my standard search engine, and it wasn’t because of privacy. Sure privacy helps, but to be honest, it was because it gives more interesting results. I’ll still use !g when I’m searching for something I know google will find, but if I’m just exploring a topic I’ll almost never use google.

What has been affected is the perception. It’s no longer considered cool to have a Facebook account. Meet-ups and interest groups are still heavily used in my social circles, but it’s almost always with an apology for being on Facebook.

Instagram has suffered less, but instagram isn’t really useful for anything but wasting time.

Facebook on the other hand serves as a modern day yellowpages and meetup combined, but with its popularity dropping and people slowly adopting privacy concerns, it seems like the right company with the right business model could displace Facebook.

Of course you could say something similar about google and how it’s search engine is so terrible at finding anything interesting.

Maybe it’s my little anecdotal world playing tricks on my perception, but to me, the whole web seems ripe for another revolution.

Then you can have as many alarms keeping track of your cooking as you want without touching your phone with your foodsy fingers.

If Siri understands you that is.

I agree with your point though, it’s kind of silly to focus on face emojis instead of letting two timers run simultaneously.

The internet didn’t stop being interesting, HN is a great example of this in action. The blog article about rejected Disney princesses is likely the most interesting piece anyone of us read on the internet today.

Only Google didn’t deliver it, a HN link to an article about the creative net did. I say google, but really, any of the gape keepers is equally guilty.

Interestingly I think all the gate keepers are at a place that yahoo, AOL and others where when google disrupted them.

So maybe, just maybe, we’ll see the dawn of something better soon.

Quora is another good example, it’s a place I often visit after search results, but on google.dk, it’s almost never a result, possibly because it’s not in danish.

DDG is much better, but once in a while when I’m searching for something very specific that I know google will first, I’ll do the !g.

If I’m looking up anything technical or comitting an act of google programming, I’ll always go straight to google.

The other day I was looking for some pipeextenders for our shower though, and neither bing, google or DDG were able to help. I ended up finding them by searching on amazon. Google was 100% commercials for plumbers and completely useless otherwise. DDG and bing had no clue what I was looking for. A few years ago, google would have been able to help, I know, because google helped me find our current ones.

Almost every time I search, I don’t get a single result I want on the first page. The first 3 results are sponsored adds, then there is the Danish Wikipedia article (useless), then 3-6 advertisements pretending to be content, and then if I’m lucky something that was relevant 5 years ago.

DDG isn’t much better, but it’s better.

I’m not sure if search engines are really to blame though. With everyone being on Facebook, Medium, Quora, reddit, 4chan and so on, it’s like the web just stopped having content worth visiting.

If it wasn’t because HN gave me interesting content, I’m honestly not sure why I’d ever browse the internet anymore. But maybe I’m just getting grumpy.