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I like how people often refer to open source code as not production ready considering the absolute horrors I’ve seen in proprietary code.

There’s some magical thinking that many of us are guilty that big-time company-owned projects somehow have all these quality processes.
People on forced deadlines cut corners. That includes properly architecting things, automating processes, and even writing some basic unit tests.

I would go as far as to say that most production software doesn’t get tested beyond the author checking their own work.
Our entire industry is built by people who are in a rush or just can’t be arsed to do all these “best practices” we keep talking about in public.

And that’s not even talking about the sheer lack of ethics education across the entire industry that can and does lead to disaster.
I happened to read an old email from my previous-previous PO today and had to try hard not to waste energy on being upset about it all over again.

"do you want shoddy software?? because this is how you get shoddy software!!"

It was yet another "why can't you just ..." comment from this person.
This entry was edited (3 years ago)
So I just find stuff like that xkcd comic about “one library maintained by some random” holding a huge tower up to be… honestly kinda dishonest about where things actually go wrong, in practice?
We are fully capable of having things go wrong in multiple ways!

Not ensuring that our deep dependencies are sustainably maintained is one example, not properly maintaining our own stuff is yet another.
This entry was edited (3 years ago)
In VyOS, we are still paying off the technical debt (implementation and, most importantly, architectural) it accumulated in its previous life as Vyatta, when it had millions in VC funding. As a community-driven project backed by a self-funded company, we can finally work to get it right.
Back in 2008 a friend and colleague of mine burst out "finally, a recession!" because then the company cut off all management consultants and put all business projects on halt, so that we finally had time to go back and make things work reliably.
This entry was edited (3 years ago)
All the IT companies I worked for were obsessed with cranking out deliverables, and salespeople lied through their teeth and promessed ridiculous things in impossible times. That is how you get dozens of hours of overtime each month, absolutely chaotic projects, and a revolving door turnover, which only contributes to more instability and technical debt.

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