I wish! It’s more of a loose collection of random business softwares in various states of abandonment. D365 CE is a platform for Sales teams to organize and track leads, quotes, contracts, etc. D365 BC is an ERP platform born out of the ashes of NAV, the core of which Microsoft bought decades ago. D365 F&O, D365 S&M, and others are various flavors of AX, another ERP platform Microsoft bought over a decade ago. They are direct competitors to D365 BC for some reason. None of these softwares can communicate directly with each other, and none allow direct access to the Azure SQL. Occasionally Microsoft will throw a bone towards integration stuff like DualWrite or Synapse or Fabric, but they can never seem to commit and eventually abandon those too.

I would actually be much happier if it was just crummy databases instead of an archipelago of rotting digital islands.

Against every developer’s advice, management has moved our entire stack to Microsoft Dynamics 365. It took over a year of prep, millions in ISV consulting charges, and it performs like trash. Now management is constantly complaining about outages, Microsoft nickles and dimes us for tens of thousands more than the estimates, and they are constantly jerking us around to half-baked tech by removing support for anything that actually works. “Want data out of F&O? We’re killing everything except Synapse Link. You spent months migrating yet it drops data? That’s not surprising since we fired everyone working on it. You should be on Fabric! No, that’s not finished either, but we need to test it on someone!”

I’m very bitter.

I used to love C++ and I still do to some extent. But the longer I am away from it the more I realize it was largely just Stockholm syndrome.

This drives me crazy with software websites and GitHub repos. Sometimes they’ll give you a hint that involves other undefined things like, “This lets you use Floorp with Bibix.”

Yeah, it was all tapes. We only had to use them once when I worked there: after finding out the UPS connected to the mainframe was a dud. And then it really was roulette because the first two tapes were unreadable, so we ended up with three week old data.

I’d believe it’s real. In 2016 I was at a company trying to migrate off an old IBM mainframe and green screens. It wasn’t like an airline with complex or critical code; it was just a barely functional ERP for a warehouse. Source control was the furthest thing from their minds. Some companies and IT departments are very reluctant to change, regardless of how much time and money it save.

It gets worse if you use Microsoft D365 AX products. Then you have to provision an entire Build server for builds which has to run Visual Studio 2019 on Windows 10. To do a build you run a pipeline in Azure DevOps, which runs the compiler in a full Visual Studio 2019 environment, which has to run on a special Azure virtual environment running Windows 10 hosted by Microsoft. It’s so fragile.

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Hatchet was such a powerful book when I was a kid. I bet it still holds up, so maybe I should reread it soon.

Any mod recommendations for a 5 year old? He’s got a laptop with Debian on it and I’d like to set him up with MineTest, but I’m not sure he can handle the full MineClonia experience.

I used to write extensively with C++, but it has been a long time since speed mattered that much to one of my applications. I still marvel at the cache-level optimizations some people come up with, but I’m in the same mindset as you now.

My workload split of Data Movement vs Data Transformation is like 95:5 these days, which means almost all the optimizations I do are changing batch/cache/page/filter settings. I can do that in any language with http bindings, so I choose those that are faster to write.

This is what I’ve seen too. Directors come back from a conference and suddenly we’re learning a newer but objectively worse system. Obviously the grunts using the systems aren’t consulted, but are expected to be team players through this educational experience.

I agree on board games.

See if there are Board Game shops in your city. If they have tables for Magic the Gathering you can check their calendar and usually find open board gaming nights. In my experience people usually bring a bunch of their own games and are open to new players. Some of the people in our group don’t own any games; the rest of us are always bringing more than we can possibly play anyway.

In college I lost one of my jobs and knew I needed another one fast or I wouldn’t be able to make rent. I spammed my resume on Indeed and Monster.

I got an email offering an IT-adjacent job in town. It was Saturday and they said I could stop by in a few weeks to fill out the paperwork or we could do it over the phone and start Monday. I called so I could get my first paycheck before the end of the month. We eventually got to her asking for my Social Security number and I froze.

I realized this could be a scam, but I was really desperate. I tried to think of a way to test them, so I said that I just realized I would be unavailable during certain hours, would that still be okay? She said she had to put me on hold to talk to the manager. After a while she came back and said it should work, but I would have to discuss the specifics with my supervisor once I started.

That sounded real to me. If it was a scam surely she would have just immediately said my schedule was fine, right? I gave her my SSN. She said I was ready to go and to have fun on Monday. I got there and it was just a parking lot. Couldn’t get a response via phone or email.

A couple months later I found out someone across the country had used my SSN and I had to freeze my credit.

Very interesting. It would certainly make doom scrolling harder. Email always feels more personal, like each message was sent specifically to me for a reason. As opposed to feeds, which feels like looking at cars as they drive by.

I think this system pushes against those boundaries. This sort of concrete brainstorming at the edges is such a crucial part of software evolution, so thank you.

“don’t have to throw the whole thing out” is what convinced me to get one. I’m not going to make a big difference on my own, but minimizing what I recycle, throw out, or chuck in the basement is still worthwhile.

My cheap old 3D printer requires constant fiddling before and after every print, yet still fails probably half the time. I avoid printing things sometimes just because I don’t want to deal with it.

I would still agree with you 100%. I hate my HP printer so much.

A lot of people don’t understand how much time long hair actually adds. When mine was reaching my hips it would add 10 minutes to my shower. I wasn’t even doing conditioner or anything; it just takes forever to get all of your hair lathered up and then rinsed out. Now that my hair is short again I’m in and out in less than five minutes, but I wouldn’t have minded music back then.