naxxfish @naxxfish@mastodon.technology

And my point is, rather than this just being a story about my plumbing, is that software engineers do this kind of thing all the time by accident. Whilst things like feature flags are a great way to let you ship fast, they are the “service valves” in your code. If you end up not shipping that feature or turning it off later, 🔥 *delete it* 🔥. Don’t keep it around “just in case we need it”. If I wanted an outdoor tap, I wouldn’t be reconnecting it to that pipe again!

The pipe which originally fed it was still there ! Coming out of the property, to an inaccessible location around the back. And now pissing water at mains pressure everywhere. I can only imagine that the plumber (or more likely handyman) wanted to disconnect the tap, but thought it was easier to just cut the pipe out and use a service valve inside to stop water coming out of it, rather than replacing the plumbing under the sink with the correct fittings for the new requirements 🤷‍♂️

It’s not connected to anything. The pipe has been cut. There is no evidence of where it was supplied from before either. Except ...

@naxxfish I tested everything in the house that uses water - sinks, baths, washing machine, boiler, toilets. All of them were working fine. What on earth was going on. Then I remembered. There is an outdoor tap on the side of my building ....

Decommissioning stuff is important. This morning I suddenly heard water gushing in my kitchen. I turned off the water to prevent immediate damage. On inspection, I couldn’t find water anywhere inside - not a sausage. What I did find was a mysterious service valve which when turned off stopped the flow of water and the water meter clicking over ....

"Mr Williamson said there would be "no algorithms whatsoever" used in determining exam grades in the summer." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56187673 - well, there will still be an algorithm, it just won't be the universally same one and it'll be in the head of each of the teachers handing out grades. There is no 100% fair solution, but there's definitely a more popular one.

I generally don't approve of "coding challenge" engineering interview questions, as being able to do them doesn't reveal how good of an "engineer" you really are. However, if the company you're interviewing for is known for their routing algorithms, asking a candidate to implement Djikstra's algorithm isn't all that irrelevant.

SEO: Being Dishonest About Your Content as a Service since 2014. Good job it didn't work 😂

Privacy experiment: in Google profile, pause YouTube search history. Wait for 24 hours. Do a search. Unpause YouTube search history. Observe that the search you recently made is there somehow 🤔

And finally: just because you have something in your parts drawer that you'd like to use doesn't mean it's the right design choice >_<

Also: test the microcontroller module before you install it into something. Somehow this Teensy has no 3.3V on it's internal regulator and I have no idea if it was like that before I soldered it in or whether my board is shorting something somewhere. These are all things that I did know once, but it's been a while and I've filled by brains with other things since then :/

Things I (re) learnt today: don't be lazy and put sockets in when you're prototyping with a microcontroller module. "Never trust the footprint" extends to keycaps.

I'm a bit conflicted by AWS kicking off Parler: whilst it's probably a good thing that it is being crippled, at the same time it demonstrates that today - where almost all apps are running on "someone elses computer" - you can be censored if the host wants to censor you.

In an entirely unexpected turn of events, turns out that companies not-in-the-UK don't really want to register with the UK tax office to sell to consumers in the UK. I thought the plans was that the pure animal magnatism of the union jack was supposed to be persuasive enough to convince johhny foriegner to put up with our beuaracracy. Or was it a bus with really big numbers on it? I forget... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55530721

I wonder how many thousands of pictures DPD have of peoples bare feet now.

So, kids, become a programmer and you too can be confused by seeming ordinary turns of phrase.

Lots of news about vaccine rollouts and being "the beginning of the end". I'm thinking to myself - at what point does the beginning stop and the end start? Is there anything in the part between the beginning and the end, and what determines how long that lasts? Or does the end only happen instantaneously - in which case, how can it begin?

Trello users: If you have a "Done" list, add 🎉 to the name. You're welcome.

I mean, I guess I knew that it was normal. But they could have linked me to their own website explaining the phenomenon: https://www.samsung.com/in/support/tv-audio-video/why-sometimes-a-popping-or-cracking-noise-comes-after-i-turn-off-my-tv/

Also, this was via live chat. They were then surprised when I disconnected.