I hate almost all software (2011)
The older I get, the more I agree with this rant. I used to be that guy putting cute unicode checkboxes in his test runner, telling myself I was making the world a better place because my software was nifty and clever. Now, I realize that, while that&#x27;s nice to see, my time was better spent just solving the problem and then moving on to the next problem. Nobody was dying for animated tick marks and I probably ruined someone&#x27;s experience because their terminal emulator or multiplexer had shitty unicode and escape code support.<p>It&#x27;s a delicate balancing act, of course. The tinkerers are often the ones pushing tech forward with their incessant fiddling. But it comes at such an incredibly high cost. I mean, how many <i>human lifetimes</i> have been consumed by the shitty intricacies of dynamic linking alone. And for what? To solve a class of problems we haven&#x27;t really had since 1992?<p>What a waste.<p>There&#x27;s ample space in the software world for all kinds -- and arguably the industry is fueled by the blood of well-intentioned innocents -- but my increasingly jaded self just wants the shit to work so that I can close my laptop and get outside with my kids. The guy who spent 15 hours a day obsessing over The Right Way and code purity and ecosystems has aged into a man who firmly believes that less is much more, cuteness is a code smell, and solutions should be as self-contained as humanly possible.