• flashgnash@lemm.ee
    36·
    2 days ago

    I’ve actually found a lot of the smaller foss tools I use are better than their proprietary counterparts because of the design philosophy and that people don’t cut as many corners on passion projects as when they’re on a deadline

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      3·
      23 hours ago

      For real. I just spent a decade in academia working dog hours with little pay keeping services running wondering how the true devs and sysadmins do it.

      I recently switched to the corporate world and have peeked behind curtain of competency: headless chickens running around, patching failing products rather than spending time to properly fix them because immediate results are the only metric that counts.

      Stability, scalability, reproducibility? Forget it, that’s someone else’s problem apparently.

      • bastion@feddit.nl
        2·
        21 hours ago

        Late stage capitalism.

        The issue is that capitalism fundamentally requires forward thinkers and enlightened (or at least rational) perspective to function sustainably.

        But capitalism rewards short term thinking, everywhere from corporate leadership, to the workforce, to the consumers caught by ads designed to catch and hold their ever-shortening attention spans.

        Fundamentally, it needs regulation to thrive. The true cost of a purchase, including environmental and decommissioning/disposal costs must be tied to the initial purchase value. Through this, we might get a functional capitalism.

  • HStone32@lemmy.world
    45·
    2 days ago

    "Dear floss4life,

    Our developers have encountered an issue while using the open source framework you published on github. We have lost as many as 400 user accounts. The estimated cost of this error is $6800.

    This is unacceptable. Be a professional and fix it immediately.

    Chad Elkowitz, MBA, Gruvbert and sons Finance Lt"

  • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
    73·
    2 days ago

    I love this meme because every app on my phone designed by a company worth more than a million dollars fucking sucks, and the best app on my phone is RIF, an app designed by a single developer, and reanimated into a lich by a team of programmers for free

  • emmie@lemmy.ml
    14·
    2 days ago

    80/20

    I live by this rule, it made me gain so much credibility and money from people who don’t know any better. 80/20 <3

    20 percent of work nets you 80 percent of result (except no one knows what I did isn’t 100 percent) bam 4/5 of time saved. Everyone is happy and if something doesn’t work we can just blame it on client

    • FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world
      18·
      2 days ago

      I follow the 80/20 rule recursively. as soon as I’ve gotten 80% of the way there for 20% effort I immediately stop, and start a brand new project for the remaining 20%. Bam! 96% complete for only 24% effort.

      taps forehead

  • superkret@feddit.org
    93·
    3 days ago

    Read “The Mythical Man-Month”.

    Basically, a team of 5-8 motivated developers can create high quality, medium complexity software extremely fast.
    But if the project is just a little too complex for one team of devs and you need more people, then you’ll need a lot more people. And a lot more time.

    Cause the more people you add to the project, the more overhead you have. Suddenly you need to pull devs off coding to bring new hires up to speed. You need to write documentation on coding style guidelines, hold meetings, maintain your infrastructure, negotiate with hardware suppliers, have someone fix the server room’s door locks, schedule job interviews, etc. etc.

    • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
      7·
      2 days ago

      Counterpoint: ‘The Brooks’s Law analysis (and the resulting fear of large numbers in development groups) rests on a hidden assummption: that the communications structure of the project is necessarily a complete graph, that everybody talks to everybody else. But on open-source projects, the halo developers work on what are in effect separable parallel subtasks and interact with each other very little; code changes and bug reports stream through the core group, and only within that small core group do we pay the full Brooksian overhead.’

      Source: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s05.html

    • EnderMB@lemmy.world
      4·
      2 days ago

      It absolutely fucking BAFFLES me that Brooks’ Law isn’t known by every software manager on the planet.

      I’ve quoted it so many times at work, even in engineering focused teams in at least two big tech companies. It’s not a concrete fact, but it explains why so many teams are hilariously shit at delivering software.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
      20·
      3 days ago

      Well, sometimes it happens. Lemmy was semi-broken during the APIocalypse, and there still isn’t such a thing as a FOSS Facebook, or search engine backend for that matter.

    • Xavienth@lemmygrad.ml
      2·
      3 days ago

      Adobe products often have no real equal. It sucks, but it’s the way it is. Gimp doesn’t come close to Photoshop, Inkscape is almost as good as Adobe Illustrator, and After Effects is the most capable video editing software I’ve ever used.

      It sucks that they try and lock you into proprietary file formats, like Substance Painter.

      • Annoyed_🦀 @monyet.cc
        2·
        3 days ago

        Yeah, the only software that can stand toe to toe with Adobe is Affinity, and they’re winning at the no subscription pricing. Other than that Adobe is really no equal when it comes to FOSS, a lot of those alternative is just us tolerating the flaw. Used to do stuff with photoshop, illustrator, flash, and after effect, switching to foss is…rough. Like you said, Gimp is barely usable, inkscape is good but far behind illustrator, and i don’t think flash and after effect have any foss alternative when i looking for it. The only free alternative to after effect that is good is davinci resolve, but that’s still proprietary.

          • Annoyed_🦀 @monyet.cc
            1·
            2 days ago

            I’m already way passed my time of using image editing software, but i’ve also heard people say the same for 2.0, but in my experience i still have to tolerate a lot of UX shit. And crash. But cool nonetheless, i’ll check it out. Professional still should just get Affinity rather than struggle with a release candidate.

            • toastal@lemmy.ml
              1·
              2 days ago

              2.0 was released 20 years ago in 2004… a lot of things, including software, can change in 20 years. 3.0 finally has adjustment layers, et al. that they have been working on since I first started following in 2008 but had blockers on GEGL & all sorts of massive refactors… which are now finally coming. If there was a time to try to get a new opinion on GIMP, it will be now (or very soon when 3.0 is finally officially released).

              • Annoyed_🦀 @monyet.cc
                1·
                2 days ago

                I heard of Gimp 2 and tried it around 2013/14, the version of that time is what my opinion is based on. Granted it’s been 10 years or so i first tried it and i need it as i have no access to adobe software anymore. Right now i’ve no used of image editing software, but i guess it’s my only option if i need it.

  • NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone
    13·
    2 days ago

    “All-star” makes me worried there’s some hidden society of super competent developers remaining at the big software corps that we somehow never noticed.

  • sunnie@sopuli.xyz
    15·
    3 days ago

    the issue with this argument is that i don’t care about who made the app when it doesn’t work. that’s why i still have a chromium based secondary browser, it doesn’t matter that it’s the work of a billion dollar company trying to get a monopoly when the website i’m on is broken. yes, the blame is on who made the website, not firefox. i still need to be able to use it somehow