The Ineffable Act of Testing

Posted on August 12, 2025 by David K.

Someday, I should write a book about the outrageous things I’ve seen in IT at Fortune 250’s. For now, the short story is that — once again — my little solo project has achieved great success, and attracted people who can’t stand to see that, and are now taking it over. So a new group is creating a new database to hold all the data my application uses (and more), and once it’s running, I am supposed to refactor my application to use it.

For the third time since June and the delivery of “MVP 2.1” — whatever that’s supposed to mean — this group has said their system is up and running and ready to be used for my refactoring efforts, and for the third time, it doesn’t work. The first time, every non-trivial query would time out. The second time, the results came back quickly, but were completely wrong. This time, no queries work again, and the strange errors I see apparently mean that the system isn’t even running! Uh… then why did you tell me it was ready?!

They keep hassling me to validate the system, but I’m like, guys, I’m testing this with the queries YOU gave me. YOU can run them first, and tell if it’s even working/running. YOU have just as much access to the canonical source of the data. YOU can check the correctness just as well as I can. You’re embarrassing yourselves.

I can’t even imagine the mentality of somehow being the guy working on this, doing things to the system, and then telling management it’s ready, when they didn’t even give it a try! I’m not even talking about test suites or automated testing in CI/CD! First: Does it answer queries? Second: Is the data correct? If you can’t verify those two simple things, what business do you have telling anyone that the system is ready?! I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

Posted in Programming | Tagged | Leave a comment

Fallout 5 Is Now Reportedly “Fully Greenlit” – GameSpot

Posted on July 15, 2025 by David K.

But it may have come at the cost of ZeniMax Online’s now canceled MMORPG.

<snip>

Corden said from what he has heard, part of the forward push for Fallout 5 and Fallout in general came at the expense of ZeniMax Online’s next MMO, codenamed Blackbird, which was canceled as part of Microsoft’s latest round of layoffs.

As Corden explains, MMOs are expensive to build and have to compete with established games like World of Warcraft and even ZeniMax’s own The Elder Scrolls Online. With that in mind, Microsoft made the decision to cancel ZeniMax’s unannounced project and invest that money into Fallout, an established IP that would more likely be a “surefire win.”

<snip>

Regardless of who is developing Fallout 5, the fact that it is just now greenlit means it will likely be many years before it releases. However, a Fallout 3 remaster is reportedly in the works that could arrive sooner. Renewed interest in Fallout reached new heights with the release of Amazon’s Fallout TV show in 2024, with star Walton Goggins recently offering an update on Fallout Season 2.

Source: Fallout 5 Is Now Reportedly “Fully Greenlit” – GameSpot

Literally all good news for Fallout fans. As someone who has quit ESO, this is particularly delightful. The cutting of ZOS’ unannounced sci-fi MMO makes sense, because it would have cannibalized the inevitable MMO-ization of Starfield by Bethesda. From a parent company’s point of view, it had to go.

I often look at the commentary about ESO on the forums and the subreddit, and it seems like I made a good decision to get out of that game when I did. The subclassing feature has landed, everyone’s had a look… and the Steam chart shows that the game is going back to pre-subclassing levels.

I thought subclassing was going to be a big hit, but now the other shoe has dropped, and they’re nerfing straight-classing hard, which many people said they would have to do, and the backlash is strong.

The Fallout Amazon Prime streaming show has been wildly successful at raising the visibility of the franchise. With season 2 due in December, Bethesda is planning the “biggest update ever” for Fallout 76. With Skyline Valley being a great expansion — and even a good implementation of fishing (which I was dreading) — along with the final combat tweaks from the past year of balance changes in place by then, I expect the game to retain more of the inevitable surge of new players than last time.

Both Fallout 3 and New Vegas seem to be set for remastering, and I’m so there for it. New Vegas will be getting love because the last shot of the first season of the series showed the second season was headed there. F3 is basically lost to time on PC because of the idiotic tie-in with the now-dead Games for Windows Live. Sure, there are hacks, but I’ve never gotten them to work. The only realistic way to replay those games currently is on Xbox S/X (Where, I have to admit, running at 60FPS, they look great.) Based on the crazy success of the Oblivion remaster, Bethesda is sure to be leaving money on the table if they don’t remaster these games.

Given that 76 is set in the western side of West Virginia, I don’t see how Bethesda could tie-in New Vegas. However, if they can tie-in Pittsburgh and Atlantic City via expeditions, they can definitely tie-in Fallout 3’s Capitol Wasteland somehow. Again, anything to connect all these game settings seems like great marketing and good business.

It feels like a good time to be a fan of Fallout.

Posted in Gaming | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Java/Javascript Midwittery

Posted on June 18, 2025 by David K.
Rails – Java – Rails

All these years later, and even with an example of how it can work, no other stack has even come close to the productivity of Ruby on Rails.

There was an effort, years ago, to provide a single command to setup the midwit stack, and I tried it. It took forty minutes to install all the dependencies on a powerful Dell laptop, and then I couldn’t find a single solid example to follow in the current versions and syntax. But sure, corporations still make Java/Javascript/Oracle the de facto default, because that’s what they’ve staffed up on for 30 years, and these tech choices have become as ingrained as Cobol and mainframes in bluechip Fortune 500 companies.

Posted in Programming | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Reddit Had an Answer?!

Posted on June 17, 2025 by David K.

I was trying to integrate Anthropic’s Claude AI into Visual Studio Code, and it wasn’t showing up in the add-ons. There’s literally one command to install it, and it simply wasn’t working. I also could not see it in the add-on marketplace. I was pulling my hair out when I finally used Google — of all places — to search for an answer, and Reddit — of all places — had the clue. As hard as I am on Reddit, “I’m making a note here: huge success.”

It was installing the add-on; I just wasn’t seeing it. Because it was already installed, it wasn’t appearing in the Marketplace, and it wasn’t showing under the installed add-ons because it wasn’t included in my profile.

I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Reddit Had a Correct Answer? FR!?
Posted in Programming | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

“Vibe” All the Things

Posted on June 16, 2025 by David K.

I can’t wait for middle management to read a post about “vibe coding,” tell a bunch of lower management to tell staffers to use it for everything, note some improvement in some metrics, and report this to upper management, which then becomes convinced that we should try “vibe shipping and receiving,” “vibe accounting,” and “vibe HR.” The only thing we won’t be able to “vibe,” of course, is upper management.

Posted in Technology | Tagged , | Leave a comment

ESO is Dead to Me, and It’s Been Liberating

Posted on June 13, 2025 by David K.

I wrote a post a month and a half ago in which I was waffling about getting back into Elder Scrolls Online. They had announced that they would be adding “subclassing” (or more accurately, multiclassing), which I thought was intriguing. I had kept everything as it was when I stopped playing. I left the door wide open to walk back through.

Their big patch came out, and I updated the game and tried it. Sure, it launched with a content expansion, but the new zone, with its new mythics and new sets and new achievements and all the rest was secondary to me. I didn’t pay for that. All I cared about was subclassing. I was going to see how that worked out before I dropped money on the expansion.

Now, you can’t just start using other class skill lines. You have to re-level them, even if you’ve maxed them out on other characters. And they level at half the normal speed, which I already thought was tedious. So I got to work, running dolmens in Alik’r and running around Spellscar in Craglorn. I used my high-level training gear for a 66% XP increase, my Mora’s Whispers mythic for another 25%, and scrolls for an extra 50%, 100%, and even one 150% buff.

I spent the next six hours in the game doing nothing but grinding. I finished three skill lines that were almost maxed on a couple other characters, just to unlock them for subclassing, and I got three skill lines fully leveled and morphed. I was working on one more, and had just gotten the last skill to level IV, ready to morph all the skills and level those alternate styles, when it finally hit me.

This wasn’t fun to me. This is the whole game; this combat. This endless click-click, click-click, click-click to the timing of an invisible one-second world clock. The net effect of it is like DDR or Crypt of the Necrodancer or something. And I wasn’t enjoying it. Still. I’ve always thought that the combat was the worst part of the game, and nothing about this has changed.

On top of this, the stress of needing to get all of these skill lines leveled and morphed, and then to follow the emerging meta build how-to videos, and then to take my new builds into old content to see how they were doing and how well I could manage it, and then to start taking it into new content and running down all the new collectibles and achievements… It brought back all the community-gatekept anxiety that was the reason I stopped playing six months ago.

So I quit.

I removed myself from all my guilds. I removed all my non-IRL friends. I left all the Discord servers. I stopped the subscription I had just signed back up for. I uninstalled the game. I quit following all the ESO streamers on YouTube and Twitch. I scrubbed all the videos about it in my watch history so that the algorithm would stop recommending them.

And I gotta say, for the record, that it’s been unexpectedly liberating. It’s been a huge load off my mind. (And I could use the extra bandwidth, let me tell you!)

Posted in Gaming | Tagged | 1 Comment

The UK Doesn’t Have a Productivity Puzzle

Posted on June 10, 2025 by David K.

Then there is red tape. For measure, the UK’s tax code comes in at 22,000 pages, more than any other country in the world. The Federation of Small Businesses estimates that a small company spends 44 hours per year on average on tax administration, at a total annual cost of around £25bn across all small enterprises.

The code itself contains numerous inefficiencies that distort work, growth and investment incentives, including cliff-edges in income tax and business valued-added tax thresholds, and transaction taxes on property and stocks. UK tax expert Dan Neidle outlines these here.

Building also requires hefty paperwork, which slows projects. As Britain Remade found, reopening a 3.3-mile train line to Portishead from Bristol took 79,187 pages of planning documents. Printed out, that’s 14.6 miles of paperwork — 4.5 times the length of the actual railway. The process has taken 16 years so far. (Construction should start soon.)

Source: The UK doesn’t have a productivity puzzle

This is the same mechanism that infects Fortune 500 bluechip manufacturing companies’ IT organizations. There are lots of subgroups dedicated to their own particular subfunction, and this sounds like a great idea on paper. Let’s have a group dedicated to, say, networking. Then the people who know networking will make their expertise available to every project, and those projects won’t need to staff up with people who understand networking. Brilliant!

Except there’s not a single IT job that can exist without at least a basic understanding of how networking works.

And firewall is separate from that.

And DNS is separate from that.

And on and on.

Every subgroup has to remind everyone else that they exist, and justify their existence by imposing extra work on every step of every project. No one will EVER say, “No, my group doesn’t need to be involved with that. That’s a small enough concern and/or low enough risk that you can handle it internally.” So every single project requires years and years of planning and execution, no matter how large or small. So a simple CRUD web site takes 3 years to work through the system.

Posted in Programming | Tagged | Leave a comment

ALS and God

Posted on June 10, 2025 by David K.

My dad lost his right leg in a motorcycle accident when he was 21. He never let it slow him down. He hunted and fished with the best of them. He once climbed a 12′ chain link fence with a Y of barbed wire at the top to sneak into a farm pond that he was convinced had some good fish in it. When he would encounter stories like this on TV, he would say, “Another poor cripple story.” There’s some inspiring wisdom in that take, about how to deal with your own situation, if you really think about it. In my own health “journey,” I have come to admire his resolve and stoicism.

Posted in Personal | Tagged , | Leave a comment

AI is the New Oil

Posted on June 10, 2025 by David K.

AI is the new oil in Fortune 500 companies. Everyone is jockeying for budget to hire consultants and supervise bloated projects using commercial AI products for non-critical-path purposes, rather than developing in-house expertise at creating models with the wealth of open source tools now available and focusing on making specific models for our specific problems.

In my blue chip Fortune 250, I had heard rumors that there was a new, “agile,” internal IT group devoted to eschewing the past 30 years of stagnation, and introducing new tools and methodologies into the business. I had heard they even used Ruby on Rails for something! But I never managed to talk to anyone in the group. They had even been working on something related to AI. Now it no longer matters, as that entire group has been let go, and a whole new group has been started with new staffing.

So we continue to approach IT like it was still the 90’s, troweling layer upon layer of outsourcing and waterfall and legacy systems and processes on top of every new technology that upper management can’t avoid, due to needing to be able to say that we’re using it, in order to make public statements in the interests of the investment banks, to appear that we’re on top of the Current Thing (TM). Many people in engineering are recognizing the opportunity in front of us, and all we can do is watch as it gets treated by the organization as though it were the same as ERP or PLM, which is to say that they’re subjecting this new technology to the same years-long waterfall-and-outsourced development processes of the last 30 years.

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Cloud Resource Whack-A-Mole

Posted on June 10, 2025 by David K.

As a perfect example of process-oriented approach to IT, every once in awhile, someone deep in the bowels of the machine presses a button in Azure, and a script gets fired off to rifle through every resource in the cloud, and fix what it thinks are problems. On the one hand, I think that’s a great idea to identify things that may have been left around and forgotten about. On the other hand, I think having it do anything automatically is a terrible idea. It should only flag things, for review.

I’ve gotten a couple of emails from an internal portal, instructing me to “scale” two of my virtual machines to different sizes. The first suggestion is to “scale” to a slightly more-expensive size, the second to a teeny-tiny less expensive one. The first recommendation has slightly-faster I/O, and I can’t tell any difference in the second one’s specs. So… why? Why change either one? It’s a net cost increase. Why run this, and issue tickets to do this work, without having any sort of review about the proposed action relative to the purpose and functioning of those resources, and their costs?

Between drafting this and posting it, those tickets got deleted. They were replaced by other tickets that told me to scale my VM’s to competing SKU’s. And then those tickets got deleted.

It’s almost funny. The machines that are popping up — and then disappearing — from this automated insanity are being unused at the moment. So, yes! They should be scaled. Except that they’re being unused because the thing they did got completely broken by changes in another group. Changes which are taking many months to get sorted. Changes that are spawning other months-long processes with other groups to get sorted.

It occurs to me that I should just spin them down while I wait, but they’re a rounding error on my own cloud tab, let alone the overall spend on Azure at the corporate level. None of this effort about these machines makes any sense. They cost less per month than me taking a dump on the company dime. If we’re going to automate all the things, and issue tickets to perform cost-savings measures without review, then at least put an “if” statement in the script such that it only operates on things that cost more than a box of pencils at the office.

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment