{"id":30255,"date":"2020-09-25T16:43:50","date_gmt":"2020-09-25T20:43:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=30255"},"modified":"2020-09-28T15:11:02","modified_gmt":"2020-09-28T19:11:02","slug":"the-need-for-stable-foundations-in-software-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/09\/25\/the-need-for-stable-foundations-in-software-development\/","title":{"rendered":"The Need for Stable Foundations in Software Development"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert<\/a>:<\/p>\n

My employer was kind enough to provide me with a top of the line MacBook Pro. It’s a beautiful machine with 6 CPU cores, 32GB of RAM and a 4K display, the most powerful laptop I’ve ever owned and a valuable tool in working from home. However, unfortunately, the slick machine suffers from a number of software problems.<\/p>

For one, you can charge it using any of the 4 USB-C ports, but you really should only ever charge it from the right<\/a> side. Another issue I frequently run into is that I have an external monitor, and despite configuring this as my primary display, the dock will randomly jump back to the MacBook’s monitor, until I go into the settings and move the dock to the right, and to the bottom again, at which point it goes back to the external monitor, until the next time it decides to randomly jump ship. A third issue is that whenever I reboot, it stays stuck early in the boot process, displaying the white Apple logo, and does nothing. It doesn’t complete the boot process until I unplug my USB-C devices. There are more problems, I could go on.<\/p>\n

Apple isn’t the only one with these kinds of quality assurance problems. […] Why is it that we live in a world riddled with bugs?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Nikita Prokopov<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Jay Sitter in his article People expect technology to suck<\/a> writes about people who keep using tech despite heavy annoyances like very dim screen or constant popups and not doing anything about it.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

And I would agree: if it was just a single case, of course, they should’ve done something about it! The point is, this happens all the time, every day, multiple times a day, and one person can dedicate only so much time to dealing with it. The stream of minor annoyances is so large people just got tired of dealing with it! And no, there’re no better alternatives.<\/p>\n

To prove my point, I decided to record every broken interaction I had during one day.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n