Some thoughts won't fit within a tweet, but none of them separately is enough to be turned into a decent blog post. Why not gather them up and published together then? Here you go.

I'm not a virologist, so I can't tell whether COVID precautions were lacking, adequate or exaggerated. What I know is that the global economy can't continue like that & we're facing the inevitable lifting of isolation-related restrictions. But some things have changed - far more developers have tried remote work, the companies who didn't even consider that model before have now jumped trains and ... didn't collapse (objectively speaking).

The question is - what now? Many devs see no point in getting back into the offices at all. But not everyone has skills, attitude & drive enough to stay fully remote (& effective). The rest simply lacks awareness or doesn't give many fucks when it comes to personal convenience. To make things more tricky, very few companies were actually able to assess/measure the real impact of "the remote leap of faith" forced by Coronavirus. I sense some very interesting conversations just about to pop up within the industry :)

A few months ago I posted some hate speech regarding the software developers w/o proper engineering foundations :) (https://no-kill-switch.ghost.io/how-deeply-broken-can-software-get/). Now I'd like to move one step further ... I regularly witness a phenomenon I call "programming equivalent of functional illiteracy" ...

What do I mean by that? I've realized (thanks to conversations, sharing experiences, discussing everyday problems, etc.) that in the latest generation of software developers there are plenty of people with 5+ years of professional experience who ...

  • have NEVER documented any design
  • have NEVER prepared & conducted proper performance tests
  • have NEVER broken down a topic into a proper execution plan
  • don't KNOW how the build/packaging/release system of their favorite language/platform works
  • have NEVER designed test data suite with a proper functionality coverage

I don't want to sound like a grumpy old-timer, but ... in ol' good times (before 2010) such people wouldn't be qualified as anything more than a junior/trainee ...

Have you noticed how GDPR has elevated to the next level recently? Not really? Try heading e.g. to The Economist site (https://www.economist.com/) and you get immediately "attacked" with a new message footer where you can "manage your cookies" (I think you're forced there during 1st visit / after you clear your cookies). If you follow that link, you'll be presented with a long, scrollable page where you can either accept or reject being tracked by particular 3rd party cookies ("the partners"). This is a direct effect of so-called TCF 2.0 (https://iabeurope.eu/tcf-2-0/) - IAB's idea to standardize Internet advertising businesses' approach to GDPR's definition of privacy.

I can't help mentioning few observations I have ...

  • first of all, some publishers are smart-assing: one can either accept all cookies immediately (enabled by default ...) or ... opt out of them separately one-by-one  (which takes time ...)
  • of course you can close the pop-up if you're in a hurry, but many publishers treat "close" as (non-explicit) "close & accept all cookies"
  • thanks to these annoying pop-ups, even people who are less technically aware can now see how insane the ad-tech has got these days - every popular site includes dozens of external scripts and pokes their endpoints tracking your every activity - YES, the ratio between actual content traffic and ad junk that accompanies it is hard to grasp ...

I'm not an expert in ad-tech industry (neither aspiring to become one), but this is seriously screaming for a completely new opening. A (re-)definition of digital identity, how we compensate the content creators or how we share our data. Honestly - I don't believe it's possible to get out of this Gordian Knot w/o reaching down into the protocols / opening completely new standards.

The smartest thing I've read on-line this month:

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