You can tell nearly everyone who works on Linux software is an engineeritis infectee as most of the tools that are considered “best” are the most difficult to use, most difficult to set up, work in the most opaque ways, and are generally inimical to human understanding.

I can learn them. And I have learned some of them and will eventually learn them all. But they are all terribly designed, mistaking complexity for elegance, and difficulty of use for productivity.

Some examples are SELinux, iptables, systemd, and git.

All pieces of shit. Powerful pieces of shit, but pieces of shit nonetheless, that could have only been designed by “genius morons.”

As some commenter noted, “Usability is always an important design element. If multiple users are making the same mistake, then it is the software that is the problem, not the users. “

I’m tired of seeing things about the crazy demands that bands and artists make while touring.

Touring is hard. Being on the road ever day? Sleeping very little? Having to get up in front of screaming and occasionally hostile crowds no matter how you feel?

Yeah, that sounds hellish to me. I’d ask for some damn fried chicken in my dressing room, too.

Anyway, as mentioned in the comments, a lot of the time demands in artist’s rider sheets are to determine if the correct attention is being paid to other things – for instance, if the request for chocolate-covered burritos on silver platters embossed with the face of Nicolas Cage is ignored, chances are the sound or lighting will be screwed up too.

I saw the contention on a message board the other day that a good systems administrator should “be able to write quality software.”

This is of a piece with the idea I’ve seen all over lately that everyone in any field should be a programmer, should learn how to program.

While I agree that a better case can be made for a systems admin to learn some programming (as I know some myself), the idea that someone like me (or rather, more what I used to do) should be able to write quality software is rather absurd.

I can bash out a script (in Bash and several other environments) pretty well. I could probably cobble something together in Visual Studio in a few days if I really had to.

But it would not be “quality” by any measure.

Programming is its own discipline that takes time and study to master. Not even the best sys admins with mega IQs I’ve ever met (unless they were former programmers) could write quality software. And even the ones who had been programmers in the past – even excellent former programmers — would probably not have claimed to be able to write quality software any longer, as it takes like most things in life constant practice.

From what I’ve seen, it takes about 5-7 years to become a really decent programmer. Most programmers I’ve talked to agree with that.

So to do that – to be able to write quality software — I’d have to put my real career on hold, missing most advances in my actual field, to do something I’m not really interested in for no obvious benefit.

Agreed, some understanding of programming and (even more so) of computer science is necessary in my field. I’ve often had to (involuntarily) debug terrible code or examine code in 10+ languages to figure out how something works.

It happens.

But the idea that everyone should be a programmer is most often pushed by (surprise!) programmers.

It’s easy for them. Shouldn’t it be easy for everyone else? I mean, just code, right?

It’s a cockamamie, terrible idea. Even as system administration is moving to more automation and more scripting, the idea that I should be turning out “quality software” rather than doing my job is fucking ridiculous.

Only a programmer or others also prone to engineeritis could conceive of something so asinine.

I have written some pretty long and complicated scripts and will do so again. But I don’t really think of that as software, and that is not the sense in which this idiot was using those terms.

Even as being a system admin changes in the “cloud” era, it’ll have very little to do with coding and much more to do (as it always has) with understanding the interactions of multiple complex systems (duh) and configuring them in the best way possible to work for whatever business or other organization is making use of those systems.

While this might involve writing some “software” – that is to say, scripts – along the way, the primary goal of a sys admin should not be programming or writing “quality software,” but rather using whatever tools are best suited to achieving the above goals.

Doing anything else is a waste of time, and quite likely to get you fired for wasting said time.

Facebook really is taking over.

I ran a blog nearly a decade and a half ago. It was significantly worse than this one as the writing wasn’t nearly as good.

Though its quality was worse and its inappropriate rant content much higher, it had thousands of readers a day.

Really, I don’t care much about my readership numbers. If three or four people read my blog a day, that’s great with me. But it is interesting that pre-Facebook how some F-list blogger could pull in thousands of readers a day easily with no promotion and now a better blogger (me, but later) can hardly make it beyond a few dozen a day.

I’m not the only blog with this problem. Better bloggers experience the same thing.

Admittedly, just like I did back in the old days I still toss off most posts in five minutes or less.

There were fewer blogs then but also fewer readers. It appears then that most people have just disappeared into the limitless maw that is Facebook, never to return.

As I’ve written before, we had the internet but were too stupid to keep it.

This happens with many things that humanity touches.