Posts

Oct 27

 Work was misery last week. Pushing hard to get something done, which I absolutely should not be doing, and yet another case of our problematic dev having a bit of a pout. I'm not going to get into it really. It's kind of shit. Our problem dev is still a problem. I did talk to Andy about it. He weighed in with his own problems with him. And the upshot is that yes, he's a problem, if we rectify it, he's probably going to leave. And we'd lose someone who's doing a good job in other places. And a massive pain in the arse in others. Andy admitted he was at fault for it. But. Contributing circumstances. Andy is talking to him this week. Not sure how that will go. Andy will not and cannot check people. He placates. We shall see. This week at therapy there were several things to pick over. I gave the shrink a choice. They immediately gave it back to me. Of course. I didn't really mean to fix on it this week, but we picked up a conversation with my sister and my fam...

Oct 20

 Bad night. Twitches were on high. Legs were jumpy, the restless leg syndrome kicking in. But the other spasms and twitches were doing a number too. This is part of my smorgasbord of bullshit. I now twitch. Sometimes in my sleep - pulling me out of it. Last night I managed to have some kind of throat twitch - which is new. Woke me up entirely. I tried to work out exactly what I had done. But. Sometimes it's impossible to replicate the twitch. A sure sign if you needed one that this wasn't a conscious control thing. Rats gnawing on the wires perhaps. Therapy day today. I went to it possibly the lowest I have been. But not tearful. Just. Bottomed out. Still swirling around the reality of suicide. After 40 minutes with the shrink, the shrink paused and a silence grew. So. The shrink said and paused again. How worried should I be about you ? Not worried at all I said and smiled. The shrink just looked at me. I'll be fine I said. I am ok. No smile this time. A grimace. You don...

Oct 19

 I have evened out a little today. Carefully taking my meds. Careful all round. Such care doesn't amount to shit if the wind decides to blow. But for today. It is a little easier. Just enough. Albeit I have slept long. Very long. But it has given me space to breathe. I wonder if the stress and then Andys follow up bullshit this week have had a hand in unbalancing me more. It wasn't only Andy. The PM was trying to entice me to do more work on my day off. It doesn't matter what you do. How helpful you are. They will always want more. Squeeze. Today I have made a soffrito. My first ever proper soffrito. Despite having cooked a wide range of italian dishes for a few decades at this point, weirdly, I have never made a proper soffrito. Probably because I almost never pay any heed to recipes or the correct way of doing things. That I had enough energy and oomph to cook a little is remarkable. I tried out my new mini food processor. I am loathe to buy new things. Even when I think ...

Conversations with an AI - Complexity Management

Prior to this once again kicking the tyres of another bit of fragile architecting/process that has apps failing. This was the second example of a flakey - mainstream - suite of software that was unreliable. This time. Google. And Microsoft. Who you'd think would know better. Ho. Ho. This is also one of my sweet spots that I have honed to a fine edge to the extent I even have a simple term for it. Complexity management. Which I think should underpin almost  all  IT stuffs. As the first principle. The only exceptions are in very niche areas where you have to have complexity - assembly code in embedded chips or those with very limited capabilities ( old school ) or require phenomenal efficiency ( rare ! ). Ignore references to LLIL. This is a hypothetical interface language ( the IL in LLIL ! ) we have noodled over a little. For AIs. It doesn't exist except within the confines of our noodling. Uh huh.  at this point in my career I have spent more than 4 decades in IT coding ...

Oct 18

 Bad. I can feel myself wrestling with suicide in a slap down fight in the mud. My ill health swirls, my sadness keeps rising up and overwhelming me, and it makes the suicide impossible to ignore. Even in moments of clarity. Oh. This isn't good. You really should just tap out. There was a slippery moment yesterday. When it all went still and suddenly there was suicide. Right there. So easy. It was a bare metal moment. Nothing else there. Right on the edge of that abyss. Are you going to alive in the next 5 minutes or not. I can't really describe it. It felt like an ending that had already been picked for me. It was. Weird. I skittered away from it after a few minutes of pause. It was very sketchy. I have bounced in and out close to that over the last 24 hours. Sometimes it fades away into a background hum. Other times its right there. Right in front of me. Inevitable. Everything. Screaming at me to do it. Because. Everything else. Sucks so hard. You don't feel well. You...

Oct 17

 Riding along the bottom. Everyday I imagine an end to it all. I have been here before. And I know it's not good. "Not good". I'm not even sure what I mean by that. It's not good in some traditional happy clappy life is a peach point of view. From a much darker more real point of view, it just is. It's a consequence. To a given reality. If things are very dark it starts to make perfect sense why anyone would want to end that. And some notion of it not being good or any such rationalising starts to border on desperation of zealous ideology, that life, must surely, always be right. The hypocrisy of that view point is self evident. We can discuss things like euthanasia. We  easily  talk about such things when it isn't a human. The double standard bullshit is peak human condition. We are such a fucky immature lifeform. Clearly. I am not in the most charitable of moods. Not that any of that is wrong. Just. Brutally on point I think. A very sober lens through wh...

Conversations with an AI - A quick grumble about MVC and over abstraction

 eh meh, I am not a huge fan of the MVC pattern, this pattern where business logic is in a service, data access is in the DAL leaves me with the feeling that the controller ends up being so much boilerplate just connecting one interface with another without adding much value in an of itself That’s a sharp and valid critique—and one that many seasoned developers share. The classic MVC + service + DAL stack can feel like architectural ceremony : layers of indirection that sometimes obscure rather than clarify intent. When the controller becomes a glorified pass-through, it begs the question: what value is it really adding? 🧠 Why This Happens Over-separation : When each layer is strictly siloed, the controller often just delegates to a service, which delegates to a repository, which wraps a DbContext… and none of them do much individually. Boilerplate inflation : You end up writing interfaces, DI registrations, DTOs, and mapping logic for even trivial operations. Loss of semantic ...