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GeePaw Hill
@GeePawHill
, 7 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
I notice how many folks seem to believe geeks are in charge of what software gets written in the world. When software is revealed to be immoral, I notice how reluctant they are to blame folks who are senior executives, boardmembers, or majority shareholders.
The majority of working software developers who are adding code to projects are <30yo. An actual current programmer is uncommon on the third floor and almost unheard of above that level. I know of no executive for any company larger than 20 employees who is a working geek.
The *geeks* didn't set the pricing option for the 737-Max. They didn't decide to ship the emissions test detection on VWs. They don't sit at home at night coming up with new ways to charge you more in order to ship you more advertising. They don't choose what software gets made.
The *geeks* didn't decide to provide backend access to your cloud data or communications for internal police. They didn't decide to allow the Great Internet Wall to be a wall of censorship. They didn't even decide to invent "promoted" tweets and facebook posts.
People make mistakes of all kinds, including the moral kind. Geeks are people, and so are CEO's. I am not trying to dodge culpability. What I am trying to do is distribute it properly.
I'm just hoping the next time you discover some great moral failure embedded in a piece of software, your first proposal isn't an ethics lecture for a bunch of 25-year-old javascript programmers on the ground floor of an otherwise innocent organization.
I hope you extend your culpability rules to cover their bosses, their bosses' bosses, their CEO, their board, their shareholders, and yourself.

There's plenty of guilt to go around, you don't have to let the geeks have it all.
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GeePaw Hill
@GeePawHill
TDD Pro-Tip: Before I write the first test in a new context, I usually design until I get to a state of "Nervous Optmism".
A couple of days ago, I was party to some drinking geekery with my colleagues at a hookah bar restaurant dance club. It was the end of a long day, and we were unwinding and being pretty silly.
My three partners in crime mobbed on "Evil Hangman", a fun little game. And I sat off to the sidelines and took potshots and enjoyed my scotch, all on my new twitch channel. It was just really just some decompression, but it did trigger something for me.
Read 26 tweets
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GeePaw Hill
@GeePawHill
Sitting here, listenin' to my playlist, thinking about temporality and how it relates to the kind of geekery I want to write and talk and teach and geek about.
Over the last 10 years or so, the topics deriving from systems theory, from complexity theory, and so on, have wormed their way slowly into our mental frame. Just a little, just a little, but that's how change works.
And as I read the popular accounts, as well as the folk-theory being built from this minor intrusion, watching ideas and tropes and careers get made, I'm still not satisfied that "we" are sensing what "I" am sensing.
Read 25 tweets
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GeePaw Hill
@GeePawHill
TDD Pro-Tip: I stay very aware of my testing context's data, and specifically of what data is opaque and what data is transparent.
Those terms, transparent and opaque, need a little explanation. Sometimes the code I'm testing doesn't vary based on the entirety of its input.
A trivial example, the function that validates the date of an order DOES NOT CARE what any other field in that order is or does. It only cares about the date field. I would say Date is transparent to that function and the other fields and subfields are opaque.
Read 17 tweets

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The only way to make a billion dollars is by denying workers a fair share of the wealth their labor generates, considering it an available excess of revenue that you take for yourself.
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Also, while we're talking about ourselves, which I do so well, without my knowledge of my languages, I would've lost out on some of the coolest experiences I've ever had. I have written radio shows, worked for magazines, been on TV, travelled extensively and met amazing people.
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