Videa Blog

Strange codes, multiple identities and team habits

Roman Veselý  

Just what I had in my mind or have tackled with in the recent past underlayed with the knowledge of the others.

originally published at romanvesely.com on 2017-10-16

T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM

Even though the PHP language is improving and the next version is around a corner, there are some parts it carries from dark ages to the present and will most likely even beyond. Strange things you do not expect to see. Surely, one of them is following message:

...unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM

"What?" a junior programmer might ask. But it happens that also advanced techies could be left speechless. Well, probably you can just check StackOverflow. Or, of course, could start learning Hebrew to know what's going on.

Thankfully, there is Urban Dictionary for all other unknown acronyms and phrases.

Git over schizophrenia

You know you shouldn't use your company's computer to work on your personal projects, do you? For those who don't consider it's a bad idea, aren't aware of possible consequences or those who just work on multiple projects and need to commit under different identities git introduced a new feature allowing conditional includes.

Now you can set different configuration for any project directory. This way you can maintain several identities without pain and fear of being caught at pushing badly signed commits.

Meeting habits

I hate to attend most of the team meetings since my first fulltime job (current one is the second, but nevertheless). The roots of my aversion probably started sooner, but, clearly, once in a room full of people when even air condition can help no more and you are forced to open all doors to get a sip of fresh air it starts to be clear this isn't the best way to share information.

Calculations of wasted time and money during standup meetings only underline my feelings so I quickly became a fan of various ways of asynchronous communication and started to advocate its benefits. On one hand, I was (jokingly) labeled as a non-team player because of my beliefs, while, on the other hand, an idea of not having any meeting during Fridays was accepted instantly. Who knows why?

I will conclude with this perfect tweet I found (of course, not during any important meeting!):