For a number of years now, the theme for all of my conference talks has been “Demand Quality In Software You Use, Demand Quality in Software You Write, Demand Quality In Yourself!”. My only goal with my sessions for the foreseeable future is all wrapped around this idea for these reasons…
First, as a contractor, the code that I see is for the most part is very bad, including architecture. On a recent project I worked on, when I analyzed their code, I found over 15K code violations! This is unacceptable, especially when management will never give you the time and resources to fix them. Ship it! Unfortunately, this attitude will just come back to bite them in the future and cost A LOT more to fix. They will lose even more money due to customers bailing and going to a competitor (something I describe in detail in one of my books).
Second, software I use is getting more and more frustrating, if it even works at all. This includes Visual Studio, Windows and apps, iPhone OS and apps, websites and more. I think, the older I get, the less patience I have, especially since I’m a software engineer. Most of my complaints to me are common sense and not that hard to implement.
These two tweet sums up my feelings,
- I’m always amazed how little effort companies put into quality software. Just keep putting Band-Aids on bad code/architecture.
- Most companies I've done programming for view security as not required unless something happens.
Years ago, I found out that most companies help you if you tweet what you have found, since tweets are public. Sure, some companies do not reply at all (Apple) and some just want you to submit something on their website. Most of the time, I do not do the later since I’m a Microsoft MVP. If there is a group of people companies should listen to, it's Microsoft MVPs.
Below are all of my tweets from 2016.
Web Sites/ Browsers
- Site that immediately display a popup when I go to their site REALLY irritates me! @Glassdoor @VSLive
- Computers are getting faster and faster… then why do web sites get slower and slower??
- Dear web developers… if I can see it (search box etc.) I should be able to use it. Fix your JavaScript loading!
- Dear Netflix, can you please make sure your site works on Microsoft Edge?
- Microsoft Edge is pretty useless on slow Wi-Fi connections. Fire Fox works fine.
- Whenever I use Microsoft Edge to download a file on my Azure Windows 10 VM, it freezes!
- Why do I have to create a login just to submit a resume for a job?
- Why when I have 100Mbps download at home, web sites are still so damn slow?!?!
- LinkedIn, why can’t users output their profile to a great looking resume?
- Mmmm, here is a Microsoft site that does not support Live accounts or special char’s in passwords! http://aka.ms/itsccc
Office
- Someday, I hope to figure out how to create groups in Outlook on Windows 10.
- When I’m working on a new edition of one of my books, I can often be heard cursing Microsoft Word!
- OneNote, have you tested iPhone app with LTE signal? It tries to sync and then just disappears.
Visual Studio
- It only took around 6 tries and a lot of manual work to install Visual Studio Mac Preview. I hope this gets better!!
- Why can I only target Win10 Anniversary build in Visual Studio 2017?
- I’ve been programming long enough to sill remember the pain of DLL hell. Now I feel I’m in NuGet Package hell!
Azure
- Am I the only one who Azure changes publish profiles without notification? All of a sudden, every x months my profile just stops working.
- Anyone having an issue with Azure web jobs not hitting Task.Delay in WebJobsShutdownWatcher code block after Visual Studio 2015 Update 2?
- Visual Studio now my issue is that this update has totally broken my Azure Webjob.
Apple
- As a software dev, I think it's a sin to force users to pay for a basic feature that used to be free!!
- I must be getting old, can't figure out how to rate songs anymore on my iPhone. You use to be able to tap song title... Not working.
- Apple, why can't I disable embedding GPS coordinates in photos taken with my iPhone??
- Has anyone with an iPhone notice that the battery drains faster after the security update this week?
Miscellaneous
- Warning all Surface 3 owners, WebEx kept crashing my machine and was unusable. I got the blue screen of death!
- Netflix needs to go back to the drawing room on its iPhone app episode downloads! Need to learn how to multi-thread better!!!
- Wait times in the TSA iPhone app are useless when someone can be 20 miles away and post a wait time.
Here are some previous blog posts on this subject.
So, what are you frustrated about? Please let me know via a comment.