laughingpine

This is the direction my current employer is headed. I was sent on a week long course to evaluate the viability of PowerApps. While there is certainly some cool stuff in there, it just doesn't feel like we should be moving all our development there wholesale. There is certainly a time and place, or at least that is how it seems to me.

Business / money making / crucial systems? No. Some random HR survey application? Maybe. Sadly Microsoft seems to have convinced a number of folks in our organization that this tool set is appropriate for all our development.

The changes they made (I guess a couple years now) to their pricing model really bit us in the ass. We had a 130 user licence on the old 5$ tier, and had to aggressively cut user counts to afford the new licence.

There really needs to be something like a "view only" or a role based cost per user. Most of our clients are just there for commenting, and only a handful of developers actually use the product to its full extent.

I know there was an issue open for discussion on their payment models, so I hope it is something they are continuing to look at. At 4x the cost of competitors that offer similar features, it is a very hard sell.

My current employer is in the process of making this mistake, and it feels awful. We've already started losing some good folks.

Not that this will help at all, but from my experience it really seems like the product has degraded in quality over the last few years.

Originally we only had a few folks using Teams, and the client was pretty snappy and just seemed to work. Then over time more features were added, and things started breaking.

For example:

On my desktop client, images will not load when clicked unless you back out of a conversation then come back in and click the image. This is not something I experience on the web client. Also on the desktop client, I cannot for the life of me do formatting any more. Bullet or numbered lists are out!

The web client seems to work better for me, but will start to chug near the end of the day, which requires a quick reload of the app.

While this is just one part of the protest, but what is happening in Coutts is illegal. Alberta passed an act recently (2020) restricting where you can protest - https://www.alberta.ca/protecting-critical-infrastructure.as...

The Coutts border crossing and highway is currently blocked. This is in contravention of the Critical Infrastructure Act as highways are included.

I picked up tendies dot ca just for the silly email address. A few weeks later I got a purchase request for 420 USD - I said no.

This is certainly going to vary from person to person, and will not be a _one size fits all_ kind of thing.

I am the exact opposite, and the year of remote working has probably been the best and most healthy year of my work life.

Been using it since 2016, and I would say the advantages are mostly related to their DevOps features - there are integrations with k8s, SentryIO, and Prometheus to help you with operations.

Their CI/CD pipelines also seem a bit more refined than GitHub actions - maybe it is just a maturity thing though? That could also just be my inexperience with GitHub Actions.

I think there are also some project management differences in how the items are setup. GitLab, at the premium tier, has epics where I believe GitHub doesn't any distinction.

That being said I believe you kind of trade features with GitHub depending on how much you pay for each platform. Both are pretty good products as far as I am concerned.

Currently a starter tier user with more than 25 users, and I don't know how I feel.

We had been mulling an upgrade to premium, but the price jump is a tough sell for us. This kind of leaves us in an predicament. Will have to see what GitLab can offer us as per their blog post.

I am lucky in that fact that I am a position where my opinions are listened to and respected. I have spent the last few years trying to improve a number of our processes. If I wasn't in this position, then chances are I would have moved on to greener pastures almost immediately.

Source control discipline is probably the single most valuable thing I have worked to improve. We still have a long ways to go, but we went from a place where on a team of roughly twenty developers with many active projects would constantly have to ask "Who has the latest code?" to a place that practices disciplined code management.

When I first started, my jaw almost hit the floor. I couldn't believe that no one actually knew how the source control worked (at the time TFVC). It is hard for me to explain just how bad things were. There were instances of features completely disappearing from production because some one never checked in the code.

Check-ins were at best months a part and production versions of code were scattered on different people's PCs.

After a long, long time we have most developers on board with good practices. There are still some who refuse to follow industry best practices, but our team, and the products we create have a much higher quality.

Free private repos is exactly why I was using BitBucket. I will have to think it moving will justify the effort.

yeah - I am also curious about this considering there are projects like ChakraCore and node-ChakraCore out there.

Would seem like a shame to lose the work done on that project.

> With a notch

I believe it was one of (if not) the first with a notch.

> When there's a bug in their code, point it out, but don't tell them how to fix it.

This is how people develop their own problem solving skills. When I was a junior developer, that was one of the skills my team leads / senior developers really focused on. Super important to be able to think / problem solve for yourself.

Incomplete or missing requirements. When it isn't clear what you are trying to deliver, you introduce a whole host of problems to the project.

> You are not your code, saying the code sucks doesn't mean I think you suck.

Some people take _any_ criticism of their code personally regardless of how constructive you are being.

I have had a person completely blow up at me for simply asking (literally a question - a valid question) "why did you choose to use a BindingList instead of a List?"

Maybe it was how I phrased it? People are tough to get sometimes.

Not relevant to this post, but I clicked your username out of curiosity (and because I am apparently a super creep). Turns out I worked with you years ago (I was on the j9jit team). Small world.

Yeah -- that should be the one they're talking about.