Prince died last week and the internet did the thing it does best now: collective, immediate, worldwide grief with a soundtrack. The purple deluge taught a licensing lesson too. His catalog was famously off the streaming services (he fought the platforms’ economics loudly and early, and honestly, he saw the creator-economy fight coming a decade out), so a generation went hunting for the music and found scraps. Own your masters. In every industry. That phrase means something different here and also exactly the same thing.
Quieter fortnight otherwise, so a work dispatch: I’ve inherited our CI/CD pipeline as a “temporary” owner (there is nothing so permanent). Current state: 40-minute builds, flaky tests quarantined by superstition, deploys blessed by one shell script named deploy_final_v3_REAL.sh. I have opinions and a roadmap now. Speed of iteration is developer happiness; nobody quits over salary who wasn’t first ground down by a red build they didn’t cause.
EPL transfer window prep observation: clubs now employ massive analytics departments to recruit players, and the scout discourse (“trust the eye test” vs “trust the model”) is exactly our industry’s “senior intuition” vs “metrics” fight with better suits.
TIL: test flakiness taxonomy, timing, ordering, external deps, shared state. Every flaky test is one of four crimes. Naming the crime is half the conviction.