• 6 Posts
  • 520 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle


  • In my experience, Excel gets a lot of developer hate primarily for two reasons.

    1.) They’ve seen it abused way too often. Things like using a workbook as a database or placing a copy to a shared one on everybody’s desktop and treating it like it’s a distinct application. In total fairness, Excel was not designed for either of those scenarios.

    2.) They don’t know how to use it effectively.

    To be clear, I’m no Microsoft fan and there are legitimate things to hate about Excel. But, it can be a very valuable tool in your toolbox if used properly.

    Excel’s bread and butter is data analysis and for that it is a phenomenal tool. Despite many claims to the contrary that I’ve heard over the years, none of the other spreadsheet programs currently available can fully match it’s capabilities.

    I can take data sets from a variety of different sources and parse, combine, refine, and distill them down to a really nice looking report that someone upstairs can read in a small fraction of the time it would take me to whip up an application to accomplish the same thing. If they want to adjust the the fields on the report, it’s super easy to make some quick changes to a pivot table.

    There is a point where Excel is no longer the best tool for the job. In my opinion, the most obvious indicator that this point has been reached is when there’s a need for multiple people to manipulate the contents of a workbook. When that starts happening, it’s time to look for a more scalable solution. If data in an Excel workbook is being used as the “source of truth”, as in raw data is being stored in it rather than it pulling the raw data from elsewhere, that’s a recipe for disaster.

    That said, I also realize that not every organization has the same resources. I’ve worked with plenty of small non-profits that don’t have the money to hire devs to create nice fancy software suites for them and primarily work off of spreadsheets. It’s not ideal but it’s understandable. If they’re doing good work, I’m not going to judge them too harshly for using Excel as a database. In those situations, I usually suggest having a comprehensive disaster recovery plan and solid, frequent data backups.

    One of my old bosses, who was an electrical engineer, liked to say, “The choices are often not between right and wrong but somewhere between worst and best”. Sometimes Excel is a good tool for the job. Sometimes it isn’t. Knowing when a particular tool is the right one is learned by experience.



  • What’s funny is their attempts to rebrand Office have just fallen completely flat. Kind of reminds me of when Willis Group bought the naming rights to Sears Tower and all the Chicagoan’s were just collectively like, “Yeah, No. We’re still going to call it ‘Sears Tower’.” Hell, nobody that I know of calls it “Willis Tower.” Nobody calls Microsoft Office “Office 365”. Nobody is going to call it “Microsoft 365 Copilot.” This is just a huge waste of effort by a tech firm that has long since run out of ways to be innovative.





  • Yeah… Adonis… Buddy… You should actually read those Bible stories you’re citing.

    Moses: Banned from entering the “promised land” as punishment for demonstrating a lack of faith in God.

    David: Has an affair with Bathsheba. She gets pregnant. He has her husband assassinated in an attempt to cover it up. God sends the prophet Nathan to tell David that life from then on will be a Game of Thrones level clusterfuck and boy was it ever.

    Paul: Religious nut. God appears to him in a very “shit your pants” kind of scene to ask Paul, “Why are you persecuting me?” After getting a change of underwear, he gets told to go spread the news of Jesus to a [probably] very skeptical audience, considering his reputation for torturing and murdering Christians. Gets shipwrecked, imprisoned, and eventually [presumably] executed by the Roman Empire.

    You know what those three guys have in common? They all fucked up. Some worse than others. And they all faced harsh consequences for their moral failings. So, if you’re looking for corelaries between Trump and those guys, maybe the most glaring one is that we haven’t even gotten to the good part yet. The part where he is held accountable for his misdeeds.











  • It definitely makes it more difficult to switch endpoints manually. I have multiple VPN connections with different exit nodes configured for failover in case one (or more) of them is unreachable. I don’t run into geoblocking issues very often but I also don’t route all my WAN traffic over VPN. Just some of it.

    What you can automate depends on your routers capabilities. Mine is a Mikrotik which does have fairly extensive support for custom scripts. However, detecting Geoblocking is probably going to involve parsing HTTP responses which is beyond the capabilities of almost all consumer grade routers. You would have to effectively do a MITM attack (aka deep packet inspection) in order to accomplish that on something other than the client device.

    TLDR: I manually change routes to a different VPN if needed but I very rarely run into Geoblocking issues.


  • /*
    By all accounts, the logic in this method shouldn't work. And yet it does. We do not know why. It makes no sense whatsoever. It took three weeks and numerous offerings to the programming gods, including using one of the junior devs as a human sacrifice, to unlock this knowledge. DO NOT LET HIS VIOLENT AND UNTIMELY DEATH BE IN VAIN! Touch this at your own peril.
    --jubilationtcornpone 12/17/25
    */
    public async Task<IResult> CalculateResultAsync()
    {
         // Some ass backwards yet miraculously functional logic.
    }