Comment by whilenot-dev

6 months ago

I think that phrase was coined in an era when the tech sector moved so fast that the prevailing law couldn't keep up. It caught up somewhat, but obviously there's still much leeway for improvement. Break all the wrong habits, rigid conventions and old traditions you want, just play along with the governing laws.

9 comments

whilenot-dev

Nextgrid 6 months ago

> the tech sector moved so fast that the prevailing law couldn't keep up

That's an extremely charitable interpretation.

A more realistic interpretation is that the law was up to date, just that enforcement couldn't keep up because 1) nobody expected such a brazen level of breaking the law and 2) justice doesn't really apply when you have enough capital.

whilenot-dev 6 months ago
> A more realistic interpretation is that the law was up to date
While I wouldn't disagree with your sentiment, just keep in mind that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) got implemented 2018.
- Jon_Lowtek 6 months ago
  
  Little known fact: GDPR replaced the Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC) from 1995 which itself replaced the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data, written in 1981. Now if you compare these three, there is enough details to get an undergrads degree in law, but on the high level the tenor did not change much. Those who were struggling in 2018 to meet GDPR criteria before the grace period of two years ended were most likely not struggling with details, but in blatant violation of almost 40 year old rules. Well one of the details probably mattered: the fines went up considerably.
  
  1 reply →
- Nextgrid 6 months ago
  
  I was thinking more about regulations around taxis, short-term rentals, etc for example.
  As an aside, GDPR enforcement is so lacking (even today) it doesn't register on anyone's radar beyond those that fear-monger about it or sell snake oil to pseudo-comply with it. But even then, keep in mind most of what the GDPR has was already part of many countries' own legislation, and things like spyware were illegal even in the US (but again laws don't apply if you are a company and have enough capital).
  
  1 reply →

avisser 6 months ago

IMO that phrase came about when old tech companies (the IBMs of the world) had

  * waterfall
  * design up-front
  * source control systems that
    * defaulted all files to read-only
    * required you to "check-out" files, potentially locking other devs out from editing them [1]
  * probably didn't have unit tests so "deploying to prod" meant "doing a full QA pass, done by human beings"
  * there was no CI/CD (We had "Build Engineers")

In this context, pushing a change to SVN/git/hg, having tests run automatically, then having CI/CD push new code to production, all as a side-effect of one engineer push a button? That was moving fast, and occasionally, breaking the whole website. But we got better tests, better CI/CD, metrics, green/blue, ... We learned it was unequivocally better than the old way.

[1] Reserved Checkouts: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/clearcase/11.0.0?topic=ucm-check...

whoisthemachine 6 months ago

Its original intended meaning was sometimes breaking your social website, not laws.

diggan 6 months ago

As far as I understood the original meaning, it was about "not being too careful", and err on the side of breaking things, in the name of moving forward faster.
It ended up meaning something else, but back then this is how I understood it.