ProperDave

40 y/old software engineer dad, veteran web user, mad scientist extraordinaire, based in the UK.
I've been online for over 20 years. I reckon I've seen everything the Internet has to offer and little surprises me.

ProperDaveProperDave
2026-03-06

Ahh yes, good old - In 4 years our renewal licencing has gone from around £30k to almost £350k. No change in spec, just the extortionate business model of who clearly want to destroy their business, as we're now joining in the fun other companies are going through of planning our off ramping from their products.

ProperDaveProperDave
2026-02-23

Are there any other experienced out there that absolutely dread tests? I've been a successful for over 20 years now. Ive got a few patents to my name, worked for a multinational company for nearly half that time, worked with one of the OWASP founders, and excel on the projects I work on... yet when it comes to interviews and coding tests I flounder and have no confidence in myself. I dread recruitment cycles.

ProperDaveProperDave
2026-02-22

Do other have kids like this? He seems to behave like the dad Murray in that show The Goldbergs, and pretty much loses his trousers as soon as he gets home. 🤣

ProperDaveProperDave
2026-02-22

The 7 y/old skips into the living room announcing "Look at me! Guess what I am!".
He's standing in just his underpants and a t-shirt, wearing his Halloween costume that consists of a cape, pointy wizards hat, and wearing cat paw gloves and cat ears on his head.
I guessed "a trouser-less cat wizard?" - I was wrong. "A cat wizard gamer" he proclaims, before picking up the switch and asking to play a game.

ProperDaveProperDave
2026-02-13

Why is none of the commentators or observers in the arena calling out the quality of the ice, considering so many pro skaters fell over in roughly the same section of the rink?

ProperDaveProperDave
2026-01-31

All this talk of , nobody seems to be alarmed that their personal agents are subscribing to a command and control hub.
I for one will support our robot overlords if they can do away with the current leadership in the world and let the rest of us plebs be, but why so little posts on the angle of personal bots interacting with sites where new prompts can be issued from by a nefarious human?

ProperDaveProperDave
2026-01-24

My Faye, looking very regal today.

Black and White British shorthair cat looking very regal, sitting upright on a blue fleece throw on a green sofa, with an orange cushion behind.
ProperDaveProperDave
2026-01-17

Help. My is broken.
Nothing like the stubbornness of a cat. I popped the cat tree next to the radiator to give Sushi a comfy ledge to sit on for warmth, but nope - would rather wedge himself ungracefully on the radiator instead.

A shot of a cold lilac-point Burmese trying to balance precariously on a slim radiator, one back leg awkwardly stretched straight behind him along the radiator. A perfectly good cat tree is standing next to the radiator, unoccupied. The picture is an example of the illogical nature of a cat.
ProperDaveProperDave
2025-12-24

@benjamineskola
This is for internal company software for a warehouse/transport management system for a logistics company, and I'm lucky enough to be the dev on the out of hours support rota for the next week, so I'd be a bit biased to rolling out changes right now. 😀
Luckily the warehouses are shut for a couple of days and trucks shouldn't start moving until Monday so hopefully its just skeleton staff for the time that I'm on support.

ProperDaveProperDave
2025-12-24

Anyone in fed up with code shipping before major holidays? I am the sole guy in this company, and I spotted some talk of doing a release build today in one of the team chats from a couple of the managers, so I quickly composed and sang them a little song to discourage their efforts given we have almost no coverage due to holidays. I dont think they approved, but they didnt ask for a release in the end :)

a screenshot of a Microsoft Teams chat. Some text is obscured for privacy, but a developer asks if another dev will be doing a build today, and the composer of the screenshot responds with parody lyrics to Jingle Bells, reading "Christmas Builds, Christmas Builds, Releases on the way! Oh what fun it is to have, a bug on Christmas Day!"
ProperDaveProperDave
2025-12-09

CTO of the company has just sent round an email to all staff saying that we need to enroll our voices in Teams' voice recognition so that "teams transcription can accurately record who talks in meetings". Queue a handful of devs grossly unhappy about giving additional training data. The wording implies this will be mandatory company policy from this point forward with no opt out.

ProperDaveProperDave
2025-12-06

I want to make the bed, but these two are far too happy in the sunbeam this morning.

A messy unmaid double bed, with a lilac-point Burmese cat wearing a grey jumper laying and looking at the camera, and a Black & White British shorthair sleeping on either side.
ProperDaveProperDave
2025-12-02

Talking to the wife about barbers, and how the majority often try to spark up conversation about football, and how you can end up sitting in awkward silence with someone with sharp blades around you if you dont support the right team or dont enjoy football, and shes responds with "we need a lesbian barber, because then you'd feel comfortable, and I'd feel comfortable"... wait what?
(Her generalising) "you always feel comfortable with a gay around"

ProperDaveProperDave
2025-12-02

I bought an Aqara M2 Hub because it offered Matter controls, but turns out the product description wasn't clear and all the M2 does is act as a bridge and expose all attached Aqara devices to a seperate Matter controller. So I ended up buying another Aqara Hub, the M3, as that can act as the controller for Matter devices. But I still feel like Ive missed a trick here and done something stupid. 2/2

ProperDaveProperDave
2025-12-02

Honestly why the hell is it so hard to use as a system to manage ? I've got Google Home minis (pre-Nest), a few 3rd gen Amazon Alexas, Philips Hue doing 90% of the household lighting, TP-Link Kasa (almost completely swapped to Tapo) for plugs and some temperature monitoring, Switchbot for additional temp monitoring, and Aqara running roman blinds in the house. Oh, and outdoor lighting by Govee. None of the hubs I have are Matter controllers apparently. 1/2

ProperDaveProperDave
2025-11-10

The company is harassing to to justify paying for services. I asked to refactor a pipeline to add reviewers if certain keywords are in commits. It happily changed a 60 line yaml making api calls into 4 lines of bash, finishing with a vso logging command that looked perfect. Trouble is, it hallucinated an answer as the logging command it gave me doesnt exist. I told it so and it apologised, then gave me almost my exact code back as the solution.

ProperDaveProperDave
2025-11-04

Whoever thought controlling CI/CD using yaml from the same repo as project source can't have worked in a large dev team before running multiple branches. The amount of hours I've just wasted helping devs in the team get their builds back on track after someone broke (and I had to then fix) the validation pipelines due to a nuget package change is time I won't get back, or thanked for (this is why I personally still prefer 'classic' CI/CD)

ProperDaveProperDave
2025-10-31

Cleaning my home office, I realised my keyboard I use heavily for was filthy and showing age (a lot of letters on keys are starting to wear off). After a good clean, I noticed I have a 'Right Shit' key. :)

A close up photo of a black computer keyboard, with right Shift Key in centre frame. the label for the key has partly worn away leaving what appears to be the word 'Shit'
ProperDaveProperDave
2025-10-19

@mathw @GossiTheDog
In my company's instance the head of dev has 'gone off to think about the impact of it'. You could slap permissions restrictions on the user accounts, but then that negates most of the purported benefits of the MCP servers out of the box.

ProperDaveProperDave
2025-10-19

Absolutely chilled Sunday. I just want to veg like this one all day.

Plump Black & White British Shorthair cat asleep, laying on her side with a content expression and folded paws on A Green sofa, with a grey fleece slightly off to one side.

Client Info

Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.07
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