I was recently thinking about what would make my top three worst pieces of software I ever had to use.
Wanting to be a bit more positive than I usually am I instead decided to go for my top three.
I’m defining “pieces of software” very loosely here, a framework, a language, a library, a tool, whatever, as long as it’s a digital thing, no hardware in this list.
🥉 Ruby on Rails: You don’t have to search too much to find a lot of criticism about Rails (like a lot, a lot), and honestly, I agree with most of it. But at the end of the day, it’s my favorite framework to build a webapp with. If I had to start a webapp, odds are I would chose Rails.
🥈 tmux: Once again, there’s a lot to dislike, top of list is probably mouse support for selection and copy/paste. It has gotten better, but it still feels kinda clunky. It’s also not beginner friendly, at all. It took me multiple months to get used to it. With that said, I can’t imagine going back and giving up tmux. I use it every day to take advantage of all of my monitor’s real estate to display multiple things at the same time. I don’t even spend that much time ssh-ing all over the place, but just to organize my workspace, it’s a must have.
🥇 Magit: I love Magit so much that these days I run Emacs only to act as my git client with Magit. I feel like I only use 5%, maybe 10% of the whole thing and yet that’s still enough to make me love it. It makes using git actually enjoyable. Everything is great, but I especially love the git blame integration, it’s fantastic.
The following did not make it but are still among my favorite things to use on a regular basis:
And because I actually really wanted to write a bottom three list, here it is:
💩 AWS Chime & Microsoft Outlook for Mac I have to use both at work and there’s no way to tell which one is worse. They’re both horrible.
💩💩 watchOS Ok, I said no hardware at the beginning and this is kinda cheating because this is also a rant about the Apple Watch. I regularly have to restart my watch because one or more features stop working. There was an update that bricked the watch, the whole thing was unusable. It’s probably very very hard to build an OS for a watch, but it’s a really expensive device, built by the richest company in the world, so yes, my expectations are pretty high, and not met. Both the hardware and the sofware suck.
💩💩💩 IntelliJ I don’t think it’s fair, in all honesty, IntelliJ is not that bad, even I can admit that. But the problem is that I’ve been “forced” to use it at work for a few years now. It crashes on me on a regular basis, often takes multiple seconds to display text as I type (I don’t type fast, at all). On top of that, it’s not free, I would be forgiving if it was an editor made by someone on their spare time, but there’s a whole company selling this. Sure you can use the free version, but that’s not an excuse. Oh, and it uses more memory than Slack! Than Slack!
If there are pieces of sofware you either love or hate, please let me know, I would love to hear more about it.