Software: A Rant About Change for Changes Sake

In software engineering I am one of those people who like to embrace change, I will in my own projects and even in professional situations (time permitting) stand up a new version of existing functionality in a side-by-side manner to try out new things, seek better solutions or performance or simply to understand how someone else's solution solved for the problem at hand.

This mentality broadly sits under the "Prototyping" method of software engineering, however, prototyping itself often says you should create a prototype in a wholly other language or platform than your target; a little like when planning to make a game in a brand new custom game engine you might want to prototype in an existing one, so benefit from both your own engineering expanding your eventual product, but building confidence and a marker post for performance & the content to which you can work.

The same is then true when I just want to elaborate on a single target piece of code and rework it.

I say all this because I like change.

What I can not abide however is change simply for changes sake, changes or reengineering something for no purpose.

The biggest villian in this space for me, sadly, has to be Microsoft with the Windows Operating system.

The only reason I even still run windows is to test games I'm working on (not even to run those games in most cases).

And today they've drawn my ire by reengineering, for no purpose to me, nor benefit to any user the Lock Screen.

You could just Windows Key and L your way to exiting to lunch or to go away securely from your desk, it's a natural reaction for me to lock the screen, even when I'm working at home!  So ubiquitous was I taught about security, through hard learned lessons and practical jokes.

So it irks me massively to return to my machine just now, find it has installed an update and now when locked I come to wake the machine it sits.... and sits... and does nothing... and nothing happens.... and you wait....

To the point I believed the machine was locked up or crashed.

When really it's opening four widgets on the lock screen.... Four..... Inane news articles which do not interest me, junk adverts and even the weather app I must have uninstalled three times on this machine, yet it returns constantly.

The delay?  Yeah, it was off loading whatever framework it needed to show these embedded widgets.... Some Javascript framework taking a gig of ram no doubt, which has taken the lock screen of instant, consistent and functional usage to a dismal mess I am going to have to disable for my own sanity.

Microsoft, just NO, stop doing this.

Why the widgets? And then you remove them, after trying to figure out what's wrong and even with the value set to "NO" do not show me these widgets it still adds another app to the list of things it can show, it's so insidious; not to mention slow.  And when you finally do disable these needless widgets?..... Oh it's still massively slow and doesn't work as it did before.

Yeah you sould press any key and wake the locked screen to give you a log-in prompt... now only escape seems to give me a log in screen.... I have no idea why that change was done, I presume whomever was tasked with this change just likes or was themselves used to using the escape key; but it's the many tiny little changes the gas lighting of "this used to work <that> way" only to find it changed - without any visual reconfiguration it just now works differently - it all just beggars belief.