I did open-source before the “forges” had pull requests and the like, but not after Git became dominant. Many of these ways to submit changes are new to me.
I did open-source before the “forges” had pull requests and the like, but not after Git became dominant. Many of these ways to submit changes are new to me.
Interesting thoughts on optimising for “normal” engineers.
Interesting insight into S3, in a PM-ish kind of way.
I’m not clear on the difference between guaranteed minimum income and a UBI here, but it’s nice to see this is where some of that Stack Overflow lucre is going: blog.codinghorror.com/the-road-…
Interesting idea about getting AI to fund open-source via docs. I can’t see any of the companies doing this, though.
TIL you can pass strings to Python’s help() to get help on things you couldn’t pass as an object.
Whatever the legal truth is, and the philosophical truth of whether a machine reading vast amounts of truth to then be able to produce new text is different than a human doing it, the moral truth is clear: taking content from people who are often poorly paid to become rich yourself without giving back is wrong. www.theatlantic.com/technolog…
Nice reworking of the famous ‘favourite commit message’.
Interesting comments on CVSS with regards to curl.
I’ve used CVSS much more than published but also find them frustrating when there is expert local knowledge fighting with broad corporate policy. They’re fine as a component in figuring out risk but not the one answer.
In the name of security, we’re pushed to having dependencies and keeping them up to date, despite most of those dependencies being the primary source of security problems.
And
The goal of code in many ways should be to be written in a way that it does not need updates. It should eventually achieve some level of stability.
From “Build it Yourself”
The other thing I increasingly see is pulling in a big library when needing a small chunk of it. Somewhat similar to:
when you end up using one function, but you compile hundreds, some alarm bell should go off
In this post on executive purchasing there’s this bit that rings so true:
Software engineering and other specialties of a technical bent (including artists, writers, etc.) have the additional barrier that our skills are testable to some degree, but this is not the case for most senior management and executive roles. In those roles, it is essentially impossible to work out whether someone’s tenure as a manager or executive was useful.
Mozi feels like one of those tools built by a group of people who just don’t live in the same world as most of us.
A reimagined social networking (not media) that is like a next level contacts plus calendar would be great. But I want it for the people in my local area, not people I might see once a year. And it needs to be way more seamless.
Interesting backstory of the rise of GitHub (and Git).
How Hard Should Your Employer Work To Retain You
Nothing to quote; it’s too good. Just read the whole thing.
This is a good take on the viability of generative AI businesses.
Except this bit:
Handily, consumers are really picky about what goes in their mouth. The unofficial motto of your main competitor is “Is Pepsi ok?”. This is despite the fact that they are identical in both taste and colour. And a significant minority of people actually say no!
These drinks all absolutely taste significantly different. That’s why it works: people are picky about taste and the flavours being distinct.
In plain terms, everybody is being [messed] with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being [messed] with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.
As usual, long and with many swears, but I agree with much of this “Never Forgive Them” post (apart from, ironically, that things are unforgivable).
Growth is such a bad driver, and VC is one of the biggest rotten cores.
Also this:
to push users into doing things that either keep them on the app longer
I had this argument so many times at N-able, where there was a pervasive idea that more time using the product was good (ostensibly for the user, but really for revenue), and I continually argued that less time was, in fact, better.
Handy package to convert various types of file to markdown, via DF.
Most interesting is that this is mostly a wrapper around other tools, and which ones Microsoft has picked.
Neat gift idea:
a list of some of his favourite[…] five books, five music videos, five TV shows and five movies […]. Whenever I watched one of the recommendations I got to talk about it with him. I’ve also had success with giving a friend a voucher promising to read a book of their choice in the next year, because one of the worst feelings is reading or watching something amazing and then not having anyone to talk to about it.
From the Spinoff gifts without buying guide.
Nice set of ‘basics’ for someone working in software development.
Interestingly, I agree with the conclusion of this hire two junior devs or one senior dev question, but for totally different reasons.
💯
I do agree that titles have degraded in meaning over time, but was there ever a time when they were really consistent across the industry?
I had conversations like this:
Either you run in AWS/Azure or you build a data center, you string ethernet cables, you buy a backup generator, you hire a couple of engineers to keep these running when hard drives fail. What? No. This is not the alternative.
so many times. People seem to miss the middle ground.
I’m not sure I like the “stack native” term, but absolutely I would continue to build like this.
Very nicely visualised story about how songs about love have changed over time - I’m not sure I agree all these categories are “love songs”, so it seems to me the proportion has declined, but not by a huge amount.
I spent ages reading the Spinoff ranking of Auckland malls waiting to get to my local, only to find it ranked first place!