Tony Meyer
About Archive Tweets Also on Micro.blog
  • A pretty good summary of how writers about Apple get the iPad all wrong.

    (I was full-time iPad for about 8 years, as a software developer, architect, PO, and PM).

    → 1:51 PM, Mar 2
  • Great post looking at the flaws of various Python datetime libraries. Dates and times are hard, but that’s why we use these libraries!

    → 12:01 AM, Feb 28
  • Not all mistakes are learning opportunities, but there are some mistakes it’s a mistake not not to make.

    I’m not sure I entirely agree with re-adding backlog items (I guess if it’s infrequent), but I do with the rest. Some of these “mistakes” are hard to make, though, like turning down deals or letting people go.

    → 11:38 PM, Feb 27
  • Great post on why it’s worth having engineering managers.

    I agree with all of this, and have similar experiences. Where I struggle is seeing 4-5 layers of management providing value rather than falling into power plays.

    → 11:30 PM, Feb 27
  • Very well written deep dive into dict() vs {} in Python.

    → 1:23 AM, Feb 27
  • Another post in the series on the business and history of Sentry - this also dovetails with the recent Kaplan-Moss post about funding developers. I’ve never been in this position, but if I was I would love to follow this example.

    → 1:18 AM, Feb 27
  • A great explanation of a great code commit.

    I’m loving being able to code more in the open again, and I strive to write good PRs (which squash to a commit), although they are not yet this good.

    → 1:15 AM, Feb 27
  • Neat tool that makes books in an image clickable through to a Google Books oage. There’s a GPT bit in the middle, but I feel it could easily be one of the cloud OCR tools or even an offline one (you’d probably need to pre-process a bit, based on my experience).

    I can tap a photo of a dog in Photos and have it tell me the breed with a link to more info. I assume books and other objects must be coming to that too.

    → 1:11 AM, Feb 27
  • This Work Chronicles comic rings so true!

    (Also, I think Work Chronicles is my favourite comic these days).

    → 11:21 AM, Feb 23
  • “If you’re a marketer, consider sending a single email during an off-period that asks people to update those [holiday-related email] preferences all at once” - this is excellent advice.

    → 11:02 AM, Feb 22
  • I vividly remember scanning 1000+ books into Delicious Library, which was vastly faster than entering them all completely manually, but something like this LLM based book scanning would be so much faster, particularly if it was wrapped into a real tool that did full lookups, etc (like Delicious Library did).

    The possibility for hallucinations doesn’t worry me much - quickly verifying the results afterwards (plus the second layer of a lookup) would mostly solve that. I’d be more worried about not noticing something was missed, but good tool UX could probably solve that.

    → 9:02 AM, Feb 22
  • I agree with all of this (except the “dollar store” reference that goes over my non-US head): any time people are paid to work on open-source it’s a win. I saw somewhere the argument that once there is sufficient funding we can start being more critical, which is an appropriate approach.

    → 2:18 PM, Feb 21
  • Interesting post on falsehoods junior devs believe about seniors. I agree with most, but not:

    • Having all the answers: the more senior, the more you ought to not necessarily know the answers (although there is a bunch of that) but know how to figure out the answers fairly efficiently
    • Time to relax: I suspect this is coming from a US perspective - time to relax should be constant at all levels; it’s basic health and cost effectiveness
    → 1:14 PM, Feb 21
  • Nice intro post to Bloom filters.

    → 10:07 AM, Feb 20
  • Applies equally to work and older schooling: Work Chronicles

    → 10:03 AM, Feb 20
  • This enterprise budgeting cartoon is so true.

    → 10:43 AM, Jan 23
  • Interesting read on random number generator seeding in C++ but broadly applicable. I’m glad that I work in a language where someone else takes care of getting this right!

    → 1:21 PM, Jan 20
  • A very thoughtful look at the hyperscaler clouds and how Europe can and should react. We really need people in a position to take action to be thinking about this in the AoNZ context as well, or maybe a Pacific context (not APAC - Asia is its own thing).

    → 1:25 AM, Jan 19
  • Very detailed post on Sentry’s removal of all cookies and user tracking - helps to have a reasonable familiarity with mar[keting]tech to follow what happened and the advice.

    → 12:53 AM, Jan 19
  • This record type proposal looks nice, but I don’t see much benefit over dataclasses (KW_ONLY is ugly, but also uncommon I think). At least it would be a stdlib addition, not a language change.

    → 9:48 PM, Jan 18
  • Arguments against using @property() in Python - other than to replace an attribute.

    I agree this is overused a lot. The other place I see it used where it seems reasonable because there’s no obvious alternative is to mark an attribute as read-only.

    → 9:34 PM, Jan 18
  • Summary of None-aware operators being considered for Python. For example, “obj?.attr” which would be None if obj is None, rather than an AttributeError being raised. I hate the idea of this being added - I hope it never does. Partly for some of the reasons in the article and partly because it’s unnecessary complexity.

    → 9:14 PM, Jan 18
  • Interactive page for figuring out how to undo or fix things in git. The “take a backup first” is the best advice. To be honest, I tend to “give up and go to a known good state” a bunch of the time.

    → 9:08 PM, Jan 18
  • I had never heard of git notes before. It seems like they could indeed be really useful if they were exposed more.

    → 8:47 PM, Jan 18
  • This is a really insightful internal look at Sentry’s pricing and scaling in the early days. I think for most of this period we were using Sentry but doing the self-hosted route (paying Sentry $0), but we probably moved to the hosted product towards the end of this time. I remember a period where every billing cycle there was a new pricing plan.

    → 8:44 PM, Jan 18
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