Marie Kondo your software stack with open source | Hacker News Reader

Marie Kondo your software stack with open source

github.com

55 pointsrwwmike12 comments

That was a fun read. BTW, I bought both Kondo’s original tidying book and her tidying for work book.

I have been looking at ways to simplify my software stacks while transitioning to “retirement.” For me this is often just pushing complexity to web infrastructure managed by corporations (but always with an easy migration path). Examples:

Lisp dev: I have been using Common Lisp for 40 years. I am eyeing more minimal languages like a Scheme implementation or Racket. I have flirted with the idea of Emacs Lisp but this would be a huge learning curve for me.

Deep learning, and general Python: I am a big fan of Google Colab. I haven’t powered up my at home GPU rig in months. For local Python dev, for little projects I have mostly moved away from PyCharm and VSCode, moving back to Emacs + python-mode.

When I must set up a web app, I am almost all in on GCP, sometimes Hetzner, never AWS for my own stuff.

I will probably drop programming languages that I don’t often use now like JavaScript, Haskell, Clojure, Smalltalk, and Java.

Thanks, I really enjoyed writing it!

And yeah, as I talked to everyone for the article, it really seemed that minimalism was relative to where you were, and could often show up these days in using managed services. Such is the power of the cloud, right?

I didn't go there, but I think lots of things like serverless and edge workers and stuff like that could fit into this discussion as well.

I would like to make a suggestion: put your Mastodon or Twitter handle in your HN profile. I was going to follow you on social media, which is how I get links to reading material.

Ahh, good call. They're both on there now.

Author here. I really enjoyed diving into this topic and interviewing people. Minimalism in technology has a long history, and it's as important today as it's ever been. A favorite quote from the story, from Carson Gross, who made htmx:

“I might encourage minimalism in web development, but only because there's this incredibly complicated piece of software called a browser that has all this infrastructure baked into it that we can sit on top of. We can take advantage of that complexity and the abstraction it provides in a simple way, rather than putting a lot of complexity on top of that,” says Gross. “A lot of JavaScript projects take a browser and heap a bunch of incredibly complicated software on top without taking advantage of the infrastructure that the browser has sitting there.”

Yes! Also https://uther.wtf/blog/the-life-changing-magic-of-refactorin...

What is "Marie Kondo"? Leave alone used as a verb.

Marie Kondo [1] is a Japanese organizing (not organization) consultant, author and tv presenter.

She is known for (rather intense) minimalism, and the saying "does it spark joy?" which you are supposed to use to filter out what things you should keep.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Kondo

Thanks for the much-more-useful explanation here. I thought the question was a complaint about verbing a name, not being unfamiliar.

Author here. Yep, someone's name, verb-ified. I fully get the pet peeve against this sorta thing, but we went there nonetheless. :)

Wait why do you even need a filesystem for.

I dunno, do you?

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