Scubabear68

This post is a great set of ideas for writing. What the author is doing is constantly putting himself in the shoes of the readers, and thinking “what does the reader need here?”.

Which may sound like a very tortuous way to write. But it becomes instinctual after a while. When I’m writing and don’t apply rules like this, I inevitably feel lost - and I know the reader will be too. When I end up going down a bad road like this, at some point I will throw away most or all of what I’ve written and start from a fresh perspective. I guess this would be my one addition to the author’s rules: don’t be afraid to throw away lines, paragraph, or even the whole thing if it’s not working for you.

Clearcase. Ugh. Only had to use it on one job in the 2000’s, man was it terrible to use. Very slow, required weird file system drivers and access. Horrific GUI. Semantic model was simply broken.

Systems like Clearcase is where “release manager” type roles were born. One poor guy would become the expert trying to bang a release out of it over weeks or months.

In my opinion, this was written by someone who is a poor verbal communicator, and who would likely fare very poorly in any political situation.

Casual verbal communication is often the lubrication that keeps organizations working well.

Live 25 miles South West of epicenter.

It went on for I guess 30 seconds or so. Everyone in the house completely confused as we had never been in a quake before. Very low level vibrations, very very loud sound. Very foreign to New Jersey folks!

Precisely right. There are firms that specialize in listing companies in Delaware and become the official “agent” for the firm.

Figuring out who actually controls it is nearly impossible.

I have a 2022 Telluride which I recently parked on a steep hill, and I did not set the parking brake. Fortunately nothing happened, but now I feel pretty dumb.

I will say it’s the best car I’ve ever owned, and it’s been the top rated 3 row SUV for awhile now. Great features for a great price. Though we did get gouged having to buy in 2022 (old car totaled).

It’s only “features” I don’t like seem to be on all new cars, like the engine turn off at a light always defaulting to on, and a too sensitive crash alert function (if the car in front you is turning, it will often think you’re going to crash when you’re not).

“That means the root issue with renewal is still a problem, and we plan to address it in the short term much like our ancestors did: multiple redundant calendar alerts and a designated window to manually renew the certificates ourselves”.

“Information density” of screens is highly important in many professional domains like financial trading platforms, pricing screens, etc.

For inputs as well, as command line lovers and Bloomberg terminal users can attest.

I have an example that helps underscore the lesson here.

I was adopted by older parents, in their mid-40s when I was adopted around 2 years old. They were the "youngsters" in their families, so it meant I was exceedingly young compared to my cousins and other relatives.

Fast forward a few decades and my adoptive parents are deceased, and we have lost touch with the few relatives I have. My wife is in a similar situation.

We adopted two older children, 7 and 3 at the time, when I was in my mid 40's. It has been great for us and for the kids, a challenge and an adventure, but the biggest miss is lack of family. We have no grand parents to fall back on, let alone great grand parents. It is incredibly difficult to raise kids without an extended family to help out. We manage, but boy do I envy those who have bigger families to lean into. Not to mention the network of cousins, etc that the kids can relate to.

They are trying to expand the Trenton-Mercer Airport. One of the justifications is airport expansion would “increase tourism into the City of Trenton”.

Anyone who has been to Trenton, NJ will understand what is wrong with that idea.

“Your honor, my family has to suffer the Green Bubble when chatting with iPhone friends. This has caused us irreparable mental harm and anguish”.

The point the suit misses is that one can simply buy an Android phone if they like. Millions of people literally do every year.

Choice already exists.

I held on to the crap job for 1 year 11 months. In 2004 I quit and found a Wall Street gig that was much better.

After getting laid off after the .com bust, I did a variation on 3), accepted a contract job with a terrible company. It got me by until the market improved and got a much better job.

The trick in a bad market is to understand that mostly the cool perks are gone, and for a time you need to lower your expectations. I think that is going to be very difficult in this cycle.

Consider if it is mud. Quicksand. Water.

You will start to sink at various rates. Not because water is “pushing less” than earth. It’s because water is not resisting.

Also, if I am 200 pounds and the earth is pushing up on me with 200 pounds of force, what is generating that force? And where does it go if a helicopter reels me in? The 200 pounds up “force” just vanishes?

Or never existed.

Very true you cannot tell the difference.

That was not the question, though. The earth isn’t pushing back.

Here is where an have a problem. The ground isn’t “pushing”. The ground is resisting my weight, and may even be compressed as a result.

In 30 years of developing software I don’t think I ever used multi-line regexp even once.

This essay glosses over the fact that most startups die a horrible death and earn little to no money for the founders.

Somewhere in this essay it needs to say “99% of you who try this will fail”.

C++ does indeed give you this level of control.

Most C++ code I have seen does not even approach this level of care and customization.

When we are talking about speed, most people mean basic out-of-the-box speed of the code without heroic efforts. C++ and Java are a wash at this point performance wise. Most analytics code I have seen on Wall Street was either Java or C++, with the choice driven by what the quants wanted in their resume, not performance.

It’s not just the lack of safety. It is all the insane gaggle of features, from the multipage errors from template errors to “diamond inheritance” to experts yelling at each other over temporary lifetimes.

The language has always been a dumpster fire. The best thing I can say about it is that is spurred development of many other languages to get away from it.

I agree. I think he could have done wonders starting fresh with something new.

Stroustrup as always fails to recognize the vast surface area of C++ features, foot cannons, and the heavy weight of C compatibility around C++ neck.

C++ barely made sense in 1995. It makes absolutely no sense today.

Stroustrup as always fails to recognize the vast surface area of C++ features, foot cannons, and the heavy weight of C compatibility around C++ neck.

C++ barely made sense in 1995. It makes absolutely no sense today.

I guess we should all stop fixing bugs and creating new feature and enhancements.

My God - if we touch the code, something might break!

Sorry for the sarcasm, but this attitude of fear is so pervasive and unnecessary.

Seriously, isn’t this our job?

I am surprised at the tone here as well as that if the article.

If you view refactoring as this risky, you are I imagine using a dynamically typed language with automated tests few and far between.

In a statically typed language and with a decent automated test suite, refactoring is just another coding activity.

It sounds like people out there are terrified of going near their code with a 10’ pole. That is heart breaking to see.

I sent him a fan letter a few years ago. It was answered by an assistant that said Piers no longer directly responds to mail, but it is read to him.

So I was doing Perl at this time on Wall Street, basically using it to replace shell-based abominations with something faster and easier to maintain. Perl 4.

Being in-process certainly sped things up. And it was easier to understand than the shell based solution.

But it would have been easier to write and read in just about any other language.

Perl 4 at the time only had very primitive data structures. Most of the time you were concatenating and splitting strings together to mimic real data types. The baroque way file handles were a first class data structure made abstracting over them painful and hacky.

That $foo and @foo and %foo were different variables caused innumerable bugs.

The exposure of function arguments as a stack directly in the language made for weirdness all its own.

The mimicry of shell expressions brought its own pain.

And finally, Perl’s greatest strength and horrific weakness: the regular expressions. One liners that would bring tears to your eyes the next time you had to debug it.

I get where Wall was going with Perl, but the emphasis on beautiful natural language for various idioms really crippled the language horrifically from the start. Going into Perl was forgetting nearly everything you knew from other languages and entering this unreal fantasy forest of code, with monsters lurking behind every rock and twist in the road.

Yes! This is what I use on technical interviews. I generally ask candidates to describe systems they have worked on in depth from an architecture perspective. This very rapidly spots the BS hand wavers from those who know how their systems work. As a side effect it can also serve as a gauge on how mature or junior they may be.

It worked fine, the problem was our workloads were minuscule and it still cost $3,000 a month to support 50ish users on a lightly used platform.

The same load in a non-Serverless instance was around $100/month.