andyg_blog

10x really isn't hyperbole at this point

I don't think anyone would mind a society without work so much if there wasn't the threat of starvation and destitution there currently is.

It doesn't, and FWIW the article says that. A meta note: ABI stability is a holy war inside the C++ community. Those against it argue that it's holding back real language evolution. Herb Sutter is even working on his own C++ offshoot that shows what could be.

I think it's a pretty good direction to go down. I wonder if we can add a little more accounting to it. Cheap shoes solve an immediate problem but you pay more long term versus expensive well built ones. How much $ (in dev time + tokens) was spent in incidents and/or fixing code later. Credits and debits. Weigh money earned (somehow) against money spent.

This reminds me a bit of "Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster" from 2014 https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-...

The constraint I, and I bet many here, have is just how much data there is. 3GB like in the 2014 article is one .pdf

Enterprise level data store is measured in hundreds of GB for a single customer, and you'll get murdered on data egress costs if you try to search an entire corpus, if you can even get through it all before the request times out or the customer decides after 5 minutes that enough is enough.

You'd need a true distributed filesystem to even start attempting what the authors suggest at any scale outside of your local machine.

Completely agree on alignment. Without it, it's a shortcut to rejection. I actually wrote a lot about this in a blog post I called "Minimum Reviewable Unit" https://gieseanw.wordpress.com/2025/03/21/minimum-reviewable...

I don't think it contradicts the OP. OP says the system is unreliable. Memory leaks that lead to out of memory failures for example. Smart pointers would stabilize things. (Also note that OP says their smart pointers PR was rejected).

This is a small April Fools' project I created while exploring git commit hooks. I wondered if you could fail a commit based on the commit hash itself. Turns out you can't; you have to wait until the post-commit hook fires, and then do a reset on failure. Eventually I decided to see just how far I could take it, and well, now there's an official website and python sdk distributed through pip.

>the whole article assumes the only language in the world is Python.

This was my take as well.

My company recently started using Dspy, but you know what? We had to stand up an entire new repo in Python for it, because the vast majority of our code is not Python.

Really appreciate it. I love mixing humor with technical communication. This post is topical because strangely I encountered GUID truncation three times in the last week.

I'm skeptical these status ladders truly exist outside of the author's imagination, but then again I've never been part of that side of tech culture. It doesn't ring true of my own experience where pretty much every technical person sees other technical people on equal footing. This includes "big names" in tech that I've spoken with.

Edited to add: what's hypothetical about Alice being happy to run a coffee shop or Bob satisfied being a 90th percentile engineer (measured how?)? Plenty of these people exist, I've met them!

A more general rule is to push ifs close to the source of input: https://gieseanw.wordpress.com/2024/06/24/dont-push-ifs-up-p...

It's really about finding the entry points into your program from the outside (including data you fetch from another service), and then massaging in such a way that you make as many guarantees as possible (preferably encoded into your types) by the time it reaches any core logic, especially the resource heavy parts.

You can downvote me all you want. I'm not claiming any kind of superiority of WordPress but merely answering the question in the OP. I've had this blog for 15 years now, long before WordPress was so reviled. It just works and I'm still on their free tier.

Markdown that is then unceremoniously shoveled to WordPress with some finagling of the images. I'm not trying to experiment with fancy tech when I write, just trying to get the words out of my head.

If something gets mathy I'll use LaTex.

Please elaborate? I define experience in terms of mostly "time" spent on something. And I consider any engineer with less than 5 yrs of experience as "inexperienced" regardless of whether they are talented or not. I've met many talented, but inexperienced engineers who still needed redirecting.

I agree that we should have safe-by-default "decay" behavior to a plain ol std::string, but I'm also picking up that many aren't certain it's a useful syntactic sugar in top of the fmt lib? Many other languages have this same syntax and it quickly becomes your go-to way to concatenate variables into a string. Even if it didn't handle utf-8 out of the box, so what? The amount of utility is still worth it.

Greek mythology? But seriously please elaborate for my less educated self.

From TFA:

> PReQuaL does not balance CPU load, but instead selects servers according to estimated latency and active requests-in-flight

So, still load balancing

I hate to agree. For an article about metaprogramming in C++, you'd expect expert level C++ code, and not what's presented here. It's bad. And the first example with the list even has a bug.

100%. Consider a scenario where someone with too much money accidentally is forced into buying out your company and then they decide to cut 75% of the workforce. At that point it's all metrics, good or not, that decides who stays and who goes.

>Are these tools measuring the “right” thing? It doesn’t matter!

My experience has been a little different. Usually you have regular one-on-ones with your manager where you discuss career things, including what you've been working on lately. From being in the manager shoes myself, I do this so that you and I are more ready to advocate for you when it comes to actual performance review time.

I think I did realize that. However, if you as a homeowner say "I really super duper don't want any scale buildup OR the minerals to be dissolved in whatever comes out the faucet" then suddenly the proposal is actually reasonable.

Metaphors only go so far. Try to see what I'm really saying here: quality has a cost. Don't shoot yourself in the foot by preemptively reducing quality on account of some ill-conceived notion about how the relationship between product owners and engineering works.

If this article is to be believed, they are storing user passwords in plaintext.

Tldr; they lost

What a black and white viewpoint to have, I feel bad for you. Should we also execute (on the spot, no less) jaywalkers, children with unlicensed lemonade stands, and people who ask for water cups but then get a fountain drink? Consider a little empathy once in a while. Do you think you might be willing to break a law of you were in fear for your life? Illegal immigration, like many "large-scale" issues in society, is a multifaceted social phenomenon that there is no silver bullet for, pun intended.

What's interesting is that this was created by Max Howell, creator of Homebrew who made waves a little while back for getting rejected by Google despite Homebrew's success. He talks about that here: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...

Sometimes it takes an existential event in our lives to really drive home what actually matters. On your death bed you won't wish that you spent more time delivering value to a company (even a great one) than spending time nurturing relationships with loved ones.

On another note, your value as a human is not the same as the economic value you produce, and it's too easy to conflate the two

This comes across as a little racist.

It's like a modern cannonball. They say a 20kg "solid sphere" traveling at 4x the speed of sound could disable a tank by exerting forces on bolts that connect the pieces together, but otherwise leaving the tank with the appearance of being mostly unharmed.