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djeikyb

268 karma · joined June 18, 2011

https://github.com/djeikyb
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djeikyb··on Solving the Worst Problem in Programming Education: Windows
There's a bunch of different UI frameworks, but WPF is pretty popular, and in WPF, my understanding is the normal control you'd use to just slap text on the screen is TextBlock. And a WPF TextBlock doesn't have any way to make the text selectable. And if text isn't selectable, you don't get the normal affordances of the window manager's copy functions.

I've used Avalonia, which is based on WPF. Its TextBlock control works the same way, which means the default way to put text on the screen is inaccessible. But if the programmer is thinking about it, they could use SelectableTextBlock instead, and then the text is available to the user for selecting and copying.

djeikyb··on I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one
Semi-direct response from someone else: https://infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/
djeikyb··on How to use undocumented web APIs
There's a way to make your point without being rude and infantilizing.
djeikyb··on Striking to End Suicide Shifts, Frito-Lay Workers Ask People to Drop the Doritos
Clearly, they are: the strike continues.
djeikyb··on Striking to End Suicide Shifts, Frito-Lay Workers Ask People to Drop the Doritos
Probably the union proposals were not actually met. NPR uses the wording "According to the company".
djeikyb··on Google employees say AI researcher did not resign, despite what exec claims
Journalists got access to an early version of Gebru’s paper and reported on it: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a...
djeikyb··on Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
i personally love partial staging/commits but haaate ’git add -p’. i use tig and a few other partial staging user interfaces. learning how to stage part of a line, in a favourite code tool, is a skill i appreciate for myself
djeikyb··on Ask HN: I lost my job
This is maybe a time for you to listen and learn about the experiences of others. Not, as you've done, call a stranger financially incompetent or insinuate they're lying.
djeikyb··on Twitter Thread: Experience at Lambda School for UX
Kim Crayton has done great analysis of this type of code school on her podcast, including interviews with students:

https://hashtagcauseascene.com/podcast/?s=bootcamp

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fhashtagcausea...

djeikyb··on Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Mac and Windows
i mostly use the git cli. i even like it; despite some ux problems! i've often been the one teaching git, and always make sure junior hires learn at least a little bit of git cli. but i do use a few extra interfaces.

1. complex staging operations. i do a lot of partial staging. staging by line or hunk is good enough most of the time. sometimes though i want a little more. maybe only part of a line, or parts of multiple lines. or even edit the staged content directly! i haven’t used eclipse in a few years, but its staging ui was great. side by side diff, working tree on one side, stage on the other. like resolving a merge conflict. full syntax highlighting, both sides editable. i haven’t found another tool like it. even primitive staging tools (like fork, tower, and tig) that don't do anything fancier than `git add -p` tend to be more useful to me, just because it's so quick to change your mind. no need to type out an unstage command then go through a bunch of screens. just drag and drop, or highlight and click.

2. studying history of a class or function. i use a jetbrains ide, and it makes it super easy to jump through the full history of a file. it's just git blame, but you don't have to copy and paste the ref to blame. very quickly you can see a bunch of versions all at once, and diff between them.

3. perusing git history. mostly, i use git-log and git-show. but sometimes, i want to see the git graph and quickly see the contents of individual nodes. a normal advanced scenario is, show me the full git graph, highlighting commits that touch a particular file, and let me quickly see the contents of those commits. i can do that with the cli, but it's way faster in other tools. if it's simple enough, i use tig right in my terminal. if my ide doesn't support the more complex cases, git-gui does.

4. interactive rebase. i don't know any tools where this doesn't suck. i'm rebasing against origin/master.. is it towards the top or towards the bottom? what files are in the commits i'm manipulating? what are the contents of those files? why can't i jump around between them without starting a new rebase session? i think there's potential for radically different tooling around interactive rebase, especially inside an ide. i'm used to the git cli. i interactive rebase constantly without any trouble. but my team mates don't, and it's not cause they're stupid or lazy. i just got really interested and put a ton of effort into learning it.

djeikyb··on Dieter Rams designed products to last, is horrified how we throw things away
not a typo :( search for "bicycle shaped object". huffy is one of those brands sold in big box stores to folks with little intention of serious use. riding these is so unpleasant there's actually a negative feedback loop.
djeikyb··on Base salaries offered to software engineers in SF, NYC, and Seattle
me too! got an offer, then the background check company flagged my claim to a high school diploma. they asked me to provide official transcripts. hr threw its hands up. this was in june. turns out the district was overwhelmed with the year end work of graduations and such, and just shut off the phones for a couple weeks. luckily i had family working for the district and got a suitable copy. absurd.
djeikyb··on San Diego Implemented City-Wide Streetlight Surveillance
1. the folks who did this weren’t unanimously voted in by san diego residents

2. the folks who did this did it secretly, without consent

deserves? i’d rather push for what ought to be than justify the current mess.

djeikyb··on Uber is dropping rates for drivers down from 80 cents/mile to 60 cents/mile
That's what a strike is! The workers stop until the bosses acknowledge market value.
djeikyb··on Ask HN: Best questions for an engineer to ask a CEO during a job interview?
Have you ever missed payroll? When was the last time? In my case the, answer was “not recently, but..” and led to further discussions where it became obvious the company had a tenuous business model and every payday was a gamble. Literally the ceo told me this, just cause I asked.
djeikyb··on The State of JavaScript 2017
dotnet development targeting linux is painfully slow. on my macbook, with a relatively small asp core project, there is a 10-20s overhead to run any quantity of unit tests. i believe it will get better, but right now it's a bad choice.
djeikyb··on Show HN: Culture Queries – The best questions to ask during your job interview
i specifically value peer review in the form of daily pair programming. i am six months into my first experience with the practice, and i currently value it much more than distributed asynchronous peer review (eg github pr)
djeikyb··on Show HN: Culture Queries – The best questions to ask during your job interview
i like recycling the phrase. to me, culture is: how frequently devs integrate their work, pull requests vs pair programming, how frequently is work delivered, (how) are devs involved with delivery, if some server related to a project has a problem, who owns it (who helps?), what is the flow of work, how does the team improve itself, how many work hours are expected each week, etc...
djeikyb··on Apple ‘On Schedule’ to Terminate Music Downloads by 2019
When Spotify takes the next step of their "incredible journey", I want to have more than memories of the great music I found. So I buy music on Bandcamp. And make backups.
djeikyb··on Not the comp.text.sgml FAQ (2002)
I think `jq` is more powerful, but for those afflicted with xml instead of json, there is `xmllint`. In a pinch, one can use it to hack something together (along with xpath and xslt).
djeikyb··on Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
http://www.empowr.com is a 10+ year old tech company with this as a premise.
djeikyb··on Great, now there's 'responsible encryption'
will you remove the initial spaces before the angle bracket? makes it hell to read on mobile
djeikyb··on Behind the Masq: Yet More DNS and DHCP Vulnerabilities
same problem on ios 10's safari
djeikyb··on The Cost of Skipping TDD and Code Reviews (2016)
I claim to practice TDD, and advocate it. You describe what I do.
djeikyb··on Japan Is Selling Ice Cream That Doesn't Melt
there is even a third option! besides ice cream with no eggs and ice cream with cooked eggs, there is ice cream with uncooked eggs. i often hear the latter two options as "custard" vs "straight method".
djeikyb··on Why Go is my favorite programming language
My team just chose golang instead of java or dotnet core for a new crud app. I'm not especially fond of go, but mean length of feedback loops are worth it (so far). We have a bunch of tests, and they all run in a few hundredths of a second. Same coverage in java is usually several seconds at least. Often up to 30s if running tests with maven.

Standing up the app is also instantaneous. Spring boot apps with hibernate often take at least ten seconds. In prod this doesn't matter. But a cheap app start means integration tests are cheap. An fs hook runs both unit and integration tests every time the code changes.

ps. all the things people hate about go are true

djeikyb··on Split user stories ruthlessly and get value earlier
I think scrum gets a bad name because folks get so caught up in strictly adhering to a concrete implementation of the agile philosophy that they lose track of the philosophy. Folks doing scrum often value scrum processes and tools over the individuals using them. Scrummers stick to their scrum plan rigidly instead of reflecting on and changing their process.

It's fine to say such teams aren't really doing scrum. It's true, right?

I wish that instead of promoting scrum as a one-size-fits-all agile process, scrum was taught as a place to start. That if in a couple months, a team was still doing scrum exactly as taught, they were probably failing to respond to the team needs, and also the business.

djeikyb··on Split user stories ruthlessly and get value earlier
> Even if engineers believe do not believe its going too fast (superficial review, lack of manual testing)

If the engineers are speaking up and are actively ignored, then the business's feedback loop is broken. The things in the agile manifesto need buy in beyond the people writing code.

> scrum master end up make it happen as his job is to make sure "sprint commitments" are met

The whole idea of using the word "agile" is to allow commitments to be re-evaluated. Respond to change, don't rigidly follow a plan.

If someone is mandating a rigidly adhered to practice of scrum, and doesn't allow teams to adapt that process to the individuals and interactions at hand, it's not agile.

djeikyb··on One of the lesser reasons Soundcloud deserved its fate
yes. or playing a game. or listening to text (book, screenreader, etc). or using any number of programs where sound is part of the ux (like voice navigation, or bash).
djeikyb··on Tools for Remote Software Development and Pair Programming
ymmv for sure. i suspect that pairing is far less valuable if not used in tandem with other XP techniques (eg tdd, ci/cd, continuous process). but certainly pairing isn't the One True Agile Way ;)
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