4,075 karma · joined October 16, 2009
Professionally: backend systems, cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and developer tooling. Personally: an application developer who enjoys building leverage.
I still enjoy dropping into unfamiliar codebases, building small studies in miniature, and leaving systems a little easier to work in than I found them.
Currently building:
Seevee: an agent-driven resume workbench that treats a career as a conversation instead of a document.
Timerbox: a cross-platform Gio desktop timer inspired by the workflow I've relied on for years.
Blog: dpritchett.net
GitHub: github.com/dpritchett
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/danielpritchett
Email: dpritchett@gmail.com
I feel like most mainstream programming languages do this sort of work for their standard libraries and their official docs. Go and Python come to mind, but plenty others do this reasonably well to the point where one mostly doesn’t need to read the implementation code to effectively use the standard library itself.
Example: “skin” has multiple sounds to help decipher the word as spelled: “sss”, “sk”, “ih”, “nnn”, “iinn”.
Identifying some of those sounds in order helps a reader to sound out the word “skin”. After doing this a few times in a context that helps the reader confirm the meaning of the word they’ve just sounded out they’ll learn it outright.
From that point forward they can recognize “skin” on sight without requiring any context.
Independently wealthy folks can stay in the game longer without needing to extract a lot of cash compensation in the company’s early years.
I imagine this is a large part of why tooling and language wars are still compelling throughout decades of computing. No amount of lecturing on the joy of e.g. Rails vs. Node will really convince anyone to use an “outdated”, slow, dynamically typed language like Ruby in 2025 — even in places where it’d be a major win.
I imagine most of us here can agree that some elevate the craft and ritual to great effect while others avoid such high-minded conceits in favor of shipping whatever hits the expected target this week.
I’ve been both at different points in my career. Usually it’s a response to my environment.
I’ve heard several folks say that about Kubernetes, but in my experience the *nix core always resurfaces the second things get weird.
I’d make so many syntax errors without at least some sort of lint/build step.
May as well ask family to stop having opinions on my cooking.
This might soon prove to be A Problem for folks who reasonably yet erroneously expected that each responsible player would of course update the diagram immediately after each move.
> module humungus.tedunangst.com/r/watc
Implies a “go get” should pick it up. Likely a git clone of that URL would do.
I get why folks often come at it from the other end and just layer some swagger annotations on top of their existing server code — lack of experience, the dynamicist’s mistrust of typing in general, or maybe they’re in a niche stack without a workable binding generator.
Still, it’s better for everyone if the API provider can pull off the artifact-driven approach.
The years really do fly by. Looked her up and she’s currently a cofounder at a company that sells an iOS contacts app.
Avoiding VCs and accounts in their orbit helped as well.
The only time I enter a desperate fugue state juggling too many disparate code modules in my head is when the system is a poorly factored enterprise monolith.
Those aren’t uncommon but I reflexively avoid jobs that make those the majority of my work.