844 karma · joined February 24, 2021
A technical decision should be done by weighting it's pros and cons, not just by looking at the pros.
Agree on the 'Sorting classes by types', it's something I've always found surprising too, and love the car-collection metaphor.
While obviously touching Alan Turing's contribution, it doesn't just call it at day, but goes in detail on the history of networking, of memory, of the web, of "personal computers" companies, with tons of little asides on specific contributors, or projects.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/computing-universe/2542...
And also you don't get to integrate it very well if everything around it isn't maintained, and compatible on old version of a library (with said documentation not existing anymore).
Also, while resume-driven development is not a good thing either, it's certainly not a good investment to pigeonhole your career into working with something you hate working with.
I think the best way to avoid falling into that kind of trap is to learn to dissociate between a value one believe in, and a discourse/action done in the name of that value.
It's perfectly possible to agree to one without agreeing to the other.
People who haven't yet learned this[1] tend to think that disagreeing with the latter also means disagreeing with the former. Worse, they might believe that not personally sharing/believing a value constitutes an attack on this value. And since one's identity tends to be tied with one's deeply held values, it constitue an attack on them or on their peers as well.
The important point is that good people might do it in good faith, out of naivety. In the Opal thread, however, I believe most of the 'Twitter army' that came to +1 the CoC uses it as a rethorical trick, out of self-righteousness.
[1] And I honestly believe that most early twenty-something tends to fall into that category, especially the most politicaly or religiously active ones.
And since the negative discourse (e.g. saying "Women face so many issue in the workplace" as a man) is way more socially palatable than a positive one (saying "Women have it OK now in the workplace" as a man), people who try to be sensible about thing not directly concerning them tend to overdo it by amplifying the "everything is bad" angle.
Which is why at the height of the BLM movements, lots of well-meaning (but IMO severely misguided) people felt that 'master' or 'blacklist' were carriers of oppression, while not thinking twice about words such as 'white noise' or 'white-label' (Implying that a lack of creativity or panache is associated with whiteness, the horror!), The former was among white 'wokes' sensibility-by-proxy, while for the latter the same crowd had the experience and tool to know this argument is bonker, and that anyone having issue with the expression 'white noise' has mental issue.
I came to this conclusion after a gay/muslim friend of mine, who likes to do humoristic quizzes on Instagram did one for the Ramadan. He asked "Apart from Ramadan, what are the other 4 pillars of Islam", and accepted the Ru Paul reference "Creativity, Uniqueness, Nerves and Talent" as the answer. The only people taking issue with that were non-muslim white french dudes who felt it was islamophobic, which greatly annoyed my friend, who felt it feed into the stereotypes of "angry muslim".
An ex-director of a French national security agency complained about exactly that during an interview, that you get more budget after a terrorist attack, or after you stop one that was well under way, but never if you avoided the condition to create a terrorist cell altogether, or nipped it in the bud.
Plus, a book recommendations is always good :).
Another very ironic example of that is this recent Reddit post [1], where the name "Nasser" was censored in-game to become "N***er", making it look much, much worse.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/znfw7y/my_name_is_n...
On that subject, I cannot recommend enough an episode of a Lawfare-related podcast (ChinaTalk) called "Hoover, Communism, and the FBI" [1], which explore the life of J. Edgar Hoover, the zeigeist of the early twentieth century, and an revisiting the "red scare" in light of the since declassified information of Russian spying networks on US soil.
Related to this is the "Venona project" [2], where US agency could break the encryption of old soviet telegraph, and learn a great deal on soviet spy network.
[1] https://www.lawfareblog.com/chinatalk-hoover-communism-and-f...
[2] https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-project-venona
Specializing in web front-end stuff was an obvious logical continuation of that, thank you for reminding me :).
(And yes, also the shitstorm that was AngularJS to Angular (4+), but that was a long time ago now.)
Which is when I truly discovered the state of the React ecosystem, and noped the f*ck out of it. Design systems that recreates the <strong> tag but with a React component, the abomination that is CSS-in-JS and "typed CSS", mixed with some of absolutely brilliant libraries with well-thought out APIs, mixed with "best practice" du jour made by clueless frontend devs rehashing arguments in a truly blind-leading-the-blind fashion.
And I do like React, and might probably use it again, but it has the downside of being the defacto choice for new devs, which creates a huge spread in the ecosystem quality that other "second languages" ecosystems such as Rust or Elixir won't tend to have.
(I know that I'm mixing a framework with a language, my point also stand for the whole JS/node ecosystem, just doubly so when you focus on the React side of the NPM ecosystem.)
Messing with the console is such a no-go that I'm appalled it even passed the drawing board, making the "React isn't a framework, it's a library" argument even more bonkers than it already is.
There is a very interesting DEFCON talk[1] called "Inside the fake science factory" about this.
I mean...yes? of course it is?
It's like pretending to watch a football match on tv to be materially the same as being in the field.
There is of course the question of whether he shared it or not, or if it was just for personal use, but still, as horrible that subject might be, I'm more than a bit mystified at the idea of the act vs. watching the video of the act considered as being even remotely in the same ballpark.
4.5 years is not a light sentence in any way.
As a result, I wrote a (Chrome only) Web extension[1], which monkey-patch the WebSocket object, so I could 'plug' or 'unplug' them by simply clicking the extension's icon. So far I'm very happy with it [2], and can finally have multiple tabs of the same page without my 'reference' tab refreshing itself while I'm working on CSS.
[1] https://github.com/MarcMonchablon/toggle-hmr
[2] It gets the job done, even if in some case (such as the Zola static site generator), where I had to put the link to the plugin's code in the index.html, otherwise the code would be injected too late.
On a similar note, you can absolutely point to America for using the international monetary system in its favor, and that wouldn't be the same a blaming regular americans.
Per Josh Whedon commentary [1]:
"This was one of the years where I was pretty convinced we would actually be picked up for another year, so we left a lot of things hanging. But at the same time I always felt if this was the last episode we ever filmed, it would be a good last one because it really did just get us into the minds of our characters, whom I love very much, and let them just sort of exist."
Still, it was kinda fun to go to work and learn that the corporate website literally went up in flames.
Here in France, the engineer diploma is a regulated thing, and there absolutely are software-centered engineering school who are accredited to deliver it, which is how I got mine.
It's in the "Grandes écoles" cursus, which usually follows a more classical STEM-centric cursus called "classes prépa".
As to whether "Software engineering" is a real thing, well on one hand most of it isn't very process-oriented, on the other hand there are such thing as ISO certification for software security, so it's less the individual which is regulated than it is the project in itself when it matters (like critical data-center, or handling of medical data), so it's not like there aren't any regulatory framework in the software world.
So... different tradeoff? Sounds like engineering to me :).