nazka

For all that don’t know you have a text only version: https://text.npr.org/

I love NPR I am just a little sad that for the past 2 years it feels like they switched from raw boring neutral to a little bit left.

I agree but also I will also argue that the beginners that got all the right answers at the beginning may learn faster in the first steps but will struggle a lot faster later on at the expert level because:

- they wouldn’t have yielded all the knowledge of the little kirks, know how, edge cases, etc… they now have to know (and the Pareto rule 20% vs 80%),

- created an intuition from all the hours spent just struggling to understand what is wrong or find a solution and little by little honing their intuition from that hard work they would have done by themselves for themselves (compared to having ChatGPT, a teacher, or an expert telling them most of time what to do),

- and getting a will to find a solution by themselves even after hours looking at a shell prompt (or logs or whatever else) that is taunting them and will tell them nothing.

So they have 2 COOs basically… and he is still acting as a CEO in the spirit of it.

I thought it was way beyond that with perfectly knowing there were problems, covering them up, no disclosures, etc…?

That’s so cheap when you see how huge the impact it already has.

If you had an AI generated Netflix let’s say after 5 years of this you will start to see how it is dull and you will see the boundaries of it. Kind of like how Metflix sounds Netflix or TEDx sounds TEDx.

Then I guess handmade or half handmade will be back in trend. The problem is after all this time AI was trending it was eating up talents and industries and after that a massive part of artists will be gone and the (human) industry shrunk. No more huge human made artistic ecosystem… Less worldwide talents. Less high quality and innovative ideas.

> Write code that is difficult to test and verify, so that only the most determined and adventurous developers will dare to attempt it.

And then you create job security for yourself!

Nobody will dare going on your turf or I mean the beautiful junk you created. With all the complexity and smelling code in place only you is “smart enough” to know how everything function. Since people that love to code would be so horrified you will be the only leader and maybe at some point the only expert and junk man, I mean coder of this junk. Since now you are so integrated to a part of how the system works nobody can fire you. You can still advance in your career. Thanks to how much complexity and buzz word you added to the pile of junk you can demonstrate you know what you are talking about to no so good managers in tech. Words like micro services, kubernetes, Kafka, istio, Falco, Vault, (add the last flavor)… Even though all this have no real value for the current state of your projects. Barely doing X events/s and making complexity of the system goes from O(n) to O(n^2).

But who cares? You have the most secured job and your career possibly is great.

You are right. It’s just interesting how cold thinking for crime in the corporate world can be just a big fine (even with thousands if not millions of people health are impacted and they all knew about it) but if you someone lose it on someone else it’s jail time. Again doesn’t mean he/she shouldn’t go to jail but where is any real balance with corporate crime and the free pass with money drops?

I actually think it’s worst. One can be a problem of anger issues where, for a time, someone lost it and someone got punched in the face, the other is a long term thought calculated full aware of consequences and with no care for the other. It also usually results in several persons being impacted.

For instance Bayer knowing that their products were contaminated with HIV still chose to sell them. Monsanto with well all their stuff. Corporate crime is really crazier in my opinions. It’s armies of lawyers and businesses men, engineers and stuff having no problem for harm. It’s just less direct than a punch on the face.

Disclaimer: violence is still bad to horrible nonetheless.

All these comments is why I like HN. Thanks!

I don’t understand. Why not Europe?

There are so many great countries/cities in Europe for exactly what you are looking for! And much more. You will avoid all the negative points from China that someone listed on another comment. While improving your life beyond work. 1-3 hours to so many wide destinations from Paris to London, Amsterdam, Oslo, Jerusalem… All while beyond guns you will have same to more freedom. Less crime. On the health side unless you need the best surgeon in the field, you will find overall better healthcare across all level. Education is great to on part with the best (for kids with countries like Norway or Sweden it’s definitely the best. Others are catching up). And I can go on and on with cost of living compare to major US cities, the variety of cultures, landscapes, way of life etc… all packed in a US size continent.

I think if Americans are easy to the idea to leave the US and sacrifice some things, they will find a wide range of interesting opportunities.

Problem is maybe those sending their kids to meat packing factory read 1 book every 2 decade…

Why not use Semrush?

Why not K8s? Or other stuff?

I wonder why he switched to Lua instead of using Haxe.

Every time withoutboat drops something it’s crazy. I don’t know how people can know all that and have the intuition of it. Hard not to be a fanboy of the Rust community. :)

Awesome post! I hope things like that will move forward.

Same! It’s the same principle as CEOs and stock options. For instance Musk that set several goals (x% market share, x unit sold…) and the hardest they get the more he will receive compensations.

I am not sure how much you could negotiate but you can have something like that and being metric based. X% customers happy, x% rating change, x% customers retained when they were close to leave. Then you make the math of the revenue and profit and it’s hard to say no.

Also for convenience over security. Like how Signal was the best secure option out there but people went to Telegram instead because even if it was (slightly?) less secured it’s a lot more convenient.

Ah ok thanks. Is it because of the new M1/M2 architecture?

I don’t get it. Why a Mac cannot be a good Linux laptop?

I agree… This is not open source. If you publish a wrapper that represent just 0.01% of your code and your product and hide all the rest as closed source that is considered open source now? Then any closed source providing an API become open source with this bogus definition. I guess now Windows is open source too, just miss the 99.99% of the rest of the code.

It’s absurd and it damages the open source world and its real definition.

Awesome stuff!

Just to share more in a course I know in the same area: open source training courses about distributed database and distributed systems by PingCap.

https://github.com/pingcap/talent-plan

You should check out Wundergraph coupled with a backend framework to at least manage the database schema. Check out this video [1] it's so fast and nice.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3YrZav5-CU

Thank you for your feedbacks on Django. I agree Django is maybe a boring but solid framework. I never used it so I can’t speak about it’s dev experience but it looks great. I see Python kind of like Java but for dynamic languages. It’s not shiny it’s not the hype. But what can’t you do with it? Usually when a new tool comes out you have Java and Python as clients. Before you used to have Ruby too. Now not so much.

For Rails the thing is that it’s not just one lib among a huge ecosystem like Python but more or less Ruby = Ruby on Rails. Sure you have Sinatra which is the Flask of Ruby but that’s it. While in Python you can do so many other things from devops to ML to eBPF…

I agree like I said the last version of Rails is great. I have been doing Rails for almost a decade now so I’m quite familiar with all its new things. But there are also a lot of issues right now if you are planning to start a company.

The total number of job offers in Rails have been going down for quite a long time now.

If you look at the Stackoverflow surveys and compare the professional respondents for Ruby and RoR between 2021 and then 2022. It’s a 20% decrease. It’s a lot.

Critical contributors of Rails and its ecosystem left for Rust, Elixir, etc. For instance the guy that was behind Active Record went to Rust. Or the creator of Elixir itself and many other followed. On the other hand I don’t see prohiminent open source contributors coming to Ruby to at least replace them… I have been doing Rails myself for almost a decade now and I can tell you that many Rails devs want or already switched to Phoenix or other languages. It’s not going up.

Many gems are mature for sure and don’t really need anymore commits. But also many are abandoned with PRs and issues stacking up. The ecosystem is not really increasing anymore even more vibrant.

Now with all that said: is it impossible to find a job in Rails today? No. Is it impossible to find some devs? No. Is it going to disappear in 4 years? No. Are you going to make a big mistake using it today? No. But there are now so many other options out there without any of these cons and some other pros that it starts to be more and more difficult to chose Rails as a solution today to start a company. Unless you want to use Rails for a side project you can’t ignore these issues and all the other options we now have out there.

About rewrites. It’s not just about the technical part. It’s also the human part. Let’s say I hire you and we grow and there is also 3-10 more Rail devs. But a rewrite has to happen. Are you going to be so exited to jeopardize all your experience in Rails to switch to something new? Even if you are the other 2-9 devs may not. And let’s say more or less everybody agrees that a rewrite has to happen, now you still have to agree on which language and which framework you are going to use! Some may really want to do Go, some Elxir, some other TS…

Whatever the solution that will be chosen there will be a lot of frustrations. Plus there will be frustrations on the tech part of the rewrite and they have to start to be slowly getting more and more productive to the new tech where something that could have taken 1 day can take 5 now. All this, particularly the frustrations from switching to a tech where some won’t really like, will slow down a lot the company. When you check postmortems of startups that failed, so many times in the reasons why they failed there will be this “and we decided to do a rewrite…”. But I never saw a company failed and they will still say that the rewrite was a great idea.

With all that said: better pick the right solution today and look at all the options. Not the Google one, not the one that decrease but one that is at least solid to vibrant, not the last hyped one either, but the best one.

I truly love Rails. But I can’t just chose it because I love it. There are now better options out there for the long term future.

I am a Rust fanboy but using it to start a startup hmm unless it’s for a specific use case. No. Why? Because the biggest bill you will have to pay at first in a startup and for a long time won’t be AWS but all the (devs) salaries. And compare to what you will pay to AWS that’s a lot of money. So a gain in performance won’t matter as much as in your success (and survivability) than speed in developing new feature every week.

Depending what you do but it’s usually the case that performance won’t matter until mid late game. I saw a startup at +300M valuation still not having to worry about performance for a long time. And a cut in the AWS bill thanks to using a more performant language like Rust won’t make that much a difference compare to how much they had to pay devs. So you just want a language where you can ship features fast.

Also the hiring pool is still very small.

I love Rails and if it was continuing to grow even so slightly it will be my go to for sure. But unfortunately it has been slowly declining for a long time… Many moving to Go, Elixir, Rust, and elsewhere. It was by far the best dev experience with a framework I ever had. The last version still looks great. But realistically unless if you plan to do a rewrite, which is never a good idea, it may not be the best option out there. Even more with having to get people onboard for the next years ahead and the ecosystem too. I am looking for a framework to use and see grow a lot for at least the next 4 years with having hiring in mind.

Spring boot is great but it does have its quirks. Config and plumbing for instance compare to Nest or Rails doesn’t makes it the best and fastest dev experience. And all the Java extra stuff and it’s ecosystem makes it solid but also old compare to what you can see happening in other languages.

I have Quarkus in my mind though. It looks amazing in dev experience with lib like panache, resteasy etc… and performance are amazing too which comes as a bonus. But there is no dev out there. And I feel that in Java people want to work on Spring Boot because spending X years working on Spring Boot are more valuable in their career than X years on something else that is not really the de facto standard of the industry. So ya not great for hiring talented people…

But NestJS with the JS/TS ecosystem start to be very close to what Rails was in the past. Stuff like Prisma for instance makes everything a breeze. There is almost always a package for the thing you want. Great at websocket too. Can do GraphQL if it’s your thing. Same language as the front end, Nextjs, etc. One of the most performant dynamic languages. And interesting things happening like Deno or using Rust with it. So there are quite some perks to it.

Can’t speak about Django though. But I am wondering how is the dev experience like when we use it for real projects.

I am starting a new project/startup and wondering which one to start it with between all these technologies. And after looking for a long time I can see that they really all comes with their pros and cons.

You should try NestJS with Prisma or Typeorm and Postgres. Plus all the classic other stuff. It's a great stack.

Ok thank you for your answer.

Awesome to see a project like!

One question: what happens for panics that won’t be able to be catched by std::panic::catch_unwind?