rchaves

“Rain acknowledges the essential role of wildfire in healthy ecosystems. Read More.”

I was glad to see this

I really like the premise, and I really agree with it, but I don't think a SaaS is a solution, the solution is trying to find better abstractions that makes things simple and easier for the developers, using code, and without limiting their flexibility, but that's the hardest thing to do!

As an experienced software developer who used to learn a new framework every week, I thought ML was going to be piece of cake. In reality, I went down this rabbit hole 4 years ago, and I'm still in there, I was so innocent back then

This article provides nothing new to me, my current company has it all and I don’t like

Does anyone here actually feel personal goal setting as beneficial anyhow?

Good old times, in Tibia ~2007 you actually feared for your life, as you could lose weeks of work when you died, and most servers where pvp enforced

Talking to the NPCs at the store was also very interesting, you actually had to talk, using the chat like a normal human being, not click the options, and they only answered one player at a time

Just copy Elm!

apparently I’ve been doing a lot of HDA, by just placing inline javascript on my html pages, specially where first time to render is essential and interaction not so heavy

I thought it was just laziness from my side of not wanting to set up the whole react scene

Nice to have a name for it

Jira, for sure, and it seems hard to run away from, almost everyone use it

It seems like the only alternative is to fund my own startup, with me as a sole shareholder, just to forbid Jira forever

actually you just gave me an idea where can I apply TLA+ in my job right now, we were thinking hard of many kafka streams and retry mechanisms we need to use, and still guarantee order without being blocking, and I think TLA+ is the perfect tool for the job of checking if we are not missing any edge cases with our current plan

I think the use of TLA+ is very niche, just to prove that some really lower level algorithms for distributed systems work well, I think crypto might be a good use case like you mentioned, but I guess most companies wouldn’t benefit from it except if for fun

no it would be online, not the pages you visit but the ones you bookmark, I’m thinking of building a browser extension that watch your bookmarks and sends the links to be scrapped and indexed

Oh I’ve been building one! But mine is truly different™, basically I gave up the idea of organizing bookmarks, in favor of searching them instead, building your personal search engine

In fact I’ve been blogging about it as I build it https://omnindex.substack.com/

I really dislike the idea o Soylent or any kind of tube food, but also even frozen meals, fast food and up to a point food delivery

I think all that just pushes people away from their connection with food, the best way for people to eating healthier (and tastier!) stuff is by increasing their love for food. If you just give it ready to them, you take their opportunity to learn.

That’s why diets don’t work a lot of times, people just follow blindly a list of stuff to eat, which they eventually give up, instead of understanding the underlying idea and introducing it to their routine.

Learn how to cook, taste it slowly, enjoy it. Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants

I find Albert Heijn here in Amsterdam to be super efficient. They do have some packs of pre-selected ingredients so you can just pick and cook at home, but also they have a very efficient self-checkout so no time wasted in lines, and since you can do everything by bike the supermarket is always 5 min away, with no parking time wasted

I go to the supermarket every other day, takes me ~15 min, I have always fresh stuff, I don’t find it inefficient at all

This is the classic “what you really hate is capitalism”

Why wanting so much efficiency? Redirect that productive developer energy, find food you really love or find challenging on learning how to cook it, and enjoy the slow cooking and eating of it, it’s one of the great pleasures of life

Potatoes are healthy, so I’m guessing just January is not enough for you to see the mess in your body from eating only potatoes. Moreover each person is different, it doesn’t make sense for you to be skeptical from nutrition based on an anecdotal case (you!)

But I mean, there are so many delicious things in this world, why would you do this to yourself? Please diversify, it can be good for you and super enjoyable!

Yes it had been getting worse, but I think there is a limit to “find relevant results” anyway, Google is good for objective answers, but for more complex stuff, there is an more and more answers, the web nowadays is overwhelming

At some point it starts reaching personal preferences as well, and just tracking me like Google does is not good enough for those filters, not to mention privacy concerns

For example, many many times it happens that I read an awesome article about a subject, then weeks later I try to google it back to show to a friend, and I simply can’t find it, because there is a gazillion other articles about the same topic

That’s why I’m building a custom search engine, where you index whatever you want, your bookmarks, your Twitter likes, building your own brain’s search engine

Stay tuned!

Yes, I do also feel very frustrated when I have to stop working on something before it is finished, specially if it's that long debugging session and you have all in your head, but you just have to stop and go do something else.

Talking specifically about code, TDD really helped me, seriously, the red-green loop makes me comfortable to stop any time the tests are green, then I commit, which means that I also have very small commits which also help me with the interruptions once I'm back.

To not miss what I was thinking ahead, I always to keep a todo list (I just use Notes) of everything that comes to mind that I still need to fix or code which I postponed from the current commit, so I don't loose track while at the same time it frees me to focus on a specific thing at a time.

Now sometimes this does not apply, sometimes you just need long, deep and uninterrupted focus, like thinking about the perfect abstraction for something, or those long debugging sessions I mentioned. For those, I try to be sure to block some time or I don't even start it on that day

I’ve been staring at this for a couple hours, trying to understand it, finally the stack denotation made sense to me, it is fascinating! But then he completely lost me at “This is not a Functor morphism!”, maybe I’ll come back another day to try to make sense of it

Those were life-changing for me:

- The Black Swan

- Antifragile

- Crucial Conversations

- Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

I really like this list, they all resonate with my own experience, I’ve been in both sides of many items (zealot became cynical)

try to focus on the things you are good at and enjoy doing. It seems that you don’t enjoy the more design side of things (animations, layout, pixel perfect) and perhaps nor the infra part (setting up es6 libs), but what do you enjoy? Do you like the actual code part? The more core javascript bits, building business logic? Then standard backend might be a fit for you, if not, there is still much more areas you can go to, share with us what you enjoy doing

A better reason to not return void is that it will make you think more about immutability and side-effects. Not returning void allow you to reduce the hidden state changes or at least to manage them better

Well in Portuguese it means “fuck”, I think it’s very suitable

To quote a tweet by RandallKanna: “I will never understand why tech companies optimize interviews for a college grad to do better than someone with ten years of experience.”

As for the query parsing, here is a suggestion: couldn’t you convert that in shell argv automatically? If “name=foo&email=bar” becomes “--name=foo --email=bar” then devs can just use regular argv parsing utils from the language, and the same script can work both from the command line and under QuickServ

Those are very valid points

The small decisions should be made by the individuals of course, as group decisions are too expensive, but the bigger ones should be taken by the team, where it pays off, or at least a pair. I’ve dealt too much with bus factor problems in the past to want fully individual systems

It also happens on scrum teams a lot, the engineer the built certain part of the system is the only one to ever take tasks related to it and the only one that knows how to fix it, so when they are gone you have to deal with their mess

On XP pair programming solves that very nicely, with a lot of comradery, but then you may also argue there is not enough individuality

Weird because that’s exactly the points I feel agile should be help with. In the teams I’m in I always promote the whole team should be part of deciding what to do, prioritizing, and coming up with ideas of valuable things to do, I speak up and give bad feedbacks to PMs that monopolize the decisions

Also the team itself should be very autonomous inside the organization as much as your context allows. In fact, the company I work for had fully independent teams in startup mode for so long, that eventually they started to step on each other toes, there was very few alignment. As company grew, more alignment and therefore negotiations started to be needed but I don’t see much way around that other than staying small and horizontal (which I like too). Still, on parts of the company on “exploration mode” (from Kent Beck’s 3X model), teams still remain very autonomous

As for the small tasks, I see them as a way exactly to promote a sense of achievement, the team is responsible for this big chunk of work and you should be able to see very clearly how things are moving forward. Sure, if you lose connection with the bigger picture because you or your team does not have enough autonomy, then something is wrong and you need to fix it, otherwise you lose this effect.

Do you hate the idea of pair programming or the actual act? Have you tried it? It was indeed weird at first but then I had lots of fun from pairing, I really miss it since the whole corona started

My first experience with agile was not with Scrum but XP, and it was a very good one. There are so many people here conflating Agile with Scrum, and I shouldn’t be surprised I guess, but my goal was not to invoke the “No true Scotsman fallacy”, I don’t care about pointing who is agile and who is not, or what names you use for what, but I do care about the principles behind it, they can give us very good ideas on how to balance certainty vs uncertainty, upfront design vs feedback cycles, in whatever environment you are. Some environments you will need to balance more to one side, some more to the other.