Notices by Evan Hahn (evanhahn@bigshoulders.city), page 2

Use the positive version of a variable. Variables like use_widget are better than skip_widget because they help avoid confusing double-negatives. (I’ve seen this confusion cause a significant security bug!)

Avoid renaming identifiers. If I have a variable like photo_id, call it photo_id everywhere, even if id might make sense in context.

Consider an enum instead of a boolean. They can be clearer and more extensible. See https://www.luu.io/posts/dont-use-booleans

“Learn X in Y minutes” is a great resource for quickly learning the basics of programming languages (and a few other things). See https://learnxinyminutes.com/

HTTP status codes aren’t worth fussing over. There's usually an obvious choice. Some distinctions are useful, but others are not. If it takes more than a minute to pick the status code, I worry.

Try using the tools I already have before reaching for new ones. Instead of installing a fancy Zsh package, see if I can set $PROMPT and be happy. Instead of installing a dependency, see if the standard library has something similar.

Tweaking my setup has limited benefits. It’s really fun to customize my dotfiles, pick the perfect editor, and tweak my dev setup. But I don’t think it’s a huge time saver. There are some great tools that have helped, and tinkering can be a great way to learn about how things work. But choosing the right colorscheme isn’t usually productive, and I haven’t observed a correlation between “good programmer” and “cares a lot about their editor”. (…it’s still fun, though, and I do it a lot!)

The “lone developer” problem: when a single programmer builds something, it’s often hard for others to maintain later. This seems to affect everyone, myself included. See https://evanhahn.com/the-lone-developer-problem/

"The world's smallest PNG" shows off the smallest possible PNG and describes how it works in detail. Not my best explainer, but probably the one I've worked on for the longest (multiple years). Feedback welcome! https://evanhahn.com/worlds-smallest-png/

#PNG #FileFormats #programming #coding #TinyCode

@aral has anyone verified this? I'm curious to look through the code to see if there's an explanation or "smoking gun"...

@hrefna I know little about ActivityPub and would love to read a blog post about these challenges.

@aral Sounds good! Feel free to reach out here, or email me@evanhahn.com any time.

@aral I used to work for Signal. If I can answer questions about encrypted messaging, let me know. I'm not an expert, but I learned some things while I worked there. (Hiding conversation metadata turns out to be a tricky problem!)

@thomasfuchs I agree with this 100%.

Also, as someone who works on #Signal all day, some of this criticism isn't constructive and makes me feel bad. I've gotten better about reading that stuff, but when people hate on something you work hard on, it sucks!