Notices by Sarah Jamie Lewis (sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social), page 5

There was a time in the early 2000s when Firefox triggered a browser renascence and there was a lot of excitement about what a "browser" could be...feeds, blogging integration, collective tagging, open comments....

The original spirit that the web should be as writable as it was readable, extended to shareable.

And in some way, shaped by economics and technology, we got an approximation of that vision..shrinkwraped and sanitized.

Fediverse captures some of that dream, as new applications find new ways to bring together interactions across instances and domains.

It's fun to see that kind of breaking out of silos again - despite any misgivings I have about federation as a model overall.

My 2024 theme will be "Year of Form".

In looking back at that this year, there is little I want to add or remove from my life at the moment, but there are plenty of areas I want to reshape to better suit.

This is first going to start with tools and spaces, but I want room to expand it to all aspects of my life.

My "Year of Focus" is coming to close. Overall I am very happy with how this year went.

My intent was to drill down on the projects that mattered most, and give them my attention.

And to that end I:

- shipped Cwtch stable (which is a small way of summing up months of features, testing, and documentation)
- founded Blodeuwedd Labs (security consulting) and already had the opportunity to work on some amazing projects there.
- finally became a Canadian citizen

Among many other small victories.

Meta: I highly recommend yearly themes as an alternative to resolutions. There is a nice short introduction to the concept here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVGuFdX5guE)

I've been theming my years since 2016 and I have found the process very beneficial.

I get that some organizations need to save-face.

They made a big show of saying they will pull out of the UK if this law passes...well this law is going to pass, as is, with no concessions.

The draft text hasn't changed, how the regulations will be written and implemented hasn't changed.

They got a pinky promise that the law will only be used when it can be used.

"A notice can only be issued where technically feasible"

The reality on the ground is that as soon as the UK's Online Safety bill becomes law then the de-facto assumption must be that any service provider with significant exposure to the UK might be under a notice that mandates the compromise of the security and/or privacy of that service.

The statement made today - explicitly designed to defuse any tension that might have held up the bill - only re-enforces that position.

The framing that this is a "win" for online privacy is deeply disingenuous.

There is a through-line in these opinions that goes something like: "dependency management is hell no matter the context" and that is definitely a big part of it.

I can, and do, use Rust per se. Benefit from the benefits, and avoid everything else.

But then you might ask questions like...can I get 80% of those benefits another way...and...maybe I should just write a compiler...and then your week off vanishes into oblivion...but that's for another time.

4. Tooling cpu usage. I don't know if this is an IDE problem or language server problem or both. But certain rust projects cause my IDE to burn cpu cycles in a way that other languages simply cannot.
5. A sense that the community has grown to a point that it is starting to naturally fragment and any of the ideals I had associated with that community no longer apply. (Regardless of whether those values were ever there to begin with).

Rust is still my default, though it is no longer separated from the pack.

I've spent more time programming in C this year than any point in the last decade. A kind of re-evaluation of what I value in a solution.

Since people asked, some opinions about the Rust ecosystem:

0. I like the language. It's my default.
1. So much dependency bloat. Almost as bad as Python. Almost.
2. A general feeling that unmaintained libs will slowly cease to compile. (There was a time when many useful features in libs were nightly only...and the unmaintained ones don't build anymore)
3. I've built some personal tooling for Rust and the sheer complexity of some introspection components makes me weary of ever trusting it.

@inthehands very early in my career I worked somewhere that made heavy use of (proto-)Rational tooling (some of the products were still being actively replaced / rebranded).

Perhaps closer than anything else I've seen, but still fundamentally targeted to large orgs.

My main complaints at the time centred on how disconnected the tooling was from each other - compatibility bugs attempting to link models together - which reduced much of it to glorified drawing tools and mediocre issue tracking.

The one thing I am missing in life is a set of tools implementing a software development methodology that is somewhere in between agile-get-it-out-fast-and-iterate-trashfires and multi-million-dollar-bureaucratic-aerospace-programs.

A process that doesn't require numerous teams to implement - but formal enough to provide some resistance to a world happy to prioritize anything over assurance.

All I have so far are a set of loosely compatible informal procedures. Missing a unifying process.

Tied into this is the understanding that those multi-million-dollar-bureaucratic-aerospace-programs still result in catastrophic failures, and agile-get-it-out-fast-and-iterate-trashfires can lead to high assurance software with infinite funding.

That assurance is practically orthogonal to process in many ways.

But surely there exists something in between issue tracking and enterprise project management suites.