Notices by Robert Roskam (raiderrobert@mastodon.social)

These anti-patterns hurt teams: no CI pipelines, everyone committing to master without feature flags, needing to change 10+ repositories for one feature, or verbose logging (worse than no logging).

Variable naming conventions by programming language:

Python: the_thing
JavaScript: theThing
TypeScript: theThing: any
Java: AbstractFactoryPatternSingletonInstanceManagerThing
C: i
Go: thing, err
Rust: maybe_the_thing

The stages of debugging a race condition:

2. anger
4. depression
3. bargaining
5. acceptance
1. denial

I'm not anti-AI. I'm just pro-thinking.

What do I mean? I mean that everyone I know who is REALLY into AI uses it for reading EVERYTHING longer than 1000 words.

This is the mental equivalent of eating only smoothies, because they go down easier.

I say this with love: reading is thinking.

Stop letting slop think for you.

Things no one will mention at your funeral:

- participated in standups
- increased to shareholder value
- got in expense report on time all the time
- had 90% code coverage on all PRs
- clocked your time on time all the time

This is not an exhaustive list by any means.

When some sage person reminds you that Rome wasn't built in a day, just remember it burned down in less than 10.

Seriously tho...

I would tell you a joke about UDP...

but you might not get it.

If the computer is a bicycle for the mind, then the smartphone is a hamster wheel. 🐹

debugging

a jumble, a mess, a mystery,
no guidebook, no help, no history,
but a moment, give me just a moment

a wisp of a thought
comes together like a glass fish bowl
reverse shattering, slow at first,
then like a breath...

I have it.

Programs could stream text from one to the other on the command line. It's still possible. No one took grep / awk / sed away from us.

But that is not how most software made in the past 30 years works any more. Applications (like 95% of them) let you primarily send data out via copy-paste.

That's it. (2/4)

We've painted ourselves into a UX corner with GUIs for the past 30 years, and LLMs are showing it to be true.

Can you imagine Salesforce contact records being just "available" in MS teams? Or a Google Sheets column be used over in Discord for a slash command?

But that used to be the expectation.

"Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface." (1/4)

Any _good_ code generators out there?

I've been working in Zed, using Claude 3.5 Sonnet. For completions, it's fine. No real complaints.

But when I try to do something larger (>200 LOC), I'm finding the output is often very bad. Doesn't matter the language.

It's likely that I'm not able to express in a short block of text what I'm trying to accomplish. So the small text prompt approach is likely the wrong UI.

But is there a better one? Has anyone seen it?

"Bug-free code."

This sounds good. And it's a trap.

It asks everyone to be perfect, now and forever more.

Let's consider some alternative targets:
- we need our rollback rate to go to 50% of what it is now
- we need code coverage to go from our current unknown value to 80%
- we need X critical customer journeys to pass Y times in order to release a new feature set

Perfection in all things is not actionable. Improvement against specific measures is.

The Internet is a series of tubes,
Deployed by a series of GitHub Actions,
Described by a series of JIRA tickets,
Clarified by a series of Figma designs,
Analyzed by a series of Google Sheets,
which all are on the Internet.

So the Internet makes the Internet, via a series of queues.

k8s is fine.

You just gotta feed it a steady supply of human souls, and it'll happily stay in its corner and not start any apocalypses.

You know, normal stuff like that.

Want to hear another programming joke?

I got a heap of them.

To be fair, it’s probably more a of stack.

Let me queue one more up.

A typical standup meeting

Original sauce: https://www.reddit.com/r/lotrmemes/comments/15x8nc7/their_roots_go_deep/

Discovering that you're wrong & then changing is an underrated superpower. 💪

Looks like Google Drive is killing off VIM motions.

Anyone here care?