disposedtrolley

My favourite feature of Pharo (which I believe it inherited from Squeak) from my very limited experience with Smalltalk environments is the ability to search for methods via example.

In the Finder window, you can type an example of an input and the result that you want, for instance `2. -2`, and the system will search for a method to do that operation for you. In this case you'd see the "negated" method which given `2` spits out `-2`.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awAB4zHrlHI

I think there's still plenty of opportunity to develop a professional network through structured events like 1:1s and mentoring sessions, but you definitely need to be intentional with this since you can't just strike up a conversation in the hallways anymore.

Where juniors will struggle with is not being able to swivel their chair and ask someone next to them for help. I've witnessed situations where people hold back "stupid" questions which end up blocking their work because the effort of crafting a Slack message or asking to set up a Zoom was too high. For anyone with juniors on their team, make sure to check up on them every now and then!

Yes that would be awesome! We try and play games during our team happy hours, but the friction of finding a site, getting everybody to sign up, and dealing with "this doesn't work on my machine" issues is often off-putting. Having a collection of games we can start instantly mitigates many of these issues.

> Close connections at work have stayed relatively strong, perhaps even strengthening as we shore them up with recurring 1:1s and social team meetings. Peripheral connections have gone down the toilet. Team and role homophily run rampant.

This absolutely mirrors my experience. Casual conversations with people outside of my team and friends, which would've happened by just being in close proximity to them have disappeared.

While I believe we're still working very well as a team, opportunities to form connections outside of our domain have dwindled. We used to have this Slack app called Donut [1] which periodically matches colleagues together for a 1:1, but these days people are sick of Zoom meetings so you really do need a sound excuse to set one up. In-person 1:1s were a chance to escape the office for some coffee and a snack; Zoom meetings are much less tantalising.

[1] https://www.donut.com/

Well yes, but that doesn't solve the parsing problem right?

My point is that some YAML or JSON documents conform to a specification which can be codified as a set of rules, which combined with the data form facts. I'm asking if there are existing systems to parse these files given I write these rules in a particular syntax, spitting out a queryable representation of the data.

Are there any examples of "programs as databases" being applied to structured text like JSON or YAML? Something like a generic system which takes a set of rules/facts and the source data, and transforms these into a queryable data structure.

I'm working with a lot of OpenAPI [1] specifications currently, some of which span tens of thousands of lines. Heaps of parent, child, sibling type relationships, and objects which are defined-once and referenced in many places. It would be nice if I could perform a search like "select all schemas used in this path" or "select the count of references to this parameter".

[1] https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification/blob/master/ver...

Why not? I mean, it shouldn’t be _the_ deciding factor but it certainly should contribute greatly to the decision.

Tools get popular for a reason. You get community support and a test-of-time guarantee that whatever you invest in today is more likely to last compared to the niche choice.

Yeah this stood out to me too! It costs nothing to add more silkscreen to the PCB and it serves as an excellent learning tool.

Yeah, more teams need to do this and consider performance on low-end devices to be a feature.

When Android Kit Kat was under development, the team used nerfed Nexus 4's to simulate a low end Android phone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_KitKat#Development

If the API provider supplies an OpenAPI definition, you can give API Sprout a try. It’ll parse the definition and spin up a mock server returning the example data you want. You can also modify the OpenAPI definition manually if you need different data to be returned.

https://github.com/danielgtaylor/apisprout

I haven't watched Helvetica, but the same director also made Objectified which is fascinating look into the industrial design of everyday products.

https://www.hustwit.com/objectified

There's a Future of Coding podcast episode where Katherine Ye (one of Penrose's authors) is interviewed.

https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/034

Worth a listen to!

> Why was Solitaire bundled even with the NT (i.e. enterprise/business) versions of Windows?

I mean, everybody knows you’re supposed to sneak in a game or two in between spreadsheets.

> stupid non-uninstallable games icons in start menu

You can remove them now. At least I was able to in the Windows 10 v.2004 update. Why Candy Crush is included with Windows 10 Pro however is beyond me.

DevonThink doesn’t really do it for me. I’ve been using it for the past few months and find it immensely useful for organising documents and other media, but it’s a very average note taking experience.

There are too many things like folder structure, tags, and even the format of the note (plain, MD, rich) to consider during the note taking experience. There’s also an annoying separation between note editing and viewing.

Agreed, but the intention appears to serve as a launchpad for digging into the rules yourself. Links to original sources would make this much easier of course.

Thanks for the link to Ganssle’s blog. I’ll be sure to have a read today.

With the exception of some of the rules under the Hardware section, this is some great succinct advice on software development in general :)

When I worked on full-stack projects, I'd always start by understanding what the frontend needed to display but not necessarily how, which translated well into a database schema and some type definitions.

I would then mock these out so I could start prototyping the rest of the frontend. This usually involved setting up UI components, pages, and linking them up with actions. The goal of the prototype was to demonstrate a few end-to-end (albeit mocked) flows to the user. With the flows and data types in place, it was trivial to design a set of API endpoints and build out the backend.

I remember seeing this on GitHub [1] when it was a JavaScript implementation. It'll be interesting to see how it's been ported over to C!

[1] https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Orca

On top of the suggestions in the article, I would wholeheartedly recommend having a look at Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style [1] for a practical guide on writing well.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20821371-the-sense-of-st...

Yeah this seems likely. I think Qantas were retiring most of their 747's.

You can buy reusable metal filters for the Aeropress. I use this one with mine and can get a decent espresso shot from it: https://fellowproducts.com/products/prismo

This is fantastic! I've often come across book recommendations in HN comments and then struggled to remember where it was posted when it came time to purchase a book on topic X.

This also seems useful at aggregating different perspectives on the same book depending on the context of the thread it was mentioned in.

I have a soft spot for VBA. Programming macros in Excel was my introduction to programming; it made me realise how simple it can be to automate a repetitive process and save yourself literally hours a day with just a small investment of time.

I don’t have much experience in iOS/Swift, but would SwiftUI address the declarative part?

From what I’ve seen you can supply state to a view and it’ll take care of the rendering for you.

Not for writing code, but I do enjoy pen and paper for sketching out high level designs and data flows. I’ve started writing on an A5 sized notebook too - I find the size constraints help with focused thinking.

We're currently building a GitHub integration which receives webhooks and kicks off a bunch of processing actions based on the event type. Your suggestion sounds like a great way to add some observability to the service -- thanks!

That’s a fantastic idea. In my last job I started a weekly newsletter of curated tech articles, but this crowdsourced approach sounds far more sustainable.

> My manager had a game-changing suggestion, too: give phonetool icons for people who submit to the list

What’s a phonetool icon?

WiFi is much more convenient if you live in an apartment, or if you're renting and can't tear down the walls to run ethernet.

On a side note, that quote by Fitche is the perfect summary of refactoring spaghetti code:

> you could not remove a single grain of sand from its place, without thereby, although perhaps imperceptibly to you, altering something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole