glacials

I agree with you, but companies exist in an evolutionary environment where—broad strokes—anyone who doesn’t do this gets out-competed. You can have 99 companies that behave well, but just one that doesn’t can drive them all out of business if it’s willing to do what they won’t. The solution is not to chew them out, but to pass policy and vote with your wallet.

The author misses one advantage of UUIDs: if you’re working in high-throughput distributed systems, serial IDs create a bottleneck and single point of failure in the service handing out IDs.

With UUIDs any service can generate an ID itself and tell downstream services about it in parallel—even if one of them is down, slow, or needs retrying.

Considering how the macOS maximize button works I’d wager this dichotomy is at least partway intentional by Apple, to stop you from falling into the Windows habit of “maximize everything even if it means half your screen is blank”.

I interned at Lawrence Livermore for three summers and a fall circa 2010, first building internal web apps for IT and then building open source websites for the climate group. As someone who needs a large amount of autonomy, I wouldn’t do it again.

My experience was that 80% of the folks are lifers, for better or worse. Work-life balance was great because everyone’s got kids and soccer games and traffic to beat home, but it was still very much a “butt in chair” system, not a “get work done” one. People regularly do “10-40” (10-hour days M-Th) or “9-80” (9-hour days M-Th, every other Friday off) schedules.

Compared with startup life and even FAANG, everything moves slowly. It’s a combination of real security, security theater, and the red tape that comes with being funded by taxpayer money. That plus the extra rules from just being near the nuclear stuff (can’t drink at lunch, guests need a background check, relationships with foreign nationals must be disclosed) made it a slog.

The most hilarious example, heard only through stories: there are two internal networks, the normal one everyone uses and the high-security one that has no internet access. They are physically separate—no cables crossed, no SSH tunnels, no bridges, nothing. But you have to transfer data between them sometimes, so you would remotely load your data onto a tape drive, and there was a tech you would ping who would eject the tape, run it over to the other network, and insert it in.

As with anything rote, the process was soon automated with a shell script. The script would take a couple of minutes to execute, and your data would be transferred. Entire workflows were built on this script. And around noon every day the latency would skyrocket, because the tape runner was on lunch.

Interesting! I recently wrote about this in the context of Google and Apple ecosystems and did not know it had a name. [1] I called in offline-first vs. online-first design.

[1]: https://twos.dev/apple.html#offline

I find an sample of Smalltalk is one of the most interesting ways to see how it flows as a language, as its grammar almost reads like English. From Wikipedia [1], this is a piece of Smalltalk code:

> 3 factorial + 4 factorial > between: 10 and: 100

which means:

> 3 receives the message "factorial" and answers 6 > 4 receives the message "factorial" and answers 24 > 6 receives the message "+" with 24 as the argument and answers 30 > 30 receives the message "between:and:" with 10 and 100 as arguments and answers true

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk

golinks.io is a close copy.

Author might be interested in Git notes (`git notes --help`). Notes are arbitrary text content added to commits that don’t affect the commit’s identity, so they can be amended without rewriting history.

Can you explain how a $1 dividend on a $100 stock drops the price to $99? Theoretically wouldn’t the stock become more valuable, because its average returns have gone up? (As an extreme example, what if I gave a $1M dividend on that same stock?)

Born and raised in SF. NIMBYism is indeed a huge problem. It’s the hidden underbelly of a city with otherwise modern and diverse thinking.

I’ve since moved to Seattle and it’s crazy to see shit can actually get done here.

A little different: I wrote a bespoke static site generator [1] for my personal website to allow my favorite mobile writing app to be a “frontend” that I can use to write+publish content from my phone (no code) to a Git data storage layer. An iOS Shortcut pushes every time I close my writing app. The weird part is it’s the same Git repository I also write the code parts in, so I have to take some measures to compartmentalize the two.

[1]: https://twos.dev/winter

The funnel leaks. The board wants to plug the holes, but can only do so if it knows where they are.

I appreciate your reply and I believe every word you have said. Thank you for the hard work and thought you and your team have put into your products, and I'm sorry to hear if anyone is casting you as faceless corporate politicians reaching for meaningless goals. I know exactly how that feels.

To be frank with my feedback, I am a person who uses Firebase for a side project. I don't have the mental capacity to watch an ~hour talk for each piece of GCP infra I don't understand. I liked Firebase because I could understand it intuitively through its UX.

I'm sure the GCP features are very helpful and innovative and I'd get a great ROI from the talk if I worked on them for my full-time job. But some weeks, an hour is all I have. I'm an app developer and I would just like to deploy my app please, and have the rest fade into the background, or at least integrate with my existing workflows.

Thanks for all your hard work. I understand if "side project developers" is not the top of your funnel. But I hope you hear my feedback.

As a side-project Firebase user, I empathize with it being slowly consumed by GCP. I don’t have the time or inclination to learn GCP for a side project. I opted for Firebase because it had a great developer experience.

As time toes on and more and more Firebase features are redirected to GCP equivalents, the DX value prop is being drained out of the product and I’m left not even understanding my own infrastructure. I’m thankful the author pointed out Supabase, it seems like a great alternative.

These features aren't nondiscoverable; discovery just takes place outside the operating system, in communities like this one. Good designers know that communities are a constant of the power user UX just like a settings menu or instruction manual. You don't have to pollute the UI with hints and copy about every little thing because power users are their own discovery engines.

The author subjected themselves to confirmation bias by specifically searching for “despite the name”. Perhaps for every service that outgrew its descriptive name, there were 99 that helped people understand them more easily.

If you were to compare the total time wasted by each category, I’m sure nondescriptive would come out as the most wasteful by far.

I don’t think they mean that it can’t, just that the better way to think about the advantages it gives an experienced engineer is more along the lines of “autocomplete v2”, i.e. a keystroke-saver.

Author here, happy to see some discussion around this. I see two major classes of comments.

1. “Why not accomplish this with X?” We arrived at this solution organically, which was important for adoption: a Discord server meant for gaming hour turned into hangout rooms turned into offices. It may not be the best option, but best means nil if you can’t convince people to use it. For us and our existing culture, Discord was an easy and incremental jump to take. Take whatever path makes sense for your culture.

2. “Why not make this asynchronous?” Asynchrony should indeed be the default mode of communication, but synchrony has its uses; between nonverbal communication and round-trip-time it is simply obnoxiously higher bandwidth. It trades away efficiency (person-hours) for speed (hours). The fewer people involved the better the exchange rate, which is why this article focuses on 1:1 interactions. I wrote about this later in my article “Why Be Synchronous?” [1] but tldr; synchrony should be deployed similarly to tech debt.

[1]: https://twos.dev/async.html

Author here. As a companion to this, we had informal optional daily water cooler esque meetings that we used to fill the “I’ll ask them next time I see them” use case.

Author here. We had no requirements to use this system so people frequently left their “office” to get some concentration time in. Some folks were rarely or never “in”, which was completely fine. (The company even had a standing “all meetings are optional” rule.)

Not sure if I’m missing something about this method, but in many apps you can long-press the word directly to get the context menu with “Look Up”, without having to type the word into a note.

Hard not to chuckle at:

> People have erroneous intuitions about the laws of chance. In particular, they regard a sample randomly drawn from a population as highly representative, that is, similar to the population in all essential characteristics. The prevalence of the belief and its unfortunate consequences for psvchological research are illustrated by the responses of professional psychologists to a questionnaire concerning research decisions.

(emphasis mine)

Not only does the statement say that “people” make this mistake then go on to cite a questionnaire only of professional psychologists, but the questionnaire is the prototypical non-random random sample the very psychologists taking it are allegedly proving misinformation about. Questionnaires select for people with the time, inclination, and attention to start and then finish a questionnaire.

Infamously, experiments held at universities bias towards undergrads. Experiments that reward participation bias towards people motivated by the reward. Experiments that don’t reward participation bias towards people good-natured enough to contribute just for science.

Randomness is hard.

I'll take a crack here: they believe the need should be solved elsehow. They see the "I want to send a message later because I don't want to bug anybody" need as better solved from the other end: "I don't want to be bugged because I'm asleep/busy/whatever".

I believe you just agreed with parent.

If you’re not familiar, RPGs call a similar mechanic to this “active time battle” or ATB—more or less turn-based but the turns are asynchronous and constantly ticking, and if you miss giving an order before one elapses, it’s gone. I know that’s not what you’re looking for, but maybe the term will help in your search.

> I think there's a growing realisation that Docker is harming developer productivity.

It depends a lot on specifics, but as a trend I tend to agree. However, there's value in making the development environment consistent among engineers. I wonder if there's a middle ground for version-pinning things like PostgreSQL and Ruby that's not as extreme as containerization.

I'm fine with this sacrifice -- if someone downloads HEAD, they are not running a "version", so it would be misleading to have the source think it's at 1.0 or 1.1 if really it's at a commit between those two versions. I have my build scripts call the version "develop" or similar if this is the case.

> The officers themselves also dropped off cards to local residents containing similar information…The team found that residents of the developments that had received the intervention believed it more likely that local officers would find out about illegal activity than residents of the control areas (though there was no significant effect on residents’ perceptions of how well police officers knew them).

This seems like a leap—couldn’t these folks instead be thinking “oh the police stopped by my building, they are paying attention”? The real study is behind a paywall so I’m curious if this was controlled for.

This is all true, but not actionable. OP was speaking to consumers about things they can do within their control, and for that purpose it’s a great post.

Between formulae and casks, package management feels first class. I can `brew install discord steam ffmpeg` and it all just works.