khendron

This makes me recall the time I was riding on the bus, and there was a little boy (maybe 4 years old) with his mum. The little boy was proudly reading the numbers off the other buses he saw drive by.

"7, 23, 5, 86," the boy proudly stated. Then a bus numbered "5X" came by.

"What's that?" The boy said, pointing in confusion.

"That's the bus number!" his mom said.

"X is a number now?" the poor kid asked in a painful tone. You could just hear his understanding of the world crumbling around him.

When non-tech folks ask me how to learn programming because they want "jump on the money train", I ask them if they ever take the initiative to solve a problem with programming. You don't have to work in tech to do this. For example:

Work in an office writing documents and making spreadsheets? Have you ever simplified your job by writing a Word or Excel Macro?

Own a smart TV? Have you dug into its features until you know them backwards and forwards and can program it to (metaphorically) sing and dance on command?

Have you connected multiple things in your house together so you can control them from your phone, just because you could?

These are all examples of taking the initiative AND having the curiosity to dig into technical problems, and implement solutions. If you are like this, you will likely do well in tech and really enjoy it. If you DON'T have the tendency to do these sorts of things, you are probably going to have a bad time.

In my experience, brutalist buildings are interesting to look at from the outside, but not so great from the inside. Once you've gone inside, you might as well be underground.

I've always thought 'git blame' was a badly named command. The word 'blame' has such negativity attached to it. The command should have been called 'git who'.

> Modern design is so beautiful to look at - but an absolute nightmare to use. You either need to use trial an error on every element, or hope that someone else can tell you what you need to do.

This. Aesthetics has overtaken usability. Back when it was web design, a good interface was defined as one that was easy to use first, pretty to look at second. During the rise of mobile interfaces, this got flipped. Now pretty to look at ranks highest, and easy to use is secondary.

Is this because of real-estate? Mobile screens are smaller, and something had to go.

Because the article is about him and the company he (co)founded.

Interesting write up. The whole article, with its stressed out overtime, inter-team fighting, and testing the computer using a game reminded me of "The Soul of a New Machine", which is a great read for anybody who hasn't read it.

Great article, and congratulations!

One thing stood out for me though

> On January 1, 2021, I received an email from Repl.it letting me know that I had been selected.

To me this is a huge red flag. To receive a work related email on what is probably the most widely recognized holiday in the world is the sign of a company with terrible work-life balance.

I hope I'm wrong, but I have ignored such a flag in the past and got bitten.

I would reword "Vote with you feet" to be "It's OK to change jobs", so as to give it a broader meaning.

There is no obligation for you to stay in a job you don't like, or to pursue a different opportunity. You don't have to explain your reasons for leaving. Your employer and your team will probably be fine without you, and if they are not it is not your problem. To often I've stayed in a job I didn't like because "I'd be letting my team down" or "we're too busy, now is not a good time." Screw that. If you are not liking it, find something else and leave.

I'd also add one more: "Take your vacation". You are no good to anybody (you, your friends, your family, or your employer) if you work self to burn out. It's not worth it, and the world won't end while you are away.

I am not sure that letting people exist in their own self-validating echo chamber is a good thing.

I have a similar theory as to why rapidly growing companies become toxic environments (of which politics and turf wars are a symptom). When a company is small and has a low profile, its employees are in it for the company. They believe in the product or service that the company is creating, and but into its mission.

When the company becomes successful and starts to grow, it starts to attract people who don't really care about the company and its mission—they are in it only for themselves. They only want to improve their lot, and are willing to play politics and backstab as required to get ahead..

If the company is only growing slowly, they can weed these types out during the interview process. But if they are growing quickly, they don't have time to interview properly and slowly and surely the company is transformed from a cooperative, mission-driven organization to one where employees are fighting against themselves.

Unfortunately these politically minded types are the ones who quickly rise up the ranks, and once most of the top areas of the company are populated by assholes, there is no cure.

I do sometimes wonder about the environmental impact of the entertainment industry. Destroying something for the sake of entertainment seems ... I don't know ... wasteful?

In this case, yes the plane was probably mothballed anyway, and yes actually blowing it up will give a more realistic result in a shorter time than CGI. But were the environmental impacts even considered when making the decision?

He might be referring to Shopify GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume —the value of commerce facilitated by the platform), which is probably approaching $100B per year.

Nice list. There is lots of new stuff here for me.

The obvious miss is John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" (1938), which is the inspiration for the movie The Thing.

I recall an Arthur C Clarke story (can't remember if it was a short or a novel) that touched on the same idea. In the story, the squid's imaging abilities were very advanced, almost TV like.

I don't think it is the existence of the email but rather the wording of it that is at fault. The email was cold, soulless, and underscored the fact that "the system" viewed the residents as inventory, not people.

I am reminded of the automated email I received from my company's HR software, just prior to my summer intern going back to school. The email asked if I had run through the checklist for the pending "termination" of my "resource". I went to the HR director and was like "WTF, can't we inject a little humanity into Human Resources?" She just shrugged it off, saying the emails were built into the system.

I think an overlooked aspect of a legacy system that makes "strangling" difficult is that nobody fully understands the behaviours of the system anymore.

It is really hard to replace the functionality of a piece of code when you don't know 100% what that functionality is.

Here's my go-to example about the challenges of driving in a Canadian winter.

I was waiting for my bus to work one morning after a large snowfall. The snow clearing crews were hard at work, but the street was effectively blocked by piles of snow, men, and machines.

Yet, my bus arrived on time *driving down the sidewalk".

I am not sure how any self-driving system could have figured that out :)

If I answer "That's a really dumb question!" am I being heretical or conventional?

There actually are no triggering images. I guess they want trypophobics to be able to read it.

It may reduce the environmental impact by preventing spoiling, but at the same time it increases the environmental impact because now the vegetable can (and are) shipped across vast distances.

Maybe we should be rethinking our entire food infrastructure and concentrate on delivering food to local markets, not markets 1000s of miles away.

The great thing about Excel is that it is easy and intuitive to use just the basics, and it is difficult to accidentally stumble onto its advanced and complicated features by accident.

With Word, on the other hand, it is easy to have created a large document and then just as easily screw the whole thing up from beginning to end by clicking the wrong button or key-combination.

What you say sound more or less the same as what the Twitter thread says. Enterprises with complex and unique workflows come to a software vendor with a checklist of features, and complex highly configurable software checks all the checkboxes. It doesn't matter that the software is almost impossible to use. For some reason, usability is never one of the checkboxes.

The root of the problem is that the people holding the checklists are not the same people who have to use the software. Which was the point of the Twitter thread.

So I need to keep writing and if I stop for too long I get stopped and lose everything. I wonder what that black bar going across the top of the screen is for. Is that an overall time limit?

I guess I will tell a story. How about the time I was in grade 6, competing in the inter-school track tournament. My sport was the standing broad jump. I was amazing! I could jump, from standing, 2 meters 30 cm. Nobody could come close to me. I was a shoe-in for the gold medal.

At the track meet, on a fine day in early June, I was really confident. Until I saw this one competitor. Supposedly he was 12 years old, but he was almost 6 feet tall. 12 years old my ass!

Anyway, he beat me. I jumped 2 m 31 cm (personal best), and he jumped 2 m 32 cm. Nobody else in the competition was even close. 3rd place was something like 2m 10 cm.

I've never been so disappointed with 2nd place. Just goes to show, not matter how confident and able you are, you can still fail. Yes, the world kept turning, and the sun still came up in the morning. I was just a bit more disappointed than the day before.

OK I am at 222 words. And I have run out of things to say. And the black bar is almost across the top of the

> there's hiring managers or recruiters that won't look at me, and coworkers whose behavior changes when they find out.

I am very surprised to hear you say this. My background appears to be similar to yours (no CS degree, programming full-time since the mid-90s), and although I did see some resistance in job interviews for about the first 5 years of my career, once I had enough experience under my belt nobody cared what my education was. I've never encountered the type of elitism you describe. Maybe it's a Google thing?

The only reason I put a sticker on my laptop is to identify it out of all the other identical laptops at work.

I generally don't get a tech related sticker either. Instead I buy a sticker of an animal or something. Of my current laptops, one has an owl, one has a cat, and one has a flying fish.

Reminds me of the time I was playing a computer game, and right at the beginning you are presented with a door 5-digit combination lock. The objective of the game was to explore the game world and eventually discover all 5 digits of the code.

First time I played the game I just randomly entered 5 digits, and the door unlocked.

I've worked with people who had been working in programming jobs for some years, and didn't have any instinct for coding. Give them a detailed spec, or some detailed business logic, and they could write code to match it. But when left to their own initiative they would fail completely.

I am curious as to how they would do with fizzbuzz.

Although I am a big fan of RSS, I find this article very disingenuous.

The author complains about the chaos, vulgarity, and hostility of Twitter, but those complaints would apply to almost any social media platform.

Then he suggests replacing it with RSS feeds from curated, professional RSS sources, which is not social media. You could achieve the same things on Twitter if you just followed the same curated, profession Twitter feeds.

This is really just a roundabout argument that can be summarized as "don't read the comments."

Many coders will argue that these comments are the type of information that should be captured by the version control system, not in the code itself.

The biggest problem with comments is they are not part of the tested integrity of the system. In other words, they are never tested for correctness.

How many times have you come across a comment that appears to have no bearing on what the code is doing? In heavily commented code, this happens all the time because a developer (not necessarily the original developer) makes a change and does not update the comment. It could be that the developer was in a hurry and sloppy, or that the change was upstream and made the comment irrelevant, or maybe the code was copied and pasted into a context that doesn't match the comment, or whatever. The point is that comments can become stale, and a stale comment is worse than no comment at all.