I hate Java. I've literally spent the entire day chasing down an issue caused by a null pointer. How, in 2023, is this just accepted as normal?! I honestly find it quite depressing how much better software development tooling isn't given a chance because most devs are just too lazy or incapable of learning anything new. Companies that adopt better tooling eventually move away from it because it makes hiring and mergers much more difficult. So instead we're all stuck using tools that were garbage decades ago
Love to hear stories where technology is genuinely improving lives. Apparently smart speakers are very popular amongst traders in India who can neither read nor write https://restofworld.org/2023/india-sound-boxes-paytm-phonepe/
"Buckingham Palace also unveiled a new emoji, of the St Edward’s crown, to mark the coronation weekend." I didn't realise the Palace was a member of the Unicode Consortium... https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/apr/09/king-charles-iii-coronation-procession-route
In a world where developers can get a lot of help from Copilot, ChatGPT, StackOverflow, etc., there are still certain coding skills that characterize the best software developers. As just one example, real developers use data types in a way that makes their code cleaner and more reliable -- they define types like "heightInCm" or "widthInPixels" instead of floats and ints, and suddenly code is 10x easier to reason about.
In your opinion, what are some other hallmarks of top 1% developers?
Any experienced programmer worth their salt will tell you that •producing• code — learning syntax, finding examples, combining them, adding behaviors, adding complexity — is the •easy• part of programming.
The hard part: “How can it break? How will it surprise us? How will it change? Does it •really• accomplish our goal? What •is• our goal? Are we all even imagining the same goal? Do we understand each other? Will the next person to work on this understand it? Should we even build this?”
Use-cases for comments in code imho:
- Documentation for interfaces
- Explaining something unintiutive about your code
- TODO: something that should change later
- XXX: something which is acceptable but weird and might be a good thing to improve
- 20-100 lines of prose adding context to a large amount of code
t. someone who OpenHub characterizes as writing "a very low number of comments"
Sci-fi concept: Humans evolved as persistence predators, and many of the things we can do still echo that. Endurance. Concentration. Ambition. What would an intelligent species look like if it evolved from a different behaviour? What about scavengers, like crabs? Gatherers, like bees? Or nurturers, like trees? What might be similar? What might be different?
Software engineer by trade. Programmer by hobby too (in addition to basketry and spoon carving). Personal website: https://rlamacraft.uk/. Gemini capsule: gemini://gemini.rlamacraft.uk