dbattaglia

Psyop feels a bit dramatic. Either marketing turned you on to a band you otherwise wouldn’t have found, or your tastes are driven by trends and social/status signals from others. Either way that’s just (admittedly intense) marketing isn’t it? Maybe I’m missing something?

I think concrete examples of this are tricky because these "mini frameworks" only exist inside of a companies' proprietary codebase. My understanding of the concept is its an abstraction layer built on top of a more general abstraction, except the more general version is well documented and well understood by the company (for an internal framework) or even overall developer community (for something open source).

Also, people lack the motivation to maintain existing stuff, because you don't get paid more or promoted doing this. Therefore, mini frameworks often die with the departure of the original authors, unless it has gained major adoption before that, which happens less likely than not.

I wonder how much of the problem stated in the article is actually a result of this resume-driven development style? The author says how the mini-framework was pushed by their engineering manager, I know it's cynical but I assume the real goal of the project was for the manager and engineers building the framework to have something fancy to show for their next promotion packet.

I don't think that's true. A large backbone app has a lot of code that you'll have to trace through multiple files in different directories

This is exactly my experience with large scale Backbone apps (from 10+ years ago). Even with extras like Marionette it quickly became a complete nightmare to navigate or maintain. Zombie model and view objects leaking memory was almost inescapable.

I remember in 2013 I introduced Backbone to my current company, hoping to make sense out of our existing jQuery + ASP.Net MVC application. After ~3 months of code from junior and mid level developers (in house and off shore) I began to deeply regret my decision. There was just not enough patterns and utilities in the framework to keep things from going off the rails. We eventually shifted to Angular v1 and it was glorious, things just worked and even the ceremony I needed to add felt worth the trouble for the speed of development we gained.

At my last employer Elastic we definitely ran into these limits on the cloud SaaS team moving Elastocsearch node containers from our proprietary orchestration to k8s. I’m not sure how they eventually solved it but I believe the plan was essentially sharding ES clusters to different regional k8s clusters.

I'd still rather that be under entities (supposedly) controlled by people, rather than entities under shareholders and CEOs.

I think I felt that way most of my life until this current administration. I think I’d be more comfortable if AI nationalization (and scientific research in general) existed outside the control of the executive branch.

It’s hard for me to imagine how the current superpowers (US,China, Russia) governments will be good stewards for AI, or really anything important. I’m not saying big tech is better but with the world heading more in the direction of autocracy and fascism it scares the hell out of me for these people to control the direction of AI.

I imagine the folks in the article and others like it are not building libraries and foundational infrastructure but rather cranking out SaaS startup ideas and CRUD web apps. I find that kind of coding really can go quite fast using AI, particularly if you are building it from zero and not worrying about all the existing quirks of a large codebase or creating technical debt.

I don’t think it’s inherently wrong, I think in this case it feels like they are making a questionable claim to do so.

I know it’s cynical but it feels like people make these statements so they can feel like they are making some difference, while in actuality all they are doing is signaling their political belief system. Not a fan.

Doesn’t c++ also make a separate type for each distinct type parameter passed to a template? If that is still true maybe it adds up when you have a lot of different vector of T types? Been a while since I read up on c++ though maybe that’s no longer true.

10 years ago I was at an “innovation lab” of a big HR tech company that gave out free lunches and snacks. The best explanation I heard was a coworker originally from the big boring corporate HQ who said basically this is a software petting zoo for big investors to look at. “Good code monkey, here’s a banana!”

They said “in other languages with classes”. They are comparing to a common code review but/gripe in other languages besides Go.

Congrats, you can almost high-five yourself for reading tech bro hot takes on a beta iOS version like it’s a personality. Your setup screams “I refresh Y Combinator in a bathroom stall,” and your Safari browser agrees.

Yup, pretty accurate! Funny it also thinks my 15 Pro is an old iPhone since I’m using lower resolution.

I’ve only heard it from Michael Scott: “Everyone here is extremely gruntled”.

In Scala it worked great using AnyVal wrappers around primitive types. It’s something I miss in typescript, where type aliases are more for documentation purposes on id types but don’t add much type safety. I think they trick is the type needs value semantics, which records should help with.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they had some ethics classes. I doubt any class is going to have instill ethics in someone who has none.

I’ve seen it happen, including other employees telling me I should make sure to zip up my code before I left (which I would never do). It’s only been at the earlier companies I worked for with many devs of questionable skill level. I’m not sure what’s behind the mentality, I assumed the act of writing decent code was challenging to them or it was perhaps something they were proud of, but maybe it’s also some misplaced sense of ownership. At one company I’ve experienced a dev asking back printouts of a design for a CRM at the end of a presentation, I assumed it was “borrowed” from their last job (thankfully we went a different direction). But regardless it definitely is a thing.

I’ve rewritten quite a bit of the same logic at most places I’ve worked over the years.

Same here. I’ve learned to enjoy it, like perfecting a craft.

As others pointed out, some form of deterrent is just as important as vengeance for the victims. Just my opinion but it feels like tech is getting a bit too full of people who think they can do all sorts of terrible things because they are actually saving humanity in the distant future via AI or blockchain or whatever. My understanding is SBF fell into this line of thinking and I don’t think we should reward this kind of antisocial behavior with get out of jail free cards.

As someone that worked at Elastic for 4.5 years on the Elastic Cloud team and really loved it there for the majority of that time, I saddens me to admit it but this is spot on. Despite all their best efforts, everyone I've ever spoken to just wants to run the "ELK stack" and doesn't care about their confusing solutions strategy.

One thing about Elastic is that their roots are in on-prem / self-managed software and selling support to enterprise customers. This led to our cloud strategy being based around ECE (Elastic Cloud Enterprise), with the idea we would eventually fully unify this on-prem version of our Cloud product with our actual SaaS, and just run ECE "at scale". During that time we got stuck in the slower Elasticsearch "quarterly minor + monthly patch" release cycle (SaaS did have a shorter one but it was also troubled) and spent countless engineering effort troubleshooting enterprise customer's own infrastructure (imagine stuff like "ohhh, I see, you V-Motioned a server hosting ZooKeeper containers, and you're running on spinning disks" after 2 weeks+ of back and forth). We couldn't easily add table-stakes features to our SaaS because we needed it to run on-prem too, even though ECE is very limited in the types of supporting infrastructure we could add (basically just ZooKeeper and Elasticsearch). I think they are trying to move past this strategy and onto a SaaS-only K8s based approach but I fear too much time was squandered. I hope I'm proven wrong.

I made a web game that's a mix of the board game Stratego and the classic rock/paper/scissor game. Its single player only, and the computer player's logic can use a lot of work but I haven't spent much time on it in a while. Basically you move your pieces to try to catch the other player's flag.

https://rock-paper-scissor-battle.com

https://github.com/daniel-bytes/rps-scala

Disclaimer: I work at Elastic.

Elasticsearch has a general purpose authorization system as well, based on the concept of "application privileges": https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr.... It's an interesting concept I never really considered at previous jobs, to piggy-back the authorization system of some infrastructure already in your stack. On one hand I can see some team members finding it to be a bit of a "smell" since it's pretty far from the original intended use case for something like Kafka or ES, but on the other hand it can free you up from having to build this type of thing yourself from scratch or libraries.

I've heard it used often in the past (like 10 - 15 years ago) by some of my Ron Paul loving anti-Fed libertarian friends that were always talking about how we need to move back to the gold standard. I think Bitcoin certainly exposed the term to even more folks with different backgrounds outside of those who study or work in economists and finance.

Just the vanilla web UI, mostly on mobile Safari. I pin it to my desktop and check it a few times a day when I’m bored. Every once in a while I remember the “new” section is a thing.

I’m not sure I understand the point. While the economical barrier to entry for producing music is lower with electronics and computers, it still requires time and dedication to be proficient in it. Most DAWs and synthesizers reward practice and dedication the same way a guitar or Clojure does.

This appendix, along with the chapters that are except from "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism", are actually my favorite parts of 1984. I enjoyed how "Principals of Newspeak" is written in a past tense when describing the language and the events of year 1984, it feels like a glimmer of hope that somehow mankind did indeed escape the horrific dystopian world otherwise presented in the book.

My wife and I have both been hearing this narrative from coworkers outside of where we live (in NYC), asking if we're living in a ghost town or warzone. It feels strange.

By the way I think the term "flyover state" is probably a bit offensive to folks that happen to live outside of coastal cities.

I was puzzled by this as well. There was of course instances of this during the George Floyd protests (over a year ago), and a bit right around the election, but that was just companies protecting their property from some of the rowdier protesters.

So while I don't count myself as a winner in this, it does seem to be a substantial win to not be one of the losers.

Same. My wife and I actually do live in one of the big cities hit hard by the pandemic (NYC), but ended up having some of the initial restrictions work to my advantage. For instance, having a limited selection of restaurants (order-in only) led to us cooking more and calorie counting again, and we've lost 30 pounds each. We also bought an apartment once the initial hard restrictions were lifted last summer, and I suspect the extreme lack of buyers made us look a lot more attractive to sellers than we would have in 2019 (NYC co-ops are infamous for requiring 2 years of mortgage+maintenance fees in liquid which we certainly didn't have after shelling out a 20% down payment). My wife spent the entire year looking for a job after being laid off in January and COVID made that significantly harder, but I think it did help her finally find a fully remote company a year later - her new employer embraced remote work in COVID by allowing employees to move away from their CA and NY office, now she's helping them expand hiring across the entire US and Canada (she's in HR and they don't use a PEO for payroll, its a surprisingly non-trivial effort). We both prefer working remotely so this was important for us.

Overall I feel good how things ended up for us but considering how terrible its been for huge portions of the world its feels uncomfortable to call it "winning lockdown".

In fall 2008 I moved from Long Island to New Hampshire (for family reasons) and found a job in a small niche B2B shop doing C# Windows apps. On my first day of work, I notice the receptionist desk has a stack of McCain/Palin 2008 bumper stickers. The next couple of months were filled with employees talking non-stop about the election, from their deeply conservative point of view. Being quite progressive left-leaning this was pretty frustrating and distracting to listen to while I tried to just get some work done. They all seemed to believe Obama would send people to their door to take away their guns and assault rifles, and somehow also turn us into the Soviet Union.

The thing is, these weren't bad people. They took a chance on an self-taught programmer / art-school dropout in their late 20s with 1 year of professional experience, and they treated me well. When I moved back to New York (for other dramatic family reasons), the CEO offered for me to stay at their own house. I just didn't agree with their political opinions. I think for most folks working in tech hubs its just the other way around, where they are in a left-leaning bubble and its hard to imagine another POV. Coming from someone who was on the outside, I can say for me it was at best distracting and at worst alienating, and I can see why companies want to put an end to it.