HN user

dpritchett

4,073 karma

I build backend systems and developer tooling that create leverage.

Professionally: backend systems, cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and developer tooling. Personally: an application developer who enjoys building leverage.

I still enjoy dropping into unfamiliar codebases, building small studies in miniature, and leaving systems a little easier to work in than I found them.

Currently building:

Seevee: an agent-driven resume workbench that treats a career as a conversation instead of a document.

Timerbox: a cross-platform Gio desktop timer inspired by the workflow I've relied on for years.

Blog: dpritchett.net

GitHub: github.com/dpritchett

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/danielpritchett

Email: dpritchett@gmail.com

Posts37
Comments938
View on HN
devblogs.microsoft.com 5y ago

What about BozosLiveHere and TabTheTextOutForWimps? (2003)

dpritchett
3pts0
haacked.com 5y ago

The Siren Song of Backwards Compatibility (2014)

dpritchett
3pts0
www.gremlin.com 7y ago

Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages

dpritchett
164pts52
www.gremlin.com 7y ago

The Next Step: Application-Level Fault Injection

dpritchett
4pts1
github.com 9y ago

Deploy an SSL-Secured Go Microservice with a Free Certificate from Let's Encrypt

dpritchett
2pts0
github.com 12y ago

Show HN: Endless Nameless, a delayed-response HTTP listener written in Go

dpritchett
2pts1
github.com 12y ago

Argus: Ruby library for controlling AR drones

dpritchett
9pts6
www.coroutine.com 13y ago

TDD and the half-life of information

dpritchett
2pts0
programmers.stackexchange.com 13y ago

How to protect yourself from political management games as a dev lead

dpritchett
1pts0
www.youtube.com 13y ago

Guy Steele: Growing a Language [video, 1998]

dpritchett
3pts0
www.wolframalpha.com 13y ago

Google can afford to pay an additional $200,000/employee in salary

dpritchett
1pts0
blog.chromium.org 13y ago

Experimental Chrome feature: proxy all pages through a single SPDY pipe

dpritchett
2pts0
www.thedailybeast.com 14y ago

Marissa Mayer's "APM" fast track program for Google product managers [2007]

dpritchett
2pts0
geekchick77.dreamwidth.org 14y ago

Jessamyn Smith: Fighting sexist jokes with a Python bot

dpritchett
505pts349
www.slideshare.net 14y ago

Quick and Dirty Python Deployments with Heroku

dpritchett
7pts3
github.com 14y ago

Create an extensible static site on Heroku in two minutes with Wwebsite

dpritchett
1pts0
github.com 14y ago

Project skeleton for dotcloud-ready Django+Mongo app

dpritchett
2pts0
blog.sfgate.com 14y ago

Parents coordinate trading of chicken pox-laced goods via Facebook

dpritchett
16pts33
workforpie.posterous.com 15y ago

Startup Accelerators: Better than an MBA. Every. Single. Time.

dpritchett
2pts0
github.com 15y ago

Browse jwz's XScreenSaver C source on GitHub

dpritchett
1pts1
us1.campaign-archive2.com 15y ago

On Annoying Others | Be Slightly Evil mailing list

dpritchett
2pts0
www.memphislibrary.org 15y ago

Teaching MIT Scratch to kids at the Memphis Public Library

dpritchett
1pts0
fluid.media.mit.edu 15y ago

Use barehanded gestures to interact with LuminAR's projected screens

dpritchett
2pts0
www.sharingatwork.com 15y ago

Likelihood a user of one of these languages will be interested in Clojure

dpritchett
1pts0
www.elance.com 16y ago

"Port Android to Windows Mobile & WebOS"

dpritchett
2pts0
www.randsinrepose.com 16y ago

The Screw-Me Scenario

dpritchett
22pts5
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask HN: Hacker's netbook recommendations below $250 shipped?

dpritchett
2pts3
0xfe.blogspot.com 16y ago

Desktop Notifications with WebKit

dpritchett
69pts19
www.newmoney.gov 16y ago

Counterfeit Deterring Features in the New $100 Bill (US)

dpritchett
3pts0
www.cbsnews.com 16y ago

Most Digital Photocopiers Save Every Page Ever Scanned

dpritchett
197pts79

That is the usual work of high end programmers, right? Growing codebases as consistent, dependable ontologies?

I feel like most mainstream programming languages do this sort of work for their standard libraries and their official docs. Go and Python come to mind, but plenty others do this reasonably well to the point where one mostly doesn’t need to read the implementation code to effectively use the standard library itself.

Sound words out at the smallest level. Practice.

Example: “skin” has multiple sounds to help decipher the word as spelled: “sss”, “sk”, “ih”, “nnn”, “iinn”.

Identifying some of those sounds in order helps a reader to sound out the word “skin”. After doing this a few times in a context that helps the reader confirm the meaning of the word they’ve just sounded out they’ll learn it outright.

From that point forward they can recognize “skin” on sight without requiring any context.

Our $100M Series B 12 months ago

It’s a bit of a class thing, isn’t it?

Independently wealthy folks can stay in the game longer without needing to extract a lot of cash compensation in the company’s early years.

An uncomfortable thing about skill, taste, and experience is that it’s often easier to demonstrate the superiority of one path over another than it is to explain the differences in a way the audience is prepared to absorb.

I imagine this is a large part of why tooling and language wars are still compelling throughout decades of computing. No amount of lecturing on the joy of e.g. Rails vs. Node will really convince anyone to use an “outdated”, slow, dynamically typed language like Ruby in 2025 — even in places where it’d be a major win.

There may never be a perfect taxonomy of programmer archetypes.

I imagine most of us here can agree that some elevate the craft and ritual to great effect while others avoid such high-minded conceits in favor of shipping whatever hits the expected target this week.

I’ve been both at different points in my career. Usually it’s a response to my environment.

Reminds me of using Ruby ten years ago and having to contend with folks who wanted to default to using the string literal style over another because it was known to be more performant at scale. That awkward stuff surfaces earlier with some languages than with others.

I’d been a huge fan of his for a solid decade, but that post was probably the last one of his I’ll ever read.

The deadpan was so good there I had to stop and double check the origins of Markdown just to make sure my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me. Hard to believe it’s been twenty years!

Depending on your chess engine (e.g. a physical board) a player could reasonably move many times without stopping to update the diagram. Maybe I forgot. Maybe I was in a hurry due to schedule problems. Maybe the diagram editor was offline for maintenance but the chess engine was still open so we kept on playing.

This might soon prove to be A Problem for folks who reasonably yet erroneously expected that each responsible player would of course update the diagram immediately after each move.

From the go.mod file:

module humungus.tedunangst.com/r/watc

Implies a “go get” should pick it up. Likely a git clone of that URL would do.

Documenting APIs 5 years ago

Agreed! I like grpc for the same reason. If I need to work with REST, a schema-first approach is ideal as it means various client, server, validation, and documentation dimensions are in sync by default.

I get why folks often come at it from the other end and just layer some swagger annotations on top of their existing server code — lack of experience, the dynamicist’s mistrust of typing in general, or maybe they’re in a niche stack without a workable binding generator.

Still, it’s better for everyone if the API provider can pull off the artifact-driven approach.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

The years really do fly by. Looked her up and she’s currently a cofounder at a company that sells an iOS contacts app.

Pihole frequently breaks online tv like Disney+ and Hulu when viewed on our Roku TV. Preload trackers or ads get stuck and the show will never start.

Firming up your tests, logging, observability, and debugging practices really does help here.

The only time I enter a desperate fugue state juggling too many disparate code modules in my head is when the system is a poorly factored enterprise monolith.

Those aren’t uncommon but I reflexively avoid jobs that make those the majority of my work.

That was kind of like hitting the lottery for us,” said Sacramento County Sheriff’s Detective Tom McCue, who led a multi-agency task force on the case.

Glad they busted up a theft ring but this sounds like a moral hazard, assuming they’re keeping the money.