schonfinkel

  Location: Brazil (UTC-4)
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Erlang, F#, Gleam, Nix, NixOS, Linux, OCaml, Python, SQL, AWS, Azure, Bash, PostgreSQL, Docker, DevOps, Terraform / Tofu
  Résumé/CV: https://schonfinkel.github.io/static/cv.pdf
  Email: marcos [dot] schonfinkel [at] gmail.com

I'm looking for Backend Engineering (especially functional programming) or DevOps/SRE opportunities.

Kinda, you'd have to go through the whole review process and also get your stuff to successfully be part of (at least) an unstable build.

What really worries me is that on Nix we have a strong habit of patching packages to work around problems caused by the fact that NixOS doesn't use FHS. So, in theory, someone could submit an obscure patch to systemd and get everyone affected by it, if it through the approval process.

The solution so far has been a very rigorous process to even get a commit bit into nixpkgs: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs-committers

The premise looks nice, but the project being full of random .tmp-*/.log files does not bring much confidence to it.

I personally find OOP to be the most intuitive for large scale systems design, but that's just me.

Once you're more comfortable with it and want to try a typed functional programming language, I highly recommend checking OCaml (or SML, if you're into old school tech) and see how the Module Functors are applied, most software will look extremely over-engineered after you write a few functors. It's the feature I miss the most when coding in F# or Gleam, for instance.

or you can throw all of this into the trash and just use Nix.

Are you trying to be sane and rational in a market that has turned into a casino? U crazy or something?

And this time the boooom has a larger blast radius than all the previous booooms combined.

The worst part is that techies can still work around the insanity if they keep their opinions private. For the serious average Joe the AI mandates must be feeling like hell on earth.

I once worked in a company that had soviet-level efforts to push LLMs into everything, someone eventually made the classic "Natural Language -> SQL Query -> Magic Result in webpage" and got promoted, the tool got mandated for every non-tech employee as part of an AI-boosting effort (people pushing metrics up).

One day I wake up with a product person in despair because the tool couldn't handle what looked like a very simple aggregation, I stopped what I was doing, crafted a 30-line SQL query over HORRIBLE TABLES, a couple CTEs and window functions here and there got him what he wanted. I found out later that single query that took 30 minutes to make saved him from inheriting a 6-month effort to create a microservice dedicated to patching said tool.

If you come from a pure FP or embedded systems background you are exposed to a much better version of "sofware engineering" than your average React dev out there. The bar created by webdev is so low it made the whole industry look like a joke.

I regret to inform you that, despite your best intentions, you have built an Emacs + Orgmode.

I once worked in a project that vendored most of its third-party dependencies, it was a culture shock at first, but damn, after a while it was so nice being able to work just by building from local source, with normal tooling like `make`, instead of pulling a shitton of deps from the outside world. Made me realize how much "webdev culture" did a disservice to software engineering as a whole.

But I think we will swing back to using GUIs when we find a performant way of making them

I like this new TUI renaissance as well, but if you wanna see what a symbiotic relationship between GUIs x TUIs could look like you need to see what Emacs does with Orgmode and the whole Org ecosystem of org-agenda, org-roam, etc. Lot's of these TUIs from the awesome are somewhat already inside Emacs.

https://orgmode.org/ https://orgmode.org/manual/Agenda-Views.html

It's all about moving fast and breaking things ;)

And it's not just AI, we're riding atop a previous finance + crypto bubble that didn't properly pop up.

Meanwhile, Anthropic is adding ~$10-$15b ARR every month.

I'd like to see how creative their accountants are before thrusting any numbers like that.

  Location: Brazil (UTC-4)
  Remote: YES
  Willing to relocate: MAYBE
  Technologies: Erlang, F#, Gleam, Nix, NixOS, Linux, OCaml, Python, SQL, AWS, Azure, Bash, PostgreSQL, Docker, DevOps, Terraform / Tofu
  Résumé/CV: https://schonfinkel.github.io/static/cv.pdf
  Email: marcos.schonfinkel [at] gmail.com

I don't wanna be that guy but...

NIX FIXES THIS.

It's nice to see that Fable is still around, my old team once did a proof of concept that later turned into a real service that used both Fable + SQL Type Providers. We had levels productivity that were never heard before, since must bugs were caught by the compiler (which had knowledge of the types all the way from the DB to the FE).

There were also some great options revealed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47678283

Big tech has noticed this a long time ago, which is why they hire a legion of "developer advocates", its inorganic in the beginning, but it works long-term and once certain tools get into large companies it's almost impossible to remove.

Apple is pressuring Windows from above and now from below with the MacBook Neo

Linux is pressuring Windows from below and from the developer class

If Valve actually delivers their Steam Machines in an affordable price then it'll be the deathblow.

For those interested, there is an awesome link between people like Bush and pioneers like Engebart (and later XEROX PARC), what made these people really genius was not only their (almost prophetic) vision, but they also had the capability to actually sketch (and sometimes implement) their crazy ideas. His early vision for "memex" acted like a "sorcere's spell" when Engelbart first read it in a magazine during WW2.

By the time he left Berkeley a few years later with a Ph.D. in engineering, he had decided that his mission in life would be, in effect, to turn the memex into reality.

This excerpt is from the early chapters of "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age". We're living in a reality these giants dreamed, and we managed to mess most of it.

I've been following the development of Spectrum OS, which seems to be Qubes with a "Nix take".

Spectrum will, for now, be a Linux-based system, with packages from Nixpkgs but not derived from NixOS. This gives us an actively-developed base with good hardware support, powerful and optimised compartmentalization primitives in KVM, and the reproducible packaging and configuration system that is important for a maintainable compartmentalized system.

https://spectrum-os.org/

https://diode.zone/c/spectrum/videos

Couple great options I've never heard about, now I'm stealing from the blogpost.

I'm a NixOS user and I know Gobolinux is a few years older, this blogpost (from 2011) was actually useful for me at the time when I decided to pick NixOS for my workstations: https://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2011/12/evaluation-and...

Nowadays I'm also playing with Guix as well, I kinda love that everything can be unified in a more decent language (Guile Scheme) than Nix: https://guix.gnu.org/

For those unaware, one of the best resources to learn Rocq: https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/

Thanks for writing this, its sad that not a lot of people talk about Property-Based testing, it's one of these great ideas from the late 90's that never seem to hit the mainstream despite how awesome it looks.

Kinda reminds me of the story of king Croesus of Lydia, who asked the oracle of Delphi whether he should wage war against Cyrus the Great, the Oracle promptly told him that by doing so he would "destroy a great empire". Croesus then promptly attacked the Persians and lost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croesus#War_against_Persia_and...

  Location: Brazil (UTC-4)
  Remote: YES
  Willing to relocate: MAYBE
  Technologies: Erlang, F#, Gleam, Nix, NixOS, Linux, Ocaml, Python, SQL, AWS, Azure, Bash, PostgreSQL, Docker, DevOps, Terraform / Tofu
  Résumé/CV: https://schonfinkel.github.io/static/cv.pdf
  Email: marcos.schonfinkel [at] gmail.com

https://schonfinkel.github.io/

Mine is a forever ongoing experiment on Emacs + Orgmode + org-roam + Nix, among many other tools. I need to get back and write more.