tom-jh

Encouraged by the comments here, I tried a few prompts for it to do something useful for our company. Most failed, but it's apparently great at improving our documentation. Here's the prompt and the result as an example:

Can you improve the following text for clarity: "When deploying into the enterprise, there is a lot of flexibility when it comes to deciding how you structure the deployment, whether you want to run supporting services on premise, and which ones (if any) you choose to deploy. The decisions depend on how you plan to use our software and your security requirements. We’ll be happy to discuss these with you at [email]."

Result:

"When deploying our software into your enterprise, you have the flexibility to decide on the structure of the deployment, including running supporting services on premise and selecting which ones (if any) to deploy. Your decisions should be based on your intended use of our software and your security requirements. If you need help with these decisions, please feel free to contact us at [email]"

It did indeed improve clarity and readability without screwing anything up. I just want to run this thing on our whole website/repo now, and I wonder how.

You may put your account email address instead of the number, as in /u/myemail@example.com

I use the 2021-02-26 format for every place that asks for a date without a clear format. All legal contracts, forms, email etc, across US and Europe. Never got any trouble for it - it seems people readily understand the format even if they may think it's a bit unusual.

I wish it was the norm.

Maybe join my company, or another company like us?

We're funded from customer revenue. Privacy focused. No VCs, so no moral flexibility needed on our end to meed VC expectations. We don't do any dark patterns. All remote.

There's GitLab, Wikimedia, Cockroach Labs, etc.. there are opportunities out there if you make it a real priority to work at such place.

Tested, Kotlin is not supported, nor is Swift.

I've just tested their lgtm.com on our codebase:

1) identified str.replace('[ABC]+', '') correctly as a bug (looks like a regex but is string literal)

2) identified various unnecessary code that TypeScript overlooked

3) identified double-unescaping of html (this one would have probably gone unnoticed for years)

And a bunch of other stuff. No actual vulnerability in our case, but still very useful. I'm enabling their checks on every future PR.

This was TypeScript but they support the rest of our stack too (Python, Java). I wonder if this includes Kotlin - will try.

Scala and Clojure are a bit of a leap for a Java dev, which may come with some cost. I don't get that feeling with Kotlin - you can kind of slip into it, it's a very easy transition, and then you don't want to go back.

Sure, Java interop will make some code parts look a lot more like Java then like Kotlin, but I can't personally imagine that a team would decide to switch back to Java-only after using Kotlin for a while. Interested to be proven wrong if someone has seen that happen.

Seconding TypeScript. If you are a js dev looking to pick up something new, just rename a .js file to .ts, open it in vscode, watch the magic. It will, I think, make you a better js dev.

Take a look at Kotlin. We are building our enterprise products with it. You get all the benefits of Java (stability, maturity) without the bad parts (boilerplate, boredom).

We just hired a Kotlin person (really a Java guy who refreshed his Kotlin over the weekend) for this, and we may be hiring more.

I suspect more companies will start looking at Kotlin in the next 2-3 years, especially for green field projects.

We run in-browser end to end tests for our browser extension. There were several reasons for flakiness:

* Puppeteer (browser automation) bugs or improper use. Certain sequence of events could deadlock it, causing timeouts relatively rarely. The fix was sometimes upgrading puppeteer, sometimes debugging and working around the issue.

* Vendor API, particularly their oauth screen. When they smell automation, they will want to block the requests on security grounds. We have routed all requests through one IP address and reuse browser cookies to minimize this.

* Vendor API again, this time hitting limits on rare situations. We could have less parallel tests, but then you waste more time waiting.

Eventually, we will have to mock up this (fairly complex) API to progress. It's got to a point where I don't feel like adding more tests because they may cause further flakiness - not good.

I built https://flowcrypt.com solo for the first two years. I would have preferred a partner, but nobody committed.

Today 3+ years later it's a three person team. Maybe in another year I can have reasonable work life balance again. Maybe.

FlowCrypt | developer | full-time + part-time | REMOTE

FlowCrypt does PGP email encryption; easier than anything you've tried.

  let you = new TeamMember();

  if (
    you.know(TYPESCRIPT | SWIFT) && 
    you.write(READABLE_CODE) && 
    you.hate('9-5') && 
    you.areFrom(EARTH)
  ) {
    await you.email('tom@flowcrypt.com');
  }

Nobody mentions Android. Any examples good quality code on Android?

FlowCrypt dev here. You're free to get the source code from https://github.com/FlowCrypt and load the extension that way. If you plan to also edit the code, just cross-check to stay within the bounds bounds of https://github.com/FlowCrypt/flowcrypt-browser/blob/master/L...

FlowCrypt dev here. The sources are available at https://github.com/FlowCrypt . You can just install it from the sources, but you'll lose the security updates.

Take a look at https://cryptup.org (disclaimer - my project). Encryption can be made easy.

RFC4880 may be ugly. Yet great design can still turn it into a good user experience.

I don't think anyone considers TCP/IP pretty. Who cares? When I open my browser, I see none of it.

Ah, Firefox. Now fixed for real. Thanks!

(edit: it's fixed now) First time I see it like that, I assume one of your plugins is blocking it (direct links to google profiles). I'll store the images & serve them directly. Thanks!

It is indeed a pain. That's why I made https://cryptup.org/

For some of my users, using Gmail itself is already challenging.

Yet they are sending around PGP encrypted messages, attachments, etc.

Even my mom is using this. For encryption software, moms count double.