wainstead

Read this over a decade ago and it’s been on my mind a lot lately. Very timely.

The notion of the inner solar system being converted into computronium sounds less and less far-fetched with each passing month.

Is it just me or is this a giant red flag?

My team has a sandbox where we create, deploy, and run AI-generated code without a human in the loop.

Banks are a good example. I don't think they are losing much money with their software experience. Corporate websites (also mentioned in the article) is another thing that just doesn't matter that much.

The opening point is that these sites are stupid slow. And I agree with the author: there is no reason this far into the 21st century a bank's web page should take several seconds to load. It should load in under a second or two.

And, it's a great picture book as well.

https://www.davidspilmanfinebooks.com/pages/books/13948/caro...

Now’s a good time to post your resume here since you’re getting this attention!

Edit: doing it for ya…

https://www.ryanmercer.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanmercer317

https://issuu.com/ryanmercer/docs/ryan_mercer_resume_2023

"For the purpose of this report, Hired examined software engineering candidate interview requests (IVR) and salary data from January 2021 through December 2022 inclusive. The data included reflects over 68,500 candidates and 494,000 interview requests between companies and software engineers on Hired during this time period."

Then, I think, the numbers reflect only candidates and companies that use Hired, as opposed to the industry as a whole. I wonder how many folks land jobs through Hired?

Had to look up “motivated reasoning”… https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-97...

I will add that sites like Roll20.net solve the problem of online gaming for D&D (and many other TTRPGs), but your points still stand.

I think this company is highly optimistic, but this might fit the bill:

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/space-hotel-orbital-assem...

This. I recall most predictions saying 2024 would be the tipping point, but even then I doubt regulations at the local and national level will change that fast.

Or even more extreme, perhaps, TAILS on a stick and you just yank the stick when you're done. As long as you don't connect via Tor you're all alone.

Ah memories. My first machine was a Classic ii. I think it might be in a friend's garage in Ohio, will have to check with him. Thanks for the great post!

"The goal is not to be better than someone else; the goal is to be better than you were yesterday." (to paraphrase the Dalai Lama)

I recall seeing my first PHP/FI page in the middle 90s. PHP was a godsend after you'd suffered with Apache's "server side includes" [0], which is largely what it was used to replace.

Python's origin was as a teaching language (originally ABC I think?), and thus the simplicity of the syntax. It was kinda cool that Python was around for so long before it took off... I had the O'Reilly Python book way back in the 90s.

Perl's influences were awk, sed, bash, C, Fortran, and Lisp.

[0] https://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/linux/apache/ch10_01.htm

I guess you could describe it that way, but it reads more like a journal.

I'm also curios to know if it depends on the career, maybe a ML Engineer need more note taking than an electrician who wire cables

I started keeping a “log” back in 1999 just for work (I too am a software engineer). I note what I worked on and/or what problems I was trying to solve and/or what solutions I found. And some personal stuff too.

My inspiration is the idea of the scientist’s lab book where “if you didn’t write it down it didn’t happen.”

Countless times — even this past week - it has proven invaluable when I wanted to look up how I solved something before (“how do we generate those CSP headers on the fly?” “How did I mount that Docker container?”) or when no one knows why something was built a certain way (and I noted the date and time a manager made that decision).

After a few years I wind up with a few novels worth of entries (by volume) so it’s amazing how writing a little each day adds up.

As to format, it started as a .txt file in Emacs but has evolved into a moderately simple org-mode file.

A few years ago I pulled out Higher Order Perl and started playing with some of the advanced features/techniques available in the language. And it was really fun! I think Perl was the first popular multi-paradigm language.

For me it’s any kind of text processing; especially code generation for some one-off task, like churning out SQL or bash scripts/shell commands. Faster than doing it by hand. __END__ is one of my best friends because I can dump the input data right into the script. On the rare occasion I am irked whatever language I’m working in does not have format/write, which comes from the Fortran tradition iirc.

Agreed, and the cpan shell too.

CPAN was definitely the envy of other languages for many years but I feel most have caught up by now.

Perhaps OP meant Pascal programmers arguing among themselves, rather than arguing with anti-Pascal programmers? I'd expect such a smallish community of developers to find plenty of common grown in such a stable technology, so no need to throw stones.

I've got the voice of doubt in the back of my head always wondering what I'm missing, what if they're right, etc. It's a serious bummer.

There's probably a saying somewhere along the lines of "There are two kinds of programmers: those who admit they get Imposter's Syndrome, and those who are too afraid to admit it."

We all have those doubts. I've been in this since... what, 1994 professionally I suppose, and I still have doubts. It's totally normal. IS is not limited to software development either.

Would you mind sharing some things that juniors have forced that you think are bad?

Nested ternary operators... though, because of how TypeScript does constants, I saw why they used this way of doing things so often.

It’s worth learning in its own right… high time someone reposted “TCL the Misunderstood”…

Line editors for the win.

I’ve often likened it to “Emacs is a place you go, and stay there a long time.”

A number of the ideas here are given chapters in “Search Inside Yourself.” For learning/remembering things try the free “Learning How to Learn” on Coursera. It builds on a lot of cognitive science research and is only four weeks.

Had to look this up… here’s a starting point: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5575449/

Gotta 2x this comment: hire a trainer. It’s changed my life. You are accountable to someone who is invested in seeing you make progress and get better.

Because I work out three times a week my life is better on multiple fronts, including my concentration and coding.

Two years on I’m down 27 pounds and can do push-ups. I have never been able to do push-ups.

I thought that was strange myself.

At the bottom of the page we get:

Methodology

This report is based on proprietary data gathered and analyzed by Hired’s data science teams. For the purpose of this report, Hired examined software engineering candidate interview requests and salary data from January 2020 through December 2021 inclusive. The data included reflects over 366,000 interactions between companies and software engineering candidates during this time period.

In addition to our proprietary data, we collected survey responses from more than 2,000 software engineers on the Hired marketplace to inform our understanding of software engineers’ working preferences.