“The code can always get worse.” “…there is no abrupt failure threshold associated with software quality…” From: There’s No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get A useful reminder about the endless, bottomless pit that a software project can become. The pit is not a barren void, it’s a gorgeous geological wonder of morphologies.
Dillo browser’s directory of bookmarks Is it Time to Regulate React? Ubiquitous language worst case. Same name, different article.
Chapter 1 It’s Wednesday evening. Incandescence lazes out from the rectangle in the southeast corner of my home work station. Zen Master Bon Seong, a fiery bushel on screen, a big circle face in the biggest square. He is using the figurative Zen Stick to short-circuit our cognition. He is fond of saying things like “You are stardust” or “What is I?”. Jeff breathes hot air through the broom on his face.
There are too many people to listen to out there. (Not sure why I wrote this. Was I overwhelmed by my podcast feed?) The vulnerabilities of the supply chain undo software’s hard surface. (Also, as Thomas Depierre intones in the hurdy-gurdy of I am not a supplier) These first two things are about overwhelm, not being able to squeeze the gestalt in your fingers. My body is a wispy cloud all this content flows through.
Senior engineering: make things happen in the margin.
Long form ✈️ Airport Libraries Take Off | American Libraries Magazine 📦 ZIP Code First 🤖 AI and that Guy at the bar — cobbles 🤖 Amplifiers of Epistemic Posture | rotating_the_space 🤖 Generative AI is not going to build your engineering team for you - Stack Overflow Fedi (maybe links to long form) 😜 Deep Space 90210: “1 Miles O’Brien is worth 1.6 K…” - Mastodon 👩🚀 GeePawHill: “Oh!
🦺 Molly guard in reverse – Unsung 🤝 Anytype — A safe haven for digital collaboration 🤖 Debugging with AI: Can It Replace an Experienced Developer? Shovel | Introducing Shovel 🦾 Building Bulletproof React Components - Shu Ding 🦻 Oatmeal - Screen readers 🧱 The logo soup problem (and how to solve it) | Sanity
At the start of 2025 I embarked on a rewrite of HistoryPin.org for Shift Collective, an Exygy Client and important place on the web where communities self-determine their stories. After being impressed with Cursor’s ability to create a meaningful contribution summary gleaned from the git commit history for SF’s Our415.org code, I let Cursor loose again. Strung together, these terse paragraphs form a pretty reasonable narrativization of my work on the rewrite.
In the fall of 2024 I joined the Consulting division of Exygy, an agency that delivers web tech solutions for civic and non-profit organizations. My very first assignment was getting a project of the Deparment of Youth and Families – Our415.org – launch-ready. Having a direct impact on families in SF was a very rad proposition, being a resident myself. Bringing a project home that’s close to home. In short time I completed a gaggle of technical work on Our415.
McKenzie Warks' A Hacker Manifesto is so bergizi (this wonderful lexical utterance meaning nutrient stuffed in standard Indonesian). So I skipped to the end notes, sue me; reading ass backwards might be the trick here. Or, if your prefer to expect the unexpected, spin a bottle to choose an entry point. Once you make progress, make sure to reprint and scatter the individuated sections that you’ve read and then affix them to posts along Triton’s surface.
In 2015 I bought this book. 7, or 8 years ago. Year one into my software career. This book is canon. I've had little use for its studies of algorithms. # thus far, see below I don't think Bentley would be offended. First sentence: "Computer programming has many faces." I’m sure I glanced at its pages before entering the corporate interview gauntlet to get in the vigilante mood. To shake out the shoulders, find some relaxment, whilst staring down a twenty two minute treadmill run or pile of laundry Sunday evening.
What are probably appropriate attacks on assigning calamity to the hand-wavy concept of “human error”. Lorin strengthens his theory that human error probably doesn’t exist by considering complex, fault-tolerant systems like Amazon S3 incapable of receiving “human error” as apology or eulogy when there’s a hard drive failure. WHAT. Secret guerrilla human rights interventions by the artist collective GALA Committee on Melrose fucking Place. > For three years, as the denizens of the Melrose Place apartment complex loved, lost, and betrayed one another, the GALA Committee smuggled subversive leftist art onto the set, experimenting with the relationship between art, artist, and spectator.
Aaron Straup Cope’s talk notes for Wishful Thinking VIBES. I read this post a few days ago and have since wandered through the hyperlinks to his other stuff. It’s clear that for some time Cope has been baking thoughts about the cultural heritage sector and its responsibility - “relationship” - to engage with emerging “virtualization” technologies and the techno-capitalist system. (As I’m learning: he’s been committed to the web writ large, you can see it through numerous cyber- and hyper- textual projects playing freely in the “network of patient documents”; his own delightful euphemism.
Originally posted as a micro website at https://ross-rutabagas.neocities.org/. Rutabagas are now sprouting here when the time is right. Volume 1 includes “found dates” – but later volumes will be less temporally registered (I think). (Why “Rutabagas”? This was Zee’s fault when he extemporaneously blurted “Ross' Rutabagas” as a fake shop name to stand in for an example during a Zinc Coop ensemble sesh.) 10/06/23 - [r/Jazz] Nat King Cole Appreciation Post & [r/Jazz] Nat King Cole Piano Recordings
> But night software is not like that. It’s not written for the day job. It’s not written to see the light of day at all. It’s not written to be looked at and scrutinized by anybody. It’s intimate and personal, it’s messy and buggy. To take a look is to transgress.
Boundary cross. Sex.
From a small heap software that helps make software. By way of Devine Lu Linvega
IYKYK DEI in tech is all but dead. If you’re an outsider, it’s important to understand that employee-led efforts to make workplaces less racist – which began in earnest at the onset of the Obama years – have been steadily blotted out since Trump. The Tech aristocracy has decided to abandon DEI budgets along with other workplace perks. As @betsythemuffin notes (in the thread I’ll be referencing below): > DEI is seen by a sizable chunk of the funder class as an allowable luxury to keep the peons happy.
Documentation, naming things. Hard. Let’s see this hardness compound at the intersection of these two phenomena in the real world. I’m casually scanning the Apollo docs, reading up on subscriptions because my wife is writing graphql client code at work. (I had vague memories of how we worked with distributed event streaming at my last job. NestJS + Kafka. We had consolidated apis into a graphql layer, but worked with Kafka event streams through Nest with the kafka-js lib as a bridge.
The dangers of premature optimization are well understood among software engineers who’ve been frustrated by the secondary effects of code that end up compounding maintenance cost. (Does this principle play out in other milieu?). Nonetheless, there are times when optimizations are demonstrably beneficial but are difficult to implement because of system-wide or social dynamics that can’t or won’t accept the optimizations. Here I’m thinking with Dan Vanderkam’s post from back in September: The Saga of the Closure Compiler, and Why TypeScript Won.
There exist happy little clouds of coincidence when studying new languages. And not just across the computer ones, mind you! Ruby and Indonesian share a frugal brevity and disinterest in flairs of punctuation when managing possession. Itu bukuku. vs That's my book. And… me = Person.find(my_user_id) my_books = me.books vs const me = await prisma.user.findUnique({ where: { id: 99, }, include: { books: true } }); myBooks = me.books; Well, Rails AR query syntax vs Prisma (NodeJS).
Matz giving us many ways to do things. > I want to make Ruby users free. I want to give them the freedom to choose. People are different. From: 🔗 The Philosophy of Ruby: A Conversation with Yukihiro Matsumoto, Part I def two_lowest(numbers) numbers.min(2).sum end Enumerable methods that can receive an operator as symbol. Glacial autumn breeze whipped up from the 101. I don’t have a brevity fetish, like I know many of you do.