Threads for L8D
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- spending my first weekend as a recurser!
- picking up groceries for the RC food events
- hoping to hack on some weekend code to relearn state management and networking in Elm.
- preparing myself to host an Elm workshop in the next week or two. I’m following rtfeldman’s elm workshop
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I’m super happy about this! I’m planning on moving to Brooklyn later this year and now I won’t need to commute to Manhattan for RC.
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Contacts really help too
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Contacts are the way to go. Make some friends and help around.
I have helped run the high school computer lab, which has landed me a job with the teacher’s company. When my peers and school pals grow old enough, they have started supplying me with opportunities. And I try to do the same thing for them.
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Figuring out how to start implementing a vast project that’s been in the “discovery phase” forever.
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MVP.
I wanted to build this correspondence chess game over SMS. For the longest time I had a lot of ambitions for it but never got anywhere with them. Then finally one day I just hacked out the smallest dumbest prototype and it worked. If I hadn’t done that, I would’ve never gotten anywhere with it.
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they should’ve released this back in April…
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cue ignorant developer who refuses to use mix-blend-mode for their project due to “privacy violations”
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BTW it appears you forgot to update the favicon
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have my last interview this week then i am done with the job hunt!!
Got my first mac, and will be setting up XCode and stuff and figuring out how it works!
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Wow, congratulations on both: getting a new job and getting your first mac.
Especially if you’re coming from Linux, take some time to savour your new Mac’s features. First impressions never have second chances, and I remember my own feelings when I got my first Mac: both a feeling of discovery, something new, and a bit of wow because of the polished interface and integration.
Do you have an iPhone too? iCloud is the target of many memes but the truth is that mac-phone integration is great this days.
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I use an android phone (Moto X2) as my daily driver eventhough i have an old iphone4s but it is giving me issues with wifi (have to literally freeze it to make the wifi start working for an hour or so).
The biggest problem i had was that update download stops when i close the lid, weird. since the updates are usually huge i don’t want to leave my mac active using caffeine, This issue was quickly solved using insomniaX.
It’s a macbook air so i’ve been using nomachine to access my old linux laptop and write code for the linux distro i contribute too, no other solution worked as good as nomachine.
also getting used to brew, after many years of jumping between apt, yum & pacman. brew is fine, brew cask is very helpful.
finally App discovery is still a problem for me, trying to find places where i can get good app recommendations.
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There are many threads and FAQs on reddit’s /r/apple regarding “software for switchers”. In general, the builtins work well (safari, mail.app, photos, etc), and for specific tasks you can try OSX counterparts for Linux software.
brewis crucial if you come from a linux environment, I see that you already discovered it.Anyway, if you want any specific recommendation, just ask here and I’m sure we’ll give you more than enough options :)
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Especially if you’re coming from Linux, take some time to savour your new Mac’s features.
Ah, those wonderful OS X features:
- no official package manager with which you can control all your installed software
- incredibly old package versions
- a fsync() that will not flush the disk’s cache; they have a F_FULLFSYNC fcntl for that that almost no software uses, so enjoy losing PostgreSQL data in the case of a crash ;-)
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:/
I know, but it gives you a good UI with excellent battery life and i don’t plan on install PostgreSQL on this machine anyway, it’s a tiny air. I will use a linux box using ssh or using remote desktop (i do desktop app development for linux too).
Kinda like some people did with their iPads early on.
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Do remember to head into System Settings -> Security and turn on the local firewall and FileVault (full disk encryption) as one of the first things you do. FileVault doesn’t, in my experience, make your Mac run any slower, but it’s super cool to know that you at least have some security for your sensitive data on you Mac.
Other than that, give Safari a chance. I used Chrome for many years when I ran Linux as my main operating system, but Safari is so much more smooth and consumes less battery if you’re on a laptop. I’ve been using Safari for 3 years now and every time I use Chrome, which I do everyday to separate work and personal logins, I loathe it.
Oh, and the built-in terminal is great, but I think iTerm2 is way better! Try it out!
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It is in my experience.
The thing about Safari is that the team focuses more on the experience, thus the smoothness, as low power usage as possible and such as opposed to Chrome which focuses on having “all the features”. That, Safari don’t have, but instead they have a browser where scrolling is smooth, it doesn’t eat my ram even with 30 tabs (my max number of tabs ever) and 3 windows, and the whole thing just “feels” better to use. It’s hard to describe, but “feel” is what sets it apart. Chrome on the other hand just feels powerful with no regard to the soul sucking jhankyness that those powers require. Safari also has a better UI in my opinion, which doesn’t hurt either.
There is uBlock (not origin) for Safari, which is what I use, btw.
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I wonder why they don’t provide any hosted solutions or services like 99% of the other web servers do. That has shown to be incredible viable and sustainable. But I don’t really know anything about business practices and SaaS
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Many times when the OpenBSD group asks for donations, people come back with: why not offer some subscription or some more tangible goods like USB keys or whatnot? The answer is that it’s just more work to be done, and we’re not asking for money in exchange for more work selling more goods, we’re asking for money in exchange for what we’ve already done. The software we’ve written is the thing you are getting, and you are already getting it, and we would like to be supported financially to continue doing that specific thing.
Offering hosted solutions and support contacts just means less developer time on the code that everyone uses, and much more time on the hosted solutions and support contracts for those few that gave money.
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Have companies been reluctant to donate rather than purchase things? I’ve noticed patio11 gripe against it but not investigated his legal concerns.
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whoa. that’s an extremely interesting point. it’s like the linux distributions that used to sell cds - it was implicitly understood that you weren’t really paying for the cd, or even all that much for the convenience (since iirc the model survived well into the time that home bandwidth was good enough to download an iso), but to support the project. nonetheless the cd set both a clear figure for a “reasonable amount” of financial support by an individual to the project, and gave you something tangible to point to and think “i paid for that”.
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On the smaller side of budgeting I’ve definitely seen that. A lot of companies (even some universities) allow employees to buy software, books, etc. related to their job, up to a budget limit. But it’s structured as reimbursement for purchases, not as a pool of money you can do whatever you want with. So, for example, you can buy Sublime Text for $70 if that’s your preferred text editor, and they’ll reimburse you the $70. But if Sublime Text were donationware, you wouldn’t be able to donate $70 of the company’s money to them.
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But people…. just don’t work that way, do they? Without a tangible carrot in exchange for their money, most will not give money. If they already have the carrot, most do not feel compelled to give the money. You need some sort of, uh, “coercion”. Also, a lot of companies just can’t donate money. Their accountants need to be able to say, “this is what we got in return for the money”, and charity is not something.
For Octave, I have been trying to find a way to get free carrot to sell, because donations barely cover a few people’s plane tickets to our yearly meeting.
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You are 100% nailed it with the “this is what we got in return for the money”. Additionally, while support is a very solid something, it tends to be a fungible thing. “Well, did you shop around getting support for product X from other companies?”. That is what is great about the consortium model – there is no other source for consortium membership. It is a great line item “Consortium Membership”. It is a combination of support AND influence (read: direct contact), and companies might only pay a little for support, but will pay a good deal more for piece of mind and influence.
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I struggled with this myself (author of Sidekiq here) as a OSS developer and project lead.
- I didn’t want to start a business with all the admin overhead that implies.
- I didn’t want to sell support, that incents you to provide poor documentation/community.
- I didn’t want to provide a SaaS, that requires 24/7 support, hiring a team, etc. See 1.
In the end, I felt that selling additional features was the best option for me personally, thus Sidekiq Pro and Sidekiq Enterprise. Of course I had to start a business to make it legit but I don’t have 90% of the admin overhead of a “real” business since I have no employees and provide no benefits to myself (aside from a basic paycheck).
I actually spoke with Matt privately a few days ago and offered what advice I could. Everyone’s situation is different so different strokes for different folks.
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I found you speaking on https://changelog.com/92/ and https://changelog.com/159/ useful on this topic, as I’ve started my own business supporting http://prometheus.io.
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Incidental support seems nightmarish, dealing with many individuals. But what about the SQLite Consortium model of focusing on a few large “users” and allowing them to basically fund it. https://www.sqlite.org/consortium.html
I really think the consortium model is very sane and applicable to a lot of infrastructure projects (like Caddy or Sidekiq). It asks those who can easily pay to pay, and they get something in exchange for it.
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That’s very intersting, thanks! Compared to other OSS projects, such as those run by the ASF, consortium members essentially get a combination of benefits a non-profit foundation would provide in terms of project oversight, and what 3rd party companies with developers on staff would offer in terms of support contracts.
However, this only works if some of your core developers have consulting skills they wish to sell, and especially this promise is a bit rough on developers: “Consortium members can call any developer at any time, day or night, and expect to get their full and immediate attention.” I’m not sure I would be up for that. But that’s just a detail of terms. The model itself is quite sound.
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“Consortium members can call any developer at any time, day or night, and expect to get their full and immediate attention.” I’m not sure I would be up for that. But that’s just a detail of terms.
Yeah, and remember, the “floor” is $75000 yearly, and most major companies contribute far more and very seldom call. It is a security blanket. See the agreement: https://www.sqlite.org/consortium_agreement-20071201.html for more information.
It seems that more infrastructure based open-source projects should look to SQLite (arguably the most successful infrastructure product ever: https://www.sqlite.org/famous.html) for guidance on how to manage funding.
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I am not sure “very good” is even required. I think you just have to be something companies depend on. They have a vested interest in your success at that point, you are in it together. If you vanish they have to switch (non-trivial cost) or take up maintenance themselves (super-non-trivial cost). From Sidekiq to Caddy there are DOZENS of projects in open source that I could see easily being funded this way. Companies are happy to lend support for like $6k a month in exchange for support and more important, influence (non-binding influence, but influence nevertheless).
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It doesn’t seem like they are looking to start a business, but a way to compensate developers for their time and effort. Assuming they generate some cashflow, I wonder what the distribution will actually look like. I guess we will have to wait for a follow up.
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I don’t understand the last two paragraphs at all. Everything in programming is about discipline or convenience; that’s how progress in languages and libraries happens, by making things more convenient or reducing the need for discipline.
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I’m saying that all these progressive technologies are a matter of discipline or convenience where we should be weighing the cost and benefit, but many will treat them as the standard that everyone must comply with. They ignore the costs of using these new technologies and blindly plunge into their pitfalls and continue to justify their decision “because everyone else is doing it.”
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In the current JS ecosystem, there is basically no desire for discipline.
There is however some odd bottomless stamina for switching from tool to tool, ever eager to find the one that files off the slight sharp edge that was inconvenient to the seeker.
Of course, sitting down, shutting up, and just getting fast at using the jank would save more time than continually trying to remove the jank, but hey, this is the web, and we’ve got funding to waste.
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This article is in desperate need of some editing. I’d love to know why he no longer uses MVC frameworks but he goes on tangents before he even begins. A thesis statement would be nice too.
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Are there any real advantages to doing something like this but with a MIDI controller instead of code?
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Perhaps just ‘historical’?
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What about the post(s) with the most comments?
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Behind 3 ‘what are you working on’ ones, this story.
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I more or less subscribe to this methodology, however it breaks down in long-lived feature branches (I know, a bad thing anyway) with several collaborators. If you wait to rebase until the branch is “complete” then you risk some really hairy conflicts and potentially flat-out breaking the feature you’ve been collaborating on in hard-to-identify ways. If you rebase frequently, then you screw up peoples' local repo when they get out-of-sync with the newly forced branch refs. Generally rewriting history in a collaborative environment requires great care.
One of the best things I picked up from this post was actually from the comments - I didn’t realize
--force-with-leasewas a thing, but I like it. It’s too bad it’s such a long option, but it may help this collaborating with rebases problem somewhat.-
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When you do
--forceit means you don’t care about prompts or warnings, and you just want to do what you want to do. Making--forcebehave as--force-with-leasemeans it won’t force when you really want it to force. I’d prefer something like--overwriteor--rewriteto make it clear you’re removing history, but it’s also not going to get held back by the conventional semantics of CLI toos.
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So what’s the alternative? If I want a lightweight, readable language and I can’t stand exceptions, Python may well still be my best option.
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One smart co-worker once taught me a simple thing: human brain is the most adaptive system of all that we use in software. In subjective cases where you simply “can’t stand” something the alternative is to change the attitude rather than work against any piece of software. It’s usually much easier than it seems at first.
(Trying Rust after ~10 years in Python, it seemed to me at first that there’s no way people writing all this error matching code couldn’t see that it’s awfully inefficient and unreadable. When I switched my brain from fighting into understanding, it stopped hurting in about two weeks time.)
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I felt the same way about Go (having to write all the error handling code drove me nuts). After a little bit I didn’t mind at all. It’s a design choice and it fits with the language’s design. Go’s
panic/recoverprovides truly exceptional exceptions as the author of this post seems to prefer (though they’re not declared).But generally this post doesn’t make much sense to me. Maybe the author’s actually annoyed by the difference between checked and unchecked exceptions?
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OCaml with Core as your stdlib is actually pretty solid. All methods that return exceptions are explicitly marked by ending in
_exn, and I can’t think of any example where there isn’t an equivalent version that instead returnsSome fooorNone, which (unlike in Go) you cannot ignore and must pattern match sanely. This post and its ancestors provides a good comparison of Python and OCaml from the perspective of moving a very large code base from one language to the other incrementally.-
Sure (and in reality I personally use Scala which is pretty similar to OCaml). But I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to prefer Python to OCaml, even if one dislikes exceptions - the OCaml syntax is a bit ugly, Python’s OO support is actually quite nice, and while OCaml has become a lot more popular of late there’s still a bigger community/ecosystem around Python, particularly for the web or science.
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I find exception control flow confusing to read, and hard to retain correctness when refactoring. I prefer to use values (functional style) for any “normal” control flow e.g. input validation, no entries found (where that’s a part of normal operation), any “4xx situation”. I’d only use exceptions for “system” failures like out-of-memory, connection refused, a “5xx situation”, or anything that definitely indicates programmer error - the kind of thing I’d expect to set up developer alerts for.
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I find exception control flow confusing to read, and hard to retain correctness when refactoring.
This is probably, full stop, the worst thing about dealing with “exception first” languages.
I find it impossible to refactor code that generates / handles exceptions the first time. I almost always end up with the exception handler too deep to react, or the exception generator moved above the scope of the catch statement.
Say what you will about Java, but at least the compiler yells at me when that happens. In Python I have to depend on my tests to tickle the condition – and if it’s truly an exceptional exception, the odds of that error sneaking into my code is significantly high.
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I was just having an extended exchange about this on HN. Even in Java with a checked exception, I’ve broken working code by reordering seemingly orthogonal lines. I think you need a (small) visual distinction between calls that throw and calls that don’t - something like the
=/distinction you get with monadic style. Alternatively, if all the Java tools highlighted calls that declare exceptions (the same way implicit conversions or by-name parameters get a green underline when working in Scala) that would make checked exceptions a lot more usable.
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Once you have exceptions, you have to start thinking about exception safety. How hard that is depends on the language.
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Exceptions can be seen as dishonest, in a sense – they are an affordance that encourages a “fix and continue” style of programming, and where they are available, they often are used for things that are non-fatal, hence, non-exceptional. I don’t mind them as much as some others do, and I do sympathize with the notion of not fighting the platform – yes, you could implement a
Some 'a | Error of msgidiom in Python, but you’d still be stuck with catching and wrapping exceptions, so you’re better off just going along to get along.
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Lua seems like an obvious choice; it’s several orders of magnitude lighter, just as readable, and doesn’t have exceptions.
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error/pcall are Lua’s throw/catch, they just don’t get used much.
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I’ve been trying to promote the term RESTless to describe rpc-over-HTTP apis.
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I would, yes. It’s right up front: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm
This chapter introduces and elaborates the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems,
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Funny how they go into great detail on how Rib works, why it’s useful and how they use it, yet it’s not open source or available as a library in any form or fashion. Maybe the idea is interesting, but we have yet to see it in practice, and we have no idea how this is intended to be used in the context of existing applications that would want to use it as a client-side proxy of sorts. I don’t find this article very useful or interesting in any regard ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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I am participating in Hack RC! The calendar event is 24 hours so I assume I will be spending this Wednesday hacking on self-hosted CI/CD with GitLab and k8s. I think the global game jam is later this week or something and I will be going to the NYU game center to hack with a team of recursers.