I think that many Rails projects do end up needing this kind of functionality.

How does your solution differ from existing open source tools or services like Docraptor?

would love to know what extensions he’s using in sublime for compile checking

In case someone hasn’t heard of it, Mosh is a replacement for ssh that is designed with the intention of the workflow described in the article (working in a session on a remote machine).

I have personally stopped using tmux after getting used to neovim and its terminal mode. It is not perfect, but I like having one less layer to manage.

A solid list, with one question mark.

Lynn Conway started life as a man. does this mean he/then her achievements give equally credited to men/women?

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/philipsu/2006/06/14/broken-windows-theory/

Windows code is too complicated. It’s not the components themselves, it’s their interdependencies. An architectural diagram of Windows would suggest there are more than 50 dependency layers (never mind that there also exist circular dependencies). After working in Windows for five years, you understand only, say, two of them. Add to this the fact that building Windows on a dual-proc dev box takes nearly 24 hours, and you’ll be slow enough to drive Miss Daisy.

I haven’t been around in the industry too long, i was in school when this blog entry was posted. But I’ve seen a few projects struggle and fail because of bad architecture and increasing technical debt. The OPs article definitely reflects the struggle between new features, legacy support, and paying down the technical debt (improving security, etc.).

If you are getting to the interview, then your resumé is doing its job. As the seniority of the positions you apply for grows, the usefulness of that document tends to shrink, leading to other aspects of the job application process taking on more importance. So I would focus on what happens after the resumé is reviewed: the interview itself. When you say “doesn’t work very well”, what do you mean exactly?

Once you are in the room (or on the call) for an interview, worry less about the job description and focus more on showing the person you are talking to that you are great to work with. It depends on the company, or course, but in my eperience job posts say things like “n years of experience in technology x”, but what people are looking for is an ability to communicate well about technical topics, be honest about not knowing answers to questions, and ask insightful questions about what is important. This stuff is often not in the job description.

When interviewing a person, I don’t really care what tools or languages they’ve used, or what the high level descriptions of the projects they’ve done are. I am looking for:

• Can this person translate a technical problem into language that can be understood, both by someone familiar with the technoligy and someone who isn’t?
• Can this person reflect back on what worked and what didn’t on projects?
• Do they get defensive when challenged?
• Can they describe a time they worked out an issue where they disagreed with someone else’s opinion? How was the situation resolved?
• Can this person identify what is relevant in a certain context? For example, if you’re asked to go through your experience, don’t walk through every job you’ve had and explain what languages you’ve used at those companies. You want to say something like “my background over the past n years is mostly full stack development, typically Ruby on the backend and an assortment of JavaScript frameworks on the front end. Before that I did…” Then focus in on particular roles that you can talk about in depth: projects that had interesting problems, where you learned important lessons, or that time has given you insights on. Remember, your resumé was good enough to get you to where you are now and has served its purpose. You don’t need to talk about every job you’ve had. Spent the limited time you have in an interview talking about what best presents your abilities.
• Can this person verbalize why they want the job?

In terms of getting a higher position, you need to be able to say “I haven’t done this specific thing before, but I have this relevent experience that shows I have related skills. I am confident that I can take the additional responsibility on.” As others have mentioned, some companies prefer to promote from within. But a lot of people advance their careers by changing roles and companies at the same time.

One other thought is to think about what kind of companies you are applying at. There might be a mismatch that is contributing to your experiences so far.

I thought Moxie’s response on HN (technically responding to the wired article, but I don’t think he would say anything substantially different about the blog post) was really good. The conclusion of which is

To me, this article reads as a better example of the problems with the security industry and the way security research is done today, because I think the lesson to anyone watching is clear: don’t build security into your products, because that makes you a target for researchers, even if you make the right decisions, and regardless of whether their research is practically important or not. It’s much more effective to be Telegram: just leave cryptography out of everything, except for your marketing.

The approach described in this article should work for any front end app whose build tools require node and npm, such as apps that use webpack.

Electron is popular because is has little (no?) competition in its space. What are the other tools that provide the same level of code reuse between platforms, a UI toolkit that many developers already know how to use, and is free? Electron’s popularity is more the result of limited adoption of other cross platform tools than it is an endorsement of its particular approach.

This is where you end up when the big platform developers are not interested in supporting other platforms. See also the rise of React Native for similar reasons in the mobile space.

I find it a little funny that the argument used against many cross platform toolkits over the years was that they weren’t “native enough”, and now we are seeing more and more desktop apps built on top of a web browser.

Do the changes made in Jehanne (vs. the other Plan 9 descendants) make it any easier to compile and run a modern web browser? It seems like this is the stumbling block all alternative OSes are tripped up by these days.

This article contains a great explanation of the differences between how scalar, superscalar, and out of order CPUs execute instructions.

The survey doesn’t have much substance, unfortunately. It asks people to identify themselves using a single term (“conservative”, “liberal”, “libertarian”, with a few shades in between). These terms have relative meanings and this seems like a faulty foundation for this kind of work. It would be better to ask for participant’s views on specific issues.

This survey answers the question “do people who identify with a particluar ideological label or a particular religion feel as though their views aren’t welcomed?” What it will not show is if this feeling accurately reflects reality, and, perhaps more importantly, it will not determine if those views are worth being shared in a group setting.

I tried to use an iPad for web development work this year, but the lack of on-device in-browser dev tools was a deal breaker.

I haven’t tried Eruda yet, but it looks very promising. It doesn’t support editing CSS within a live page, but even without that it could be a useful troubleshooting tool.

I’ve seen a few posts about Slack’s backend engineering. I’m normally interested in stuff like this, but honestly, their frontend client is so slow - so frustratingly slow - that I never read them. I wish they’d get it sorted out, I mean it’s truly abysmal.

This technique, while very impressive, is disorienting as a user. The images shown to a single user for a movie or show change constantly, which makes recognizing titles based on their cover art nearly impossible.

If they were customized but more stable on a per-user basis, I think the experience would be vastly improved.

In terms of selecting an appropriate vocabulary for discussion or writing, it is imperative to understand your audience. “Bigger” words or technical language often exist to communicate ones ideas more fully and exist as useful abstractions in the right context. The author’s concerns are valid, but it is also worth not limiting yourself to the most simple forms of programming or communication as an absolute rule.

Higher level languages and techniques are inherently more complex, but the benefit of this abstraction is being able to focus on solving a problem by communicating your intent in terms that more closely match your understanding of the problem.

The term “simple” can also mean a lot of different things. C and Ruby are both simple in some ways and complex in others.

Seems like this is targeted specifically at the use case of running inside a browser.

I’m just transitioning from npm to yarn for my own projects. Current versions of either seem pretty good to me, and much improved over old versions of npm in terms of speed.

Faster is always better, but I don’t feel seriously inconvenienced by existing tooling anymore (at least on my own projects, which are not that large.) Are there still major performance concerns for typical projects with existing tools?

This is a very nice idea, and like issues, ties you into the infrastructure.

The problem I have with this is that - like issues - it now separates out the code from the discussions about the code in not a nice way.

Ideally, the infrastructure would be a nice GUI on top of a data structure either embeded in git (like commits, tags, etc) or closely allied with it such that when I mirror the code to other infrastructure, or to my local machine, the issues and discussions come with it.

Currently, for example, I will have commits in the code that reference issue #12 and github’s infrastructure does a wonderful job of cross-linking and tooltipping and what not. I move to gitlab. BOOM! All gone.

One could argue that when github disappears we will all be pretty old, and our antique code will only be seen in museums because all the kids are using AIs to program, or the AIs are programming the kids, either way.

But, you know, I have a code base from sourceforge (yeah, remember that, kids?) that is now 15 years old. The commit messages have survived just fine (migrated from CVS or SVN I forget) but not the issues. Were there any important design decisions based on the issues and the discussions around the issues. Yeah, yeah, I should have put them in the commit, but I’m human. And why must I repeat information?

-Yours in elderly (not that elderly!) rantiness

It is worth noting that ActiveRecord::Observers was removed from Rails 4 in favor of using more explicit methods to invoke behavior.

The current trend is to use a service object to encapsulate work that doesn’t cleanly fit into a model, although there are undoubtedly other approaches as well.

Does anybody have some ideas on why we as software developers are so likely to shirk our responsibility in the things we create?

Is it a capitalist thing where being paid to do something is all the justification needed, and everything else is “on them” (the people paying you for your work, the people who use the tool/system, the users who choose to interact with the system)?

Is it because our industry is young and so dominated by young people that there isn’t a long term perspective on the impact we have? How often do people ask each other or themselves, “how will I feel about this when I’m looking back over my life and what I’ve brought into the world?”

Is it the nihilistic view that “if we don’t do it, somebody else will, so it might as well be us?”

Is it just the simple fact that doing the right thing (what is in the interest of the people who our software will affect) is harder, takes more work, more discipline, and is not what we’re rewarded for (directly by superiors, or systemically)?

Is it that we all have so little faith in our industry as a whole that we’ve all shrugged and said “fuck it, I’m not going to be the only one who gives a shit”?

Is it the way that user’s are often talked down to and looked down on that effectively minimizes their view, perspectives, and interests?

Do you think it comes from other places?

Is our industry more or less prone to this? We do seem to be a particularly unconcerned and irresponsible group, but there are clearly more egregious examples (finance, pharmaceuticals, the fashion industry, and others). Not that it’s an excuse that others do even worse in some regards.

It’s a hard topic, and I can be prone to cynicism, but I don’t see Silicon Valley moving in the opposite direction any time soon. That said, everything creates its own resistance, and I have seen small trends of choosing sincerity and giving and shit over cynicism and disregard.

Thoughts or perspectives?