jadero

@jadero@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to be a -10x Engineer⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In the spirit of “-10x is dragging everyone else down” I offer my take on +10x:

  It’s not about personal productivity. It’s about the collective productivity that comes from developing and implementing processes that take advantage of all levels of skill, from neophyte to master, in ways that foster the growth of others, both in skill and in their ability to mentor, guide, and foster the growth of others. The ultimate goal is the “creation” of more masters and “multipliers” while making room for those whose aptitudes, desires, and ambitions differ from your own.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stacks for Simple Static Sites⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I tried a few. Zola was the only one I got far enough with to actually get my site deployed.

  Some of that might be that I learned stuff from my previous failures, but I really feel like the combination of the way it works and the Zola-specific themes are what worked for me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨With AI looming, is there still space for new coders?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But typically when a field becomes more affordable, it goes up in demand, not down, because the target audience that can afford the service grows exponentially.

  I’ve always been very up front with the fact that I could not have made a career out of programming without tools like Delphi and Visual Basic. I’m simply not productive enough to have to also transcribe my mental images into text to get useful and productive UIs.

  All of my employers and the vast majority of my clients were small businesses with fewer than 150 employees and most had fewer than a dozen employees. Not a one of them could afford a programmer who had to type everything out.

  If that’s what happens with AI tooling, then I’m all for it. There are still far too many small businesses, village administrators, and the like being left using general purpose office “productivity” software instead of something tailored to their actual needs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why software 'security debt' is becoming a serious problem for developers⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  … if your company or your job depend are at stake, that’s often a risk you have to take

  Take all the risks you want. Just be sure that you’re the one actually taking the risk, not the people whose data you manage. I get really tired of people and companies who claim that it was a necessary risk when they’re not the ones paying for the bad outcomes.

  You risk something by standing your ground, not in agreeing to that which puts me at risk.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why software 'security debt' is becoming a serious problem for developers⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  All excellent points. I never worked at those scales or under those conditions, neither should I have been permitted to. And I had enough self-awareness to keep myself away from anything like that.

  I guess when I read about this breach or that, the real damage seems to be a result of not having the basics covered. Whatever “basic” might mean for different scales of operation, encrypted at rest seems to be the the basis of public harm through theft of data, and it strikes me that if that can’t be managed at a particular scale, then operating at that scale should not be considered.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why software 'security debt' is becoming a serious problem for developers⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Of course, but that just makes the case for security as a foundational principle even stronger.

  Mistakes happen. They always will. That’s not a reason to just leave security as the afterthought it so often is.

  None of the things I mentioned have anything to do with errors and scope creep, but everything to do with building using sound principles and practices always. As in, you know, always. In class, during bootcamps, during design meetings, when writing sample code, when writing reference implementations, during the construction of the prototype that, let’s face it, almost always goes into production. Always.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why software 'security debt' is becoming a serious problem for developers⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That is something I just don’t get. I’m a hobbyist turned pro turned hobbyist. The only people who I ever offered my services to were either after one of my very narrow specialties where I was actually an expert or literally could not afford a “real” programmer.

  I never found proper security to have any impact on my productivity. Even going back to my peak years in the first decade of this century, there was so much easily accessible information, so many good tutorials, and so many good products that even my prototypes incorporated the basics:

  • Encrypt the data at rest
  • Encrypt the data in transit
  • No shared accounts at any level of access
  • Full logging of access and activity.
  • Before rollout, back up and recovery procedures had to be demonstrated effective and fully documented.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Software Engineers like Woodworking⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That sounds ideal. Machines that are mostly maintained by experienced people and a community to help you gain experience.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Stupidity Manifesto⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This may not apply to your situation, but I found that most of my problems like this were related to “general vs specific”.

  Many people have difficulty generalizing from specific instructions so they need help every time something looks different to them. In an extreme case, found a person unable to choose a font in the header of a word processing document because the only thing they’d ever been shown was how to choose a font in the body of the document. It’s not even that they were particularly dense, it’s that they’d seen so much unexpected and unexplained variation in other areas that they started assuming that everything is an isolated task with a potentially distinct set of procedures. Now that I’ve switched from Windows to Linux, I’m getting a better understanding of how that happens, with many applications using different hotkeys, not implementing what I think are sensible “tab ordering”, etc.

  Many people have difficulty going from the general to the specific without also seeing several specific examples in a variety of scenarios. That kind of thing normally requires more formalized training. If their only exposure to your knowledge is through ad-hoc help desk kinds of interactions, there will be no opportunity to put everything together.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Simple Websites⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for your interest!

  Apart from here and “self-hosting” and other communities, if you’re a glutton for punishment, you can see what’s up at walloftext.ca. I’m currently in the process of rebuilding everything from the ground up, including an associated mastodon-compatible instance. I’ve not yet rewritten my project outline to account for all the new stuff I’ve learned about in the past few months, but it’s coming in the next few days.

  Just note the most important part of my tagline: “Unstable by nature”. Some would argue that applies more to me than the stability of the site and projects. 😛 Either way, chaos is probably the order of the day for at least the rest of this year. (And I mostly take summers off to reenergize by fishing, working in my shop, etc.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Software Engineers like Woodworking⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Tension. Always tension. My mom had the same battles. My aunt never had trouble.

  I suspect that buying a new mid-grade machine or better from a reputable dealer is the secret. I’ve bought a couple of $50 used machines because I don’t want to spend 10 times that or more if it turns out that I’m not going to actually use it. I already do enough of that. 😀

  Go find a sewing club and get their advice. That’s what I’m doing the next time the bug bites.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Simple Websites⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oops! I guess I wasn’t paying close enough attention.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Simple Websites⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oops! I guess I wasn’t paying close enough attention.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Simple Websites⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I find it hard to believe that people would like to browse to x different websites to see if an artist has new works, only to find out that they don’t.

  RSS FTW!

  Every site I’ve ever created or been involved with in even the tiniest capacity has supported RSS. Sometimes it was enabled just to shut me up.

  I’m not sure how to better promote the use of RSS and get people to use feed readers, but I think it is the answer to at least that particular issue.

  My personal opinion is that a “platform” should really be just a collection of searchable and categorized feeds with it’s own feed. That way there is both discoverability and the ability for individuals to construct their own personal feed on their own personal device (no server required!) while staying abreast of new feeds on the master feed aggregation “platform.”

  There are innumerable ways for people to get their own content into something that supports RSS and that feed could be easily submitted to the master feed aggregation “platform” to deal with the discoverability issue. For example, Mastodon and most compatible systems support RSS and registration is child’s play on any server that allows public registration.

  In fact, the “platform” could set up a crawler to automatically discover RSS feeds. If the author has done the metadata right, the results would even be automatically categorized.

  Done right, the “platform” might actually run on a pretty small server, because it would be linking to sites, and only pulling summaries from them.

  Even comments could be supported with a little creativity. As I said, there are innumerable ways for people to get their own content out there. If there were a standard metadata tag “comment: <link to article or another comment>”, some fancy footwork could produce a threaded discussion associated with a particular article, even if the original author has no internal commenting system. (And my favoured internal comment system would permit nothing but pure HTTPS links to the commenters own content, extracting a short summary for display.)

  Side note: I acquired a domain explicitly for the purpose of setting up such a feed aggregation “platform.” Now that I’m retired, I’m slowly working on creating it. Everything is highly experimental at this point and, to be honest, shows no visible progress to that end, but that is my ultimate goal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Simple Websites⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There was a thread elsewhere asking whether a toggle should show current state or the state desired. There was enough disagreement that it quickly became apparent that, whatever else the toggle does, there should be something external to the toggle showing the possible states, indicating which way to move the toggle regardless of toggle appearance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lights bulbs⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey, me too! Although I took a transition job in between as public works foreman for a small village. (Single person doing everything from water treatment to sewer cleanouts, snow clearing to cutting grass.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Software Engineers like Woodworking⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sewing for sure, especially machine sewing. I feel like I’ve got as much time invested in fighting and maintaining our sewing machines as in our Windows machines. 😛

  And then there’s that whole transition between pattern (spec) and outcome that is oddly reminiscent of far too many of my software projects!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should a toggle button show its current state or the state to which it will change?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Knowing how a switch works in a circuit and how it’s typically represented in schematics, I would guess that moving the switch toward the body of the gun should be off.

  But if actually placing a bet, I’d put my money on it being the other way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's time to break free from Corporate Agile⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’ve just described my 50 years in the workforce, jumping from job to job, only just barely anything resembling an actual career.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Software Engineers like Woodworking⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t yet started blacksmithing, but it’s the next logical progression. Other than a (very!) occasional boat and the odd bit of furniture or cabinetry, I seem to spend most of my time making tools, jigs, and fixtures.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What if an SQL Statement Returned a Database?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  #5? (Me): pronounced S.Q.L. except for Microsoft’s product which is pronounced “sequel server”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some common misconceptions about programming that you'd like to debunk?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I call that the “nerd equivalency problem”. I think it’s the source of much (most? all?) of the problems with software that comes out of organizations that are not programming shops by nature.

  “We’re not moving fast enough (or, “I have this great idea!”), hire another nerd!”

  The problem also exists within individual programmers (“sure, I can do that UX/UI thingy, just let me finish building this ray-tracing thingy”), but that’s just an ordinary cognitive weakness that affects us all (thinking that being expert in one field makes one expert in all). It’s the job of proper leadership to resist that, not act as though it’s true.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Article suggests that 1 million ML specialists will be needed in 2027. What do you think of that?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s very closely related to something I’ve come to think about tech: nerd equivalency. If there is a computer involved, then a nerd is required and they are all interchangeable.

  Basically, someone says “we’re not moving fast enough, hire another nerd!” and nobody in the chain of command or in the hiring process has a clue which particular skills are required, assuming that everyone can do everything.

  That’s why so many corporate projects have what amounts to random people doing randomly assigned work producing insecure, unreliable products with obscure and even hostile UIs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Article suggests that 1 million ML specialists will be needed in 2027. What do you think of that?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  AI is cool technology (imo), but currently it’s just the latest bait for CEOs, managers, etc. Somehow these kinda people are just so vulnerable for hype words without ever thinking more than as second about how to use it or whether it’s even useful.

  I think that’s a general problem with most technology that is fundamentally about computing.

  People outside any field have only the barest grasp of that field, but the problems are so much worse as soon as computers are involved. They are so ubiquitous and so useful to so many people with little or no training or understanding that everyone just succumbs to a form of magical thinking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨VS Code | January 2024 Release | 1.86⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Unless, of course, that programmer has any number of mobility issues that limit their use of the keyboard, in which case something like cursorless might be the only option.

  I urge you to take a look at it. Some even claim that it’s more productive than the keyboard. I don’t know how the VSCode voice feature works, but if it makes integration of cursorless easier or better, then I’m all for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Introducing OpenD⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks, that time frame sounds right.

  Man, I loved that magazine. Also a kind of newsletter or mini-magazine called “Algorithm” (or Algorithms). I think that’s where I first came across Metaphone, which I implemented in several different languages just for fun. I also tweaked it to take account of the relatively high proportion of Ukrainian names in the region, mostly because my mom was of Ukrainian descent.

  Ok, enough reminiscing. I’ve taken us way off topic! :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Introducing OpenD⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I was subscribed to an actual paper magazine called Dr Dobb’s Journal. I think it was there that a language called D was being described as it was being developed. Is this D the continuation of that one? (I suppose it’s possible that it was Byte magazine, not DDJ.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RIP Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s been so long since I first read that that I forgot about this section:

  Operation activation

  Another example that illustrates our strategy is the activation of operations. Programs are not executed in Oberon; instead, individual procedures are exported from modules. If a certain module M exports a procedure P, then P can be called (activated) by merely pointing at the string M.P appearing in any text visible on the display, that is, by moving the cursor to M.P and clicking a mouse but- ton. Such straightforward command activation opens the following possibilities:

  1. Frequently used commands are listed in short pieces of text. These are called tool-texts and resemble customized menus, although no special menu software is required. They are typically displayed in small viewers (windows).

  2. By extending the system with a simple graphics editor that provides captions based on Oberon texts, commands can be highlighted and otherwise decorated with boxes and shadings. This results in pop-up and/or pull-down menus, buttons, and icons that are “free” because the basic command activation mechanism is reused.

  3. A message received by e-mail can contain commands as well as text. Commands are executed by the recipient’s clicking into the message (without copying into a special command window). We use this feature, for example, when announcing new or updated module releases. The message typically contains receive commands followed by lists of module names to be downloaded from the network. The entire process requires only a few mouse clicks.

  Anyone remember the Melissa worm? Or perhaps been negatively affected by clicking a link in an email?

  Every convenience comes at a cost. I wonder if he ever revisited that concept with an eye to how similar capabilities became the bane of our existence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RIP Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I wrote this elsewhere:

  He brought me much joy in tinkering, first with Pascal, then with Oberon.

  In looking up and then reading that article, I discovered that not only has Oberon been actively maintained, but that there is a successor, A2. Now that I’m back to being a hobbyist, I look forward to more joyful tinkering courtesy of his great mind.

  Edit: in the course of further investigation, I found many dead links. But I also found this A2 repository that shows activity from as recently as 2 months ago.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the best website to learn and practice SQL?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the general idea has a lot of merit. I don’t know about execution records specifically (no death penalty in Canada for many decades), but government data sets in general.

  I retired from database stuff a decade ago, but would jump at the chance to take a course that used Canadian data from various levels of government and public institutions.