Sy Brand
@TartanLlama
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Following
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c++ developer advocate @microsoft ~ poet ~ film/noisemaker ~ mask enthusiast ~ they/them
Edinburgh, Scotland
Joined April 2009
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Pinned Tweet
My debut electronic/noise album, "The World is Dying, Hold my Hand", is out now!
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Absolutely losing it at the UK spending 12 BILLION pounds on a test and trace system which stores its data in fucking MICROSOFT EXCEL
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I am a:
⚪ man
⚪ woman
🔘 compiler
Looking for a:
⚪ man
⚪ woman
🔘 '}' on line 69
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10 things that every software developer should know
1. If you hit the computer really hard with a hammer it can't hurt you anymore
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My kid is fixing a bit of floor in Minecraft using TNT blocks because "it's what I had and I'll just not blow it up". I think this is what our industry calls technical debt.
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I'm a big fan of the pomodoro technique for productivity, where I do my best impression of a tomato and sit in the dark for 48 hours before I am devoured by beings beyond my comprehension
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Poll: do you understand the context of this image? NOTE: I will only be counting "yes" votes.
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Imposter syndrome implies the existence of crewmate syndrome where you're trying to get your little tasks done without being eaten
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I trained a neural network for 300 hours on the word "curdle" and asked it to write a stageplay. This was the result.
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Inspiring! This Woman In Tech Printed All the Unsolicited Advice She's Got From People She's Smarter Than and Burned It All
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Cloud: Someone else's computer
VM: Your computer's pet computer
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I'm glad to have made my mark on the world
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Women who post programming jokes on Twitter are braver than anyone deserves
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Objection! A Language Lawyer Story
🔊 for my awful voice acting
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Why passing small objects by value instead of reference is often faster, explained with my cats 🐈🐈⬛
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What's the difference between "concurrency" and "parallelism"? Watch me explain by feeding my cats treats 😻🥫
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I'm begging C++ teaching resources to not teach pointers right near the start of the course. Functions, references, classes first.
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Computer science was a mistake, trees are NOT SUPPOSED TO ROTATE
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If US devs are shocked at how little devs in Europe make, wait till you see what service workers in the US make.
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A wrote a book on how debuggers work!
It guides you through writing a complete native debugger from scratch.
Available Spring 2025 from
@nostarch
(probably not with this cover)
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Tech bros are like: "keeping track of what's offensive is too hard these days, it moves so fast!" while learning their sixth JavaScript framework of the year.
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If you're running an in-person conference, I should find a link to your COVID policy on the front page of your website. Is there a mask mandate? Air filtration? How is air quality monitored? what contingencies are in place if a room becomes unsafe? Is there outdoor catering?
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Programming difficulties:
Easy - multiplying 1,000,000 matrices in the blink of an eye
Medium - making sure that any memory allocated is freed correctly
Hard - checking if a picture is of a bird
Nightmare - handling dates
Ultra-Nightmare - handling people's names
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me, lightly missing a semicolon in my code: compiler, tell me if this code looks okay, please
compiler, her eyes enourmous: you KICK compiler? you kick her program like the `kill -9`? oh! oh! error for user! error for user for Ten Thousand Lines!!!!
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Dudes who say "if you write code for money instead of pleasure it won't be as good" should see the utter trash code I've written for pleasure.
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My favourite* kind of documentation:
/**
* Get the actor
* @/the_actor The actor
*/
void get_actor(actor* the_actor);
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Compilers are just cool. Programs which take programs and output new programs? Top shit.
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Me: Hey, computer, what's 0.3 + 0.6
Computer: 0.8999999999999999
Me:
Computer:
Me:
Computer:
Me:
Computer:
Computer: DON'T YOU GIVE ME THAT FUCKING LOOK NUMBERS ARE HARD OKAY
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Controversial tech opinion: the language you write in is probably fine.
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In Unix everything is a file. Files are files, folders are files, disks are files, your keyboard is a file, your mouth is a file, the air is a file, you can't breathe, your file lungs fill with files and you try to scream but only files come out oh god Dennis how could you do thi
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Not a woman, but as soon as I started presenting more feminine I got stories like this.
At a conference dinner we were discussing a C++ standards paper (like an RFC) and some guy stopped, turned to me and said "I'll explain the paper for you".
I wrote the fvcking paper.
#womenintech
true story.
A colleague invited me to a party.
One guy intro'd himself and asked me what I do.
Me: I'm a developer.
Him: Uh 'developer' can mean a lot of things. What do you *actually* do?
My colleague had to back me up and I explain that I do program at work.
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People say "passing small types by value is faster than by reference", but how is the code generated different?
Consider this code
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The mental crisis I go through every time I open up one of my own codebases in VS Code and it asks me if I trust the authors of this folder
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I need people to understand that moderating a community is not censorship.
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DOOMSCROLL CHECKPOINT
Perceive my cat and leave something nice in the replies for other people if you're so inclined.
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Me teaching programming:
First we write our code
*students take notes*
Next we debug our mistakes
*intent nodding*
This system is known as "fuck around and find out"
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AWS Infinidash explained with a bubble machine I found in a cupboard and my cat
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Bored of writing code in your text editor? Want to do it in MS Paint instead? Well vizh is the language for you!
Give the compiler a png file and it'll generate binaries, or object files to be linked with other programs!
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You do NOT need a GitHub account to call yourself a developer, HOWEVER you DO need Neopets account that you've lost the login details of.
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More seriously, tech workers could *at a bare minimum* ask themselves "was there literally a Black Mirror episode about this?" and, if so, maybe not build the thing.
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If you've been programming for a long time, I think it's easy to lose sight of how powerful it is to have an idea and just, make it real.
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A lightning tour of how function calls work under the covers ⚡️🛌
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I made a GitHub Action which replaces all the files in your repo with a picture of Nicholas Cage.
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This is how you do gender-neutral toilets btw. No "we don't care if you're a man, woman, or alien hahahah", just what facilities are available.
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Announcing: Visual Studio Stories!
Share code snippets with the click of a button and have them show up directly in your friend's IDE!
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I'd tell you all about the time I had an awful bug from overflowing a 64bit int, but
it's
a
long long story;
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The halting problem is one of computer science's great unsolveable problems: how to get techbros to just, stop.
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I'm writing a talk on what's new in C++23, so while I'm doing that, here's a thread of new features:
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An introduction to register allocation, in which Lexical Cat takes a trip to Paris 🇫🇷🐈⬛
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❌explain it to me like I'm 5
✅explain it to me like I'm just having a rough time right now and could really use a nap
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Normalise DMing your mutuals saying "hey you're cool wanna be frends"
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Becoming a normal person by finding a plane and becoming perpendicular to it
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There's a C++ standard library function called std::get_money, but it does not give you money 😠
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Have you ever thought that Doom could do with more cats? 🐱🔪👿
I'll show you how to edit the game while it's running using Visual Studio 2022's Hot Reload feature in 1 minute.
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Why might processing a sorted array be many times faster than processing an unsorted one?
I'll explain how pipelining and branch prediction factors into this, and, yes, Marshmallow is there too.
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Mr. Kanban
Bring me a card
Move it to WIP,
I hope it's not hard
My backlog's full, and I'm so tired
Pretend to do stuff so I don't get fired
Kanban
I'm so alone
Working in lockdown, my focus is blown
My sense of "real" is broke and charred
Mr. Kanban bring me a card!
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If you call youself a developer and you use twitter to drag other people down, I just assume you're an asshole.
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The film adaptation of this story is called "Closing Embrace on Line 69"
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7yo: Wow, the new Minecraft update has a lot of stuff in it. The people who make it must have worked really hard. I think they should get maybe... 2 months off to rest.
😭 me too
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This C programming tutorial is like "you have to handle your errors" and I'm like, I can barely handle my mild disappointments.
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Hello, please consider taking some time out of your day to say hello to my fluffy son
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I relate to my laptop, because I too occasionally make weird noises and then refuse to work for an extended period of time
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- Mummy, other Mummy, how are programming languages born?
- Well, you see, when someone with ADHD says "I wonder how you write a programming language"...
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Online recipes 10 year ago:
2 eggs
120g sugar
1 tsp baking powder
140g sr flour
70g butter
Online recipes now:
My cake baking journey began five years ago while on a spiritual hiking retreat in the mountains of Nepal, where I
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How are CPU instructions represented in binary? I explain with my cats 🐱🐱🐱
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Expectation: I can just block everyone with a hexagon avatar!
Reality: Oh No Some Of The Hexagons Are Ironic
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a baby...
a baby plat—
a baby platypus is ca—
EVERYONE
A baby duck-billed...
A BABY DUCK-BILLED PLATYPUS IS CALLED A PUGGLE
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Explained trickle-down economics to the kiddo and he said "...but won't the rich people just keep the money?". 8YOs understand this.
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"Professionalism" is a ploy to stop more programmers from wearing cat ears because it makes them too powerful
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Haha sure, you can make gender a boolean *sneaks 254 extra genders into unused bit representations*
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Today my 7yo looked sad and said "I just want the coronavirus to go away".
Me too, buddy. Me too.
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