The idea that you can’t be a great software engineer without a CS degree is nonsense.
The idea that there’s no value in spending three years studying the fundamentals of our field is also nonsense.
Q. What are Story Points?
A. Story Points are a way of making developers deliver faster by asking them for a random number, and then saying, “That seems a little high,” until they say a smaller number.
Maybe instead of, "doing agile," we should ask, "where's your feedback loop?"
Do you have a feedback loop at all?
Is it fast?
Is it simple?
And does it actually involve end-users?
Duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction, it's true.
The right abstraction is still cheaper than both of those. Sometimes it's so much cheaper I've seen people build entire businesses from one insight.
Duplicate where appropriate but don't stop hunting for the pattern.
Zig might be the most ambitious language we’ve looked at on Developer Voices - it’s trying to replace C, compete with LLVM and be the foundation of the whole compilation story. It’s a feast for language fans…
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The year is 2098. A mother waves to her son as he enters the playground. "Have a good day!" she calls. "Don't forget to like and subscribe!"
No-one remembers the origin of this phrase. It's just something your parents always said when people left.
Here’s my
@oredev
talk about
#PureScript
, and the big ideas it embodies. Ideas I hope make it into mainstream programming soon. But you don’t need to wait - you can have it all today. 😎
Okay, here's the true difference:
Junior developer: Has keyboard-shaped bruises on their forehead.
Senior developer: Has keyboard-shaped calluses on their forehead.
JavaScript Maps in a nutshell:
Me: Save this under the key `[1,2]`.
JavaScript: Done.
Me: What's under the key `[1,2]`?
JavaScript: Nothing. Never seen that key before in my life.
🤦♂️
This I promise you:
Hiring people to maintain an Elm or PureScript app is not your biggest problem. Your biggest problem is the amount of maintenance your JavaScript app needs.
Today's spicy open-source take: the people who give you their work for free don't owe you a good goddamn thing.
If you're dependent on their effort, pay their rent, pay their bills, buy them some of that free time you want a slice of. *Then* you can start making demands.
I'm thrilled to be able to say this: This week I'm joined by
@simonpj0
, who has to be one of the smartest, nicest and most infectiously-enthusiastic people in the whole of computing.
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Smalltalk was an audaciously ambitious programming environment that blurred the lines between programming language, operating system and notebook.
In this week's podcast we explore the design of Cuis Smalltalk, and its vision for the future of computing.
Two bits of news:
1) I accidentally got a job, making coding videos. 😅
2) Here's the first one! 🥳
If you want to use
#Python
with
#ApacheKafka
, here's the first-in-a-series of getting-started guides from
@Quix_io
:
I'm happy to say I've just been promoted at Confluent. I'm now a Staff Developer Advocate.
I asked if I could be a Broadsword Developer Advocate instead, but they said a mage class can't be trusted with melee weapons, so Staff it is. 😊
What tricks are databases pulling to parallelize billion-row queries and answer them in seconds?
Join me &
#DuckDB
co-creator (& DB professor) Hannes Mühleisen for a delightful journey beyond the query planner.
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Imagine Python, but with an opt-in type system, native parallelism and access to CPU/GPU-level optimisations - that’s the latest language from the creator of Swift.
It’s called Mojo, and it’s our topic of the week on Developer Voices:
Happy Friday! Developer Voices is now 1 year 🎂, 50 guests 🌎, 2 coding walkthroughs 👨💻, and ~19,000 subscribers📈 old. 🥳
Thanks to everyone who's joined me to peek at the near-future of programming. And here's to the year to come. 🥂
Programming ideas that need to die, episode
#43
: If an open source project comes from Google it is *automatically* good.
It may be good. It may be bad. The G stamped on the side doesn't get it a free pass.
Kids! Are your parents sending secret messages about parenting? Know the signs:
brb - I'm so tired.
lmao - I'm so tired.
rofl - I'm so tired.
fml - I'm so tired.
yolo - I'm so tired.
lol - Please let me sleep.
This is the single most offensive thing a company has ever done to me.
Confluent have just published a podcast congratulating themselves on how great their episodes have been over the past year & I’ve been totally erased. It’s as though I never existed.
Cheap shot CFLT. 😞
Well this is worth a little fanfare—
#Zig
is first episode of Developer Voices to go through 100k plays. 🥳
Thanks again Loris Cro - you made it a great episode. ❤️
ICYMI, you can viewCount++ (and learn about a very interesting language) here: 😁
New
#Brexit
plan:
1. We ask to extend A50 by 1 week. No more.
2. On the 29th March we reaffirm our intention to leave.
3. On April 1st we shout, "APRIL FOOL!" really loud.
Brexit is cancelled.
UK's place in comedy history is reaffirmed.
The rest of Europe says, "Ya got me!" 😁
Ah, but I'd rather work with badly-written Elm than typically-written JavaScript. Some languages help you refactor a system incrementally, no matter what state it starts in, while some simply don't care if you fail.
I believe that the principles of good programming are more important than what language we code in. I'd rather work with well-written JavaScript than badly-written Smalltalk.
An interesting thing we still don’t know about programming: how long can someone stay sharp? Is programming like footballing, where you’re past your prime at 30; or like jazz, where most don’t hit their stride ‘til 50?
As always, my money’s on jazz. 😎
I just turned 50. I’ve been programming for about 38 years, since starting with a ZX81, Spectrum, and BBC Micro.
That puts me in a very tiny minority, given the average length of experience with programming is currently around 6 years if the last poll I read is to be believed.
Today I'm launching a new podcast looking at the future of software by talking directly to the devs who are trying to get us there.
We kick off with London's hippest new language designer, Louis Pilfold, the creator of Gleam.
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On $CURRENT_PROJECT we have a mechanism that publishes the frontend state to a gist and gives you the gist ID.
Bug reports are coming in with a hash that lets you restore the tester's state.
It is absolutely glorious.
😎
I love the ideas in
#Erlang
, but I’ve never quite gelled with the language. So when I heard someone was porting the runtime to
#OCaml
, my ears pricked up.
Leandro Ostera joins me this week to explain how he's borrowing BEAM's best bits. 😅
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The PureScript Prelude! My beauty! My love!
I say to the PureScript Prelude, "Thou art so elegant, so graceful, so balanced. I shall compose odes in your honour!"
And she whispers back to me, "Then, my love, your odes are semigroupoid."
Exhaustive pattern match checking is such a wonderful thing. It's one of those rare things where you feel like the programming language is on your side. ❤️
Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.
Doing *almost* the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is just normal debugging.