otl

joined 6 months ago
[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I found the documentation extremely lacking last time I looked at Swift 2 or 3 years ago. Any changes there? Or perhaps there's somewhere outside of Apple's own docs I should have been looking?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

I would use reportMissingData

Agreed, report feels clearer as the verb "record" is more about permanent storage and later reference.

Or even just reportMissing? Depending on what's happening around call sites, I often find I can drop generic stuff like "Data" and it's just as clear, especially when looking at a function signature. For instance:

func reportMissing(data) { ... }
[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It attracts passionate and clever people, but as a result comes with a (rightful) reputation of being hard/expensive to hire for.

Worked at a Scala shop for a while. It was interesting as an outsider to see exactly that play out (I'm a diehard Unix hacker type, love Go etc.). There were some brilliant minds who really seemed to "get" the Scala thing. Then there were others who were more run-of-the-mill Java developers. Scala and the JVM makes all that, and everything in between, possible. With so many Java projects around, the Java devs would come and go depending on team/company factors like job cushiness, salary, or number of days in the office. But the more Scala-leaning people hung around. They made a huge impact on how projects were run.

The bosses would often talk with me about how hard it was to find those people. From a business perspective, they said it was absolutely worth the effort to find the Scala people despite operational overhead of the rotating door for the armies of Java devs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The Philosophy section has quite a few wonky arguments; I'd skip it altogether.

Guidelines is pretty succinct and has many rules-of-thumb that almost any software would benefit from. That's including CLI, GUI, libraries -- even hardware if you take a bit of a step back.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

and full of old bugs and legacy code.

The feeling of reading through those crazy JVM stack traces with classes named "hudson" from the Jenikins prototype... I shudder! Well done for pushing through it all!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

But, since this particular set of data is so well-defined, and unlikely to change, roll your own is maybe not crazy.

I think that's the trick here. A relational database lets you do a whole bunch of complex operations on all sorts of data. That flexibility doesn't come for free - financially nor performance-wise! Given:

  • engineering chops
  • a firm idea of the type of data
  • a firm idea of the possible operations you may want to do with that data

then there's a whole range of different approaches to take. The "just use Postgresql" guideline makes sense for most CRUD web systems out there. And there are architecture astronauts who will push stuff because they can, not because they should.

Every now and then it's nice to think about what exactly is needed and be able to build that. That's engineering after all!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I think you've done a fair summary that deconstructed the simple narrative of "evil corporation steals from the poor". Well, for me it did ;)

to me this clearly looks like a "different culture" problem.

That is a key point. To me it is surprising that a developer of such supposed seniority was not aware of (or doesn't care about, or is so pushed for time, or just insensitive to?) the culture differences. That surprise made me jump to conclusions, leading to outrage and frustration.

Deep in my soul I believe Microsoft really is an evil corporation that steals from the poor. But in this specific instance, your summary made me think of Hanlon's razor.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

or is a specific company being singled out just because some low-level grunt filled in a field in a bug report?

FYI they're not a "low-level grunt". The bug author's job title is Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft with (at least) 18 years' experience.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

(they're somewhat unpredictable too - wait what? Why are you downvoting that?! 😂) I had nothing but positive reaction the the dotnet and MAUI communities.

Ha yes know exactly what you mean. The ActivityPub system I've written (from where you'll receive this reply) just drops any Like/Dislike activity altogether!

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Fair enough. Just wanted to give a heads-up as to why there's been a negative reception to the post. Good luck with the talk :)

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 months ago (6 children)

I am giving a talk next week about making the most of the Fediverse

The spirit of link aggregations sites and forums in general is to share ideas and foster discussion. This post is promoting an event. There are no ideas and there's nothing to discuss.

Perhaps wait until after you've given your talk and then share a link to a recording/transcript of it?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago

"A failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part."

Wow now that is a quote I'm going to steal. Wondering if "A failure to understand on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part." has the same punch or is as relevant... anyway, thanks for sharing!

 

From https://scribe.rip/@dimillian/adding-ai-generated-image-description-to-ice-cubes-c4e7990a5915

I’ve recently released a new feature for Ice Cubes, and users have loved it! On Mastodon, it’s considered an excellent ethic to add media descriptions when posting medias on the network. It’s necessary for visually impaired people but also for anyone who would want to get more detail about the image.

Ice Cubes is an open-source Mastodon app. Under the hood it uses OpenAI's Vision API.

(Source article: https://dimillian.medium.com/adding-ai-generated-image-description-to-ice-cubes-c4e7990a5915)

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Finding "bad" projects (apubtest2.srcbeat.com)
 

I'm a software dev/sysadmin mix, ~8 years' experience, looking for work again after some time off. (Based in a capital city in Australia if that's relevant)

I have no idea how to characterise the projects that I've enjoyed the most or would like to do in the future.

The projects that I've found the most enjoyable are not the ones that you see advertised by recruiters and companies; Kubernetes, cutting-edge, greenfield projects, massive cloud accounts... meh.

Some fun stuff I've done or would like to do:

  • Upgrading that weird service everyone is accidentally relying on but afraid to touch
  • While money pours into LLMs in healthcare, fax machines were still used every day
  • Working out the "low-level" part of the system colleagues put off for 2 years because nobody wanted to read through the boring 400-page ISO spec
  • Maintaining that abandoned 500K line Java system with most errors being RuntimeException with a null description
  • Working in small teams, max 8-10 people

Any tips to characterise this kind of work to focus my job search? I know it's different from working at a software company pumping out features.

Tight deadlines and shoestring resources don't bother me (as long as I get my salary!). Having people who don't take it all super seriously along the way is super important.

How do I look for this? Trial & error? I feel like there must be... consultancies? ... working on these kinds of projcets. Perhaps there's some name or buzzwords that I need to use? Or would I need to talk with one of those mega big consultancies like Accenture?

Of course very open to the possibility that I'm being totally unrealistic and way too picky in a down market.

My bread and butter is working in Go, Python, backend and OS stuff. Networking, Linux, BSDs, that kinda thing.

Thanks all!

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