or, a week in the life of a programmer Lately I’m working on our documentation. We write it in markdown, turn it into a web site, and then serve it from s3. To turn it into a web site, we use mkdocs and the material theme for mkdocs. Mkdocs is written in Python. Then we …
Software Development has moved forward a lot recently. Both on the code side and the runtime side, we’ve had huge advances. we’ve seen more advances in writing code and in running it, than in the bridge from written to running We have way better languages and frameworks for writing applications now. For instance, JavaScript, JQuery, and …
Yesterday I was ready to get some changes into master, so I merged in the latest and opened a PR. But NO, the build on my pull request broke.The error was: ERROR: (jsdoc-format) /long/path/to/file.ts[52, 1]: asterisks in jsdoc must be alignedERROR: (jsdoc-format) /long/path/to/file.ts[53, 1]: asterisks in jsdoc must be alignedERROR: (jsdoc-format) /long/path/to/file.ts[54, 1]: asterisks in …
The inaugural REdeployConf wrapped up yesterday (as I write this). I’m already feeling withdrawal from intense learning and conversations. I’ll attempt to summarize them in this post. The RE in REdeploy doesn’t mean “again” (lo, it is the first of its kind). RE stands for Resilience Engineering. It is a newish field, focused on sociotechnical …
In Why Information Grows (my review), physicist César Hidalgo explains that the difference between the ability to produce tee shirts vs rockets is a matter of accumulating knowledge and know-how inside people, and weaving those people into networks. Because no one person can know how to build a rocket from rocks. No one person understands …
The other day in Iceland, a tiny conference on the Future of Software Development opened with Michael Feathers addressing a recurring theme: complexity. Software development is drowning in accidental complexity. How do we fight it? he asks. Can we embrace it? I ask. Complexity: Fight it, or fight through it, or embrace it? Yes. Here, …
Or: the Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming. (video, or TL;DR, or abstract) At the end of this post is an audacious idea about the present and future of software development. In the middle are points about mental models: how important and how difficult they are. But first, a story of the origins …
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Does caring scale? We can’t all care about everything. We have cities without clean water, a criminal justice system full of injustice, and oceans clogged with paper bags. There are too many important causes to catalogue, much less champion. We can only contribute to a few. We can’t all care about everything. At my house, …
Understanding code under change Why is it so hard to jump into a team and start contributing to code? Why is someone else’s code so darn incomprehensible? One reason is that the code is a snapshot of a system in process. If you know where it was and where it’s aiming, the middle makes more …
When you learn to code, you acquire a superpower: automation. We turn the computer into a machine to do our (very specific) bidding. We get paid to automate what other people want. We can and should use this superpower for ourselves too! Levels of automation Are we programmers or software developers? Probably both. I think …