Quick Thoughts: Less Twitter

Less Twitter

So I started journaling my quick thoughts basically at the beginning of 2016 and only managed to post them to my blog once. So it goes, I guess. I have a backlog of them, most of which I'll just ignore and I'll post the highlights below.

With my twitter feed becoming unpleasant due to so much Trump noise, I've reduced my use a twitter a lot. I've somewhat switched to reddit which is better organized into narrow topics. Instead of tweeting I'm just making little notes in my quick thought journal which I'll just post on my blog.

On to the 2016 backlog...

Chesterton's Fence

I often think this when looking at my own code.

Why babel with node

At the beginning of 2016 I was frustrated and baffled as to why with node.js 6.3 supporting almost all of ES2015 natively, why would someone introduce the babel transpiler into a node-only server side project. So much ouch for so little benefit.

Promise Edge Cases

Promise library docs have special sections for delays/setTimeout, browsers, databases, etc. async.js has no such special cases.

PostgreSQL TOAST

TOAST stands for The Oversized-Attribute Storage Technique, probably the best acronym in the history of Computer Science.

Git and WIP commits

How about a git that deals with both tiny WIP changes and larger more meaningful units?

Easier to Reason

For every X units of complexity removed by "Easier to Reason About" techniques, programmers will take the opportunity to introduce >X other techniques that make things more complicated.

I've also more recently experienced this phenomenon with serverless patterns. For every X units of complexity managed services and serverless patterns eliminate, programmers will add at least X complexity units in bizarre hacks, purported cost optimizations, etc.

Long Term Low Supervision

Thinking back on the fact that I've at least twice had long-term (> 1 year) projects with shockingly low supervision. One was leading a small team, one was mostly solo with light collaboration/devops stuff. Both went really well from my perspective.

Writing Less Damn Code

[http://www.heydonworks.com/article/on-writing-less-damn-code](Writing Less Damn Code)

Software Is About People

For all this talk on podcasts about "software is about people" there are a lot of architecture articles that make no mention of team size or team quantity.

AWS

Ha ha https://www.aws.org is the American Welding Society

Consulting Feast or Famine

My consulting work had been in famine mode for 6+ weeks. Full stop on work pending project sponsorship. Suddenly client calls a meeting and is like "How quickly can we get a demo working?". So I guess it's feast mode for the next 2 months or so. This is good because I could use some extra savings to cover my time at the Recurse Center this fall when I won't have any income.

Relative Dates

meetup.com's message app says a message is from 1092 days ago. Wow. Such friendly UX. Such superior to an actual date.

Unusual Call Volume

Stop trying to explain long customer support queues as "unexpected load". Bullshit. It's because you just don't give a fuck. Own it.