abrookins
Joined 15 years ago
Karma
84
Submissions
29
Member since
Oct 26
Recent submissions
Comment · 5 years ago
For the certification program at Redis University (https://university.redis.com/), we previously used ProctorU because that's what other folks were doing -- proctored exams for certification.
Buuut, after a while, we were like, why subject people to this? This is crazy. And why even charge for certs anyway? I'm happy we're done with proctoring!
Comment · 5 years ago
Async Python has proven faster in my uses for IO and non-CPU-related stuff. But I think Python, either as a community or within the language, needs to solve the anti-pattern of maintaining separate sync and async versions of a library. I'm thinking specifically of aioredis and redis-py, both of which I've worked on.
Some people are looking at ways to solve this. I know urllib3, elasticsearch-py, and a few others use unasync (https://github.com/python-trio/unasync) to transform async code into sync code, leaving one codebase supporting both uses in different namespaces. This leaves you with some conditional logic (is_async_mode() -- https://github.com/python-trio/hip/blob/master/src/ahip/util...). I'm seriously considering this approach.
Comment · 5 years ago
You can use Redis for full-text search and some more SQL-like queries, including aggregations, with RediSearch: https://oss.redislabs.com/redisearch/
Comment · 5 years ago
This matches my experience of 24-hour on-call DBaaS shifts.
Comment · 6 years ago
Super sad. I interviewed at Samasource early in my career. They had a cool mission, and Ms. Janah seemed really inspiring. Glad she got to do so much with the time she had.
Comment · 7 years ago
Related: Parents of young children found to be completely dead inside
Comment · 7 years ago
Very sad news. Most people I’ve met treat alcohol as a casual, mostly harmless substance. On the other hand, the world is filled with people dying quickly and slowly from alcohol addiction. This discrepancy can be very confusing, especially for young people, as it’s often not clear which camp you’ll fall into — until it’s too late.
Personally, I think alcohol is worth giving up. Why find out how bad things can get? In my case, I quit 10 years ago. In that time, I’ve built a career as a software developer, grown a marriage, and become a father. I have a great social life, deeper friendships than I ever had while drinking, and have replaced the access to creativity I used to feel by drinking alcohol with running and meditation. Sobriety is an extremely viable path.
Comment · 7 years ago
You can start on the path right away. Before work every day, imagine your teammates and the things you like about them. Then ask, what would you need to know and do today to help keep the team safe and successful? What’s going on in the world of this particular team? What are the commitments, what are the threats (from inside and outside the team), etc.? Dwelling in that mindset every day is a good first step.
Comment · 7 years ago
Ah, ha! I KNEW I had read about this, but couldn't find my notes on it, so I didn't include it. Thank you!
Comment · 7 years ago
I own a Surface device, an iPad Pro, and a Macbook Pro. While I write code on all of them, macOS is still the king of development environments.
On macOS, you can just work. That's what the end goal should be in other platforms. I doubt iOS will ever get there. I mean, how are you supposed to copy and paste code from Vim running in tmux inside of Blink? With your finger? Hell's bells!
Windows is just too weird. If you compare them strictly from the perspective of using Vim, Windows is better than iOS. You can use Vim from WSL or a VM in a nice Linux terminal like Tilix running on a Windows-native X server. Boom, Vim is running right alongside your Python interpreter, $GOPATH, etc., and copy and paste works. (Let's set aside the fact that WSL is crawling with problems.) But if you use Windows, you'd kind of expect to be able to use more than Vim, right?
That ends up being a pit of snakes... multiple Windows-native X servers I've tried have problems rendering Intellij, and I've tried to get native Windows editors like VS Code to work smoothly with interpreters hosted in WSL or VMs. Only Intellij can really do it properly, and even then it depends on the language. It ends up being just another distraction.
Then there's running Linux desktop on a VM in Windows 10. I don't know how other people do this. Even with a beefy machine with two GPUs, no modern Linux window manager is performant enough to use. If you can find one like xfce that is fast enough, you end up having to manage the scaling on individual programs when you switch between high DPI and lower DPI displays. It's bananas!
So purely from the perspective of access to any tool you want to use and limiting distractions, macOS is still the best. I'm rooting for Windows, but only because I have a 2017 MBP and the new keyboards are painful to type on.
Comment · 8 years ago
You know, I tried 16.04. 18.04 is worth a shot!
Comment · 8 years ago
That's okay -- I'm sure they fixed something like that issue! The WSL team has been crazy busy, and their work so far is super impressive.
VirtualBox shared folders had their own problems. `npm` wants to create symlinks for commands provided by packages, but VirtualBox doesn't support symlinks by default on Windows shares. So you have to execute an arcane command to enable that feature -- every time you restart the computer.
Interesting to hear that performance is decent with the Samba share. I presumed it would be otherwise. In that case, Hyper-V with Samba may be my last shot at getting the machine to work for me... we'll see if I can muster any more enthusiasm.
Writes at andrewbrookins.com