canadev

An interesting article.

Something interesting maybe none or few you will likely experience: Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous meetings, presumably any 12-step meeting.

Say what you will about the 12 steps, and the belief of god that is associated with them. Feel free to disagree with the dogma. As a member I openly do that from time to time.

The real beauty of these meetings is that when someone speaks, they are left to speak completely uninterrupted. (Some groups use a timer and people generally wrap it up when the timer goes off.) Speaking about your experience during a meeting is called “sharing” and it is fucking magical. It’s helped me learn to listen, it’s helped me to speak extemporaneously on things that matter to me deeply, it’s taught me patience as an object lesson. You may not agree with what the other person is saying - there is no rule that you have to, and as might be expected it is not at all an infrequent thing that you hear absolute nonsense or worse. But there are also messages of beauty, there is often identification, there is definitely learning, and there is freedom, and there is genuine respect.

I believe there is some significant power in the 12 steps: confession of harms caused, attempts at restitution where at all appropriate, and learning to take responsibility for one’s actions. I do not believe in an all powerful and loving god because there is simply too much needless suffering in the world for me to agree with it. Occasionally I share about this but I try not to harp on it.

But the real beauty of a 12 step meeting is in the sharing, in my opinion…

Lots of development practices come back again. E.g. techniques for optimizing code for computers sometimes make a resurgence for mobile phones a decade later.

I suppose that is likely true. I just put myself in the poster's situation and started breathing real shallow, haha.

This is a good endorsement!

It's kind of crazy how hard it was for him to get out of there though; I would have expected his flatmate to take care of it straight away.

Rather than a tool like Copilot, which does look very interesting, I'd be curious to see the effect of using evergreen (self-updating) off-the-shelf free open-source components.

Imagine if you get get an app that uses `http-rest-api` and `http-www-crud` with `http-www-multifactor` and `http-rest-api-license-key` and you could automatically be using the latest rest API, the latest CRUD framework, the latest multifactor/whatever framework (which you'd probably pin to some standard like YubiKey so user tokens don't get invalidated regularly). The actual reference implementation could be done in pseudocode even, and ported to many languages (ok this is getting too meta). You could throw together a professional quality application in a few lines of package management. And if someone finds a bug in the code, it gets updated, and next time a release is cut you'll pull it down automatically and deploys itself.

Yeah! I've uh, ... never copied a bit of code into my repo verbatim, right?

yeah right. I wish.

(Not saying every dev does this)

have you a link handy?

Sometimes coding is hard in and of itself.

I agree, and I'm glad I don't work at a place where coding is considered easy work.

This book looks interesting. I'd like some advice on whether it will be useful for me.

I've been a professional dev for over ten years and I have a CompSci degree from a respected university. I'm getting paid principal engineering salary for a moderate sized city in the U.S. and I work remotely from Canada in a fairly cheap cost-of-living city at a small company (far from Silicon Valley salary, but pretty damn high for here).

Do you think this book will be useful to me? I want to maintain my career as a developer and grow in skill and salary. I have started blogging about a year ago and I do infrequently but I think my posts are decent. I also am taking the time to learn some stuff like ML and am constantly trying to improve my skills with stuff like PostgreSQL and Go.