Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago
I find it strange that many people think there’s no technical reasons to oppose vibe coding. Every opposition to it is quickly denounced with strawman and ad hominem arguments.
Comment · 2 months ago
Build yourself a 6502 microcomputer. It’s fairly simple and there’s complete board designs available. The reason is that the CPU is simple enough to quickly grasp all important concepts, and it is still available. Starting with x86 might be too frustrating at the beginning. Also you will learn much more than just assembly code - you will learn all parts and things that make assembly possible
Comment · 2 months ago
People should realize that programming is not a liability. Programming per se is the actual creation of detailed knowledge by writing.

You get a task, how does it interact with all other invariants? What are the implications on data flow, processing and user workflows? You can rarely answer those questions beforehand, you step on them during programming as the formal language forces you to take them into account sooner or later.

If you outsource this knowledge-building you’re losing the steering ability when stuff hits the fan. You lose the ability to navigate the code properly in order to identify bug or violations of invariants.

LLM optimize locally, that’s their nature. Invariants are often implicitly scattered around the whole code base. Explaining them to the LLM is much more tedious than just to write the code in the first place. At least for me as I have much better expression-ability in Code than in natural language when it comes to describing any form of computation.

Comment · 3 months ago
This may sound a little bit ridiculous, but if you’re really into computers: Grab a 6502, build a computer yourself - the chips are cheap and overall availability is good. Try writing a small operating system, an interpreter like Basic or Lisp or a game. After you accomplished that you already know more than most CS grads and the knowledge will be so fundamental that it will help with everything else coming to you in future.
Comment · 3 months ago
I start to think most people in Software don’t care at all. Before LLMs they were forced to at least pretend and they had been guarded by more and more style guiding, architecture, frameworks and agile ceremony.

I care alot about software and code. I write without AI, code and prose. Yet I would say it is useful for context sensitive search and autocomplete on steroids. I wonder why it should be more? It’s the intellisense I always wanted - just not worth a trillion I'd say.

And another point: if your coworkers do their job exclusively by vibing, then where’s the point of producing software? Your competitors can recreate it easily. There’s no value in AI generated artifacts and so there’s no value in operating the AI.

Just write the damn code

Comment · 4 months ago
It doesn’t make any sense. If you can build a business purely with LLMs, then it’s even easier to copy it. Producing much output fast was never valuable, but those Valley guys seem to run around like headless chicken on crack (wait does crack even work without having a head?)
Comment · 4 months ago
Why would anyone want to do that? Why not automate these tasks and let Claude handle everything on its own?

If the maintenance and implementation can be done by an LLM, I see no logical reason to keep a human employed for lower work.

Comment · 4 months ago
There is much beauty in the C-code of the compiler.
Comment · 5 months ago
don'hurt me…
Comment · 1 year ago
Most job postings are fake / ghost jobs. Some are used for companies to evaluate the talent pool and find the lowest possible wages. Others are made to collect and even sell your data. You can identify those by their vague generic description of responsibilities/tasks and an absurd amount of requirements.

I'm not kidding - I am a freelancer and got unwanted calls from an accounting service company. Thanks to the german data regulations they had to tell me where they got my contact data from and it was a broker which got the data directly from a freelancer project platform.

There are still plenty of job opportunities out there, but lots of HR teams are overwhelmed by the amount of candidates received from the job platforms and recruiters. Besides the global economy cooling, we also see job platforms becoming more and more useless for candidates and employers at the same time.

My suggestion is to go the conventional way of application: as a freelancer that means acquisition by cold/warm calling and as a job seeker I recommend researching companies and contacting the people there responsible for staff - team managers, internal recruiters, CTOs or even the CEO

Comment · 1 year ago
For any production ready software you plan a budget around the cost of a new car. Mostly even a lot more.

Just finishing a software project takes at least 80% of time and money besides the other 80% already done. Sounds funny, but I want to make it clear that effort and time of projects are almost always extremely underestimated.

If you need funding, the best and most reliable way is to have a customer willing to pay for development. In your case try to use contacts to hospitals and simply ask them if they are interested. When you hit a spot (and the right person) you might be surprised how easy money comes when someone needs or wants something…

Comment · 2 years ago
It depends on many factors. No policy fits every team or situation. If feedback times - weather due to pipeline or personal/reviews - are long, I would also push larger PRs. Also reviews rarely really improve anything besides bikeshedding stuff like style or whatever the reviewer might find more pleasant in terms of overall structure. If reviews were done right you’d have to deep dive into the problem the requester tried to solve and understand his concepts and ideas of the solution. To do so, I do important reviews (which are super rare) in pair programming style with the requester. I suggest you should do the same especially if lot of code is changed or added. I assume you have proper testing in place. Looking at tests can help a lot to understand production code
Comment · 2 years ago
The author seems to try to enforce programming constraints in order to fix one problem they identified, to fix all related problems that may occur in future.

It is obvious that he doesn’t have experience with long living systems, behause this approach leads to inflexible software. For example: sometimes memoization of react hook returns is sometimes good, but never always. He also values processes much over individuals - well we had a manifesto against such views…

Future proofing, assembly-line mentality, knows-it-all thinking - I feel sorry for those he manages and the company when they’ll become unable to add features at all.

Comment · 2 years ago
You can try voluntary work. Working in animal shelters, or as you mentioned red cross / caritas could offer such opportunities. See, whatever you do, it will teach you required skills for any job and build up reputation. And it changes your perspective: jobs are not there to help you, it’s the other way around - what can you do to help the employer, the society, etc.? When you understand this, you will develop self esteem and find a direction in which you can go and develop yourself and a career.
Comment · 2 years ago
When I did game dev I often went for an even driven approach or messaging based systems combined with oop and state machines to prevent eventual consistency locally. It works great in that domain, albeit not being the most performant solution.

In web or business systems it works well for some(!) parts. You just shouldn’t do everything that way - but often people get too exited about a solution and then they tend to overdo it and apply it everywhere, even when not appropriate.

Always chose the golden middle path and apply patterns where they fit well.

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