dmuth

I literally saw this in the first paragraph of the website and it feels like it was written with AI:

> It’s more than just software—it’s a statement.

I know us engineers aren't the best writers, but when I see things like this, it feels like they're not even trying to write their own content.

Same! I remember a co-worker getting a call from a relative about it so I went to cnn.com. ...only to see it time out. Same with usatoday.com and abcnews.com. At that point I knew that something was happening.

I then happened to remember that abcnews.com.au existed and figured Australia's websites weren't getting hit quite as hard as ours, and I was right. It was front page news there.

We all left the office (which was in Center City Philadelphia) a few minutes later.

> stdout and stderr output often ends up in a black hole

Ain't that the truth. Literally every crontab I've written for the last 10 years has had this in it:

2>&1 | logger -t cron-WHATEVER

...and that does a pretty good job of capturing anything that the script emits and making it easy to grep for in syslog the following morning.

But I'm still amazed at how many crontabs I run across that don't capture any output at all.

Beat me to it! I did in fact have experiences like that with Perl in years past.

Your username is nice nostalgia for me. :-)

This is one reason why whenever I build a new project, I build it inside of a Docker container.

That way, the project has just the dependencies it needs, and I know I can rebuild it at some point in the future and will be unlikely to run into problems when I do.

Check your Python version.

Try switching to the newest version of Python with something like Pyenv, or even try spinning up a Docker image with something like:

docker run -it -v $(pwd):/mnt python:3.13 bash

...and try using the utility there. Good luck!

Definitely. This is one of my favorite books due to both the writing style and the "behind the scenes" aspect of living and working in Antarctica.

I can offer what much younger me was once told by a senior engineer:

1) With respect to not having whitespace: "Not everyone is as smart as you, and you need to ask yourself, do you want junior engineers working on your code to keep bothering you asking how things work, or would you rather your code by easy to read (and commented) so that they can pick things up on their own?"

2) With respect to complexity: "We are expected to build products that align with business objectives. New and experimental code belongs in your home lab and on your GitHub, not in a production environment."

Depending on how things go with #2, maybe offer to let the engineers spend 20% of their time working on lab projects to improve their product, with the understanding being that the rest of the time they are expected to build products with a minimum of complexity.