gameface

Main takeaway here is this:

> Information Systems are super-useful for hardening and regularising processes so that they follow standards, run more quickly, cheaply and smoothly and take expensive, error-prone humans out-of-the-loop. The downside is that IS’s are fragile in the face of change.

Author’s view is that this is because of the way they grow and evolve, but to me it seems like it’s part of the nature of software.

AI shows promise in getting computers to behave more flexibly and naturally, and show “graceful degradation”.

I wonder if these techniques should/will ever be applied effectively to get us out of the mess we’re in now.

My view is that they’ll probably just add to the complexity and make things worse

I’ve always found the desktop hierarchy to make a lot of sense - windows, files, directories.

Individual programs within that system may not always continue the abstraction I guess

I thought the whole point of go was to remove extraneous features and provide a completely minimal programming language. The argument being that all those extra features are a source of bugs.

Nevertheless, modules and try... it seems like it’s just an effort to add them all back in again.

Surely if this happens go will be indistinguishable from all the other languages it was designed to be different from?

Main take-away seems to be to tailor the method to the risks you face.

I’m not sure how this helps, since you now need a method for identifying and prioritising risks. Hmm

Doesn’t account for political problems, time management problems or the ever-present issue of people turning your estimate into a commitment, but sure.

I don’t use a debugger. I just use a REPL to try things out and ‘explore’ the state of my code.

If it doesn’t come back with what I’m expecting then that’s a bug.

The idea of opening up a debugger again seems like a step backwards to be honest.

It might not have everything you want, but just using private github repos, an organisation, and the issues on there would be my preference.

Most developers are already familiar with this too.

On the other hand, as an individual working in IT I can achieve so much more than I could before... team sizes seem like they’re a lot smaller now as a result. That’s the upside, surely?

Is the financial crisis a good example here? A systemic failure of risk management caused by a bonus scheme that rewarded bad behaviour and led banks to over extend themselves. Seems like it was short-term rewards rather than any failure in understanding the risks per se. Lots of people called it

What are the reasons for wanting to run java inside docker? The jvm is supported andavailable, and portable on every environment socket is, so what does it get you?

This has just been installed on all the developer PCs where I work. You can't turn it off.

I guess it's another aspect of the surveillance society we're now in, but I wonder to what use these "productivity" "metrics" will eventually be put.