Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
Even for ducted systems, these proprietary controllers are the only thing you can get in Japan, and by extension places like Australia/NZ where the systems are all imported from Japan. (Europe is still largely yet to discover heat pumps, judging by reports from this past summer.)
Comment · 5 months ago
Comment · 5 months ago
CFC refrigerants are the canonical example.
Comment · 11 months ago
Commit messages are immutable. Linking them to a bug ticket gives you a mutable place to record any new information about the bug that you discover in the future. (For example, that it affected more cases than you originally thought, or that the fix caused another bug.) This new information will be discoverable when starting from the original commit (found e.g. by doing a blame on a particular line of source).

To fail to do so is a gigantic missed opportunity in my opinion. You never know when you will need it.

Comment · 1 year ago
It’s a lot better than the reverse.
Comment · 1 year ago
Another way to look at it is that you’re getting to do all of the fulfilling parts of management roles (helping your team(s) to grow and develop) without the less fulfilling parts (endless meetings, budget spreadsheets, unpleasant conversations, having to give up writing code).

> These are not rookies if they reached Principal IC, but the most experienced team members ever, yet the author still feels the need to say this.

At this level the job is qualitatively different from what went before - you do start as a rookie in this role, and if you only try to keep doing what you’ve done before only better then you’re not setting yourself up for success.

> Do we need to move up or out?

Not to this extent, no. If you are still a Junior after 15 years, that’s a problem and questions will be asked. But if you want to stay in a role where you keep doing what you’ve done before only better, then that’s generally completely fine and the right choice for many people.

Comment · 1 year ago
The ink ribbon contains a record of every word you type, and I believe hoovering them up was a common espionage tactic back in the day.
Comment · 1 year ago
Debuggers allow you inspect stuff forward in time, while print statements allow you to debug backwards. (There was a lot of academic work on reversible debuggers at one point; to be honest I haven’t kept up on how that turned out.)

If you can detect a problematic condition and you want to know what will happen next, a debugger is a great tool.

If you can detect a problematic condition and you need to find out what caused it, it’s printf all the way.

My theory is that different types of programming encounter these two types of problems at different relative rates, and that this explains why many people strongly prefer one over the other but don’t agree on which.

Comment · 1 year ago
A city is not a tree: https://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/cityisnotatree.html

Even trees are not trees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastomosis

Evolution is most definitely not a tree.

Nature also tends towards practicality, even more so than programming. Trees aren’t a fundamental truth, they’re a made-up oversimplified abstraction.

Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 2 years ago
The one that sprang to mind for me was The Name of the Rose. Oddly it doesn’t show up as a title drop in the data.
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
You must be American.

In Australia there are exactly zero heat pumps on the market that you can use an ecobee with. It just isn’t an option. There are no off-the-shelf options.

You don’t have to pay $1700 for this garbage $50 tablet, but it is the default that every installer will offer you without mentioning any other options (and the only options are the manufacturer’s proprietary controllers). In this case his builder procured it for him without even telling him the price. He may not even have been given a choice. You have to be extremely motivated to stay on top of every decision like this along with the thousands of other decisions involved in building.

Comment · 2 years ago
The arrow has a white outline around it, so the hotspot is at the tip of the black arrow, at (1,1).

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