Programming

If I were a better developer, would I have worked on more products people love? No. Even granting that good software always makes a well-loved product, big-company software is made by teams, and teams are shaped by incentives.

When people say “taste,” what they actually mean is experience. Pattern recognition built up over years of doing the work. But calling it “taste” instead of “experience” does something subtle and harmful: it makes a learnable skill sound like a gift.

Why GitHub Actions is the Internet Explorer of CI, and why Buildkite offers a better path forward for teams that care about developer experience.

web dev here who also plays guitar. i've been using audacity for recording and musescore for notation but wondering what else is out there.

anyone using anything cool for practice, transcription, or just messing around with sound?

[...] Coding agents are now also introduced to production codebases. After 12 months, we are now beginning to see the effects of all that "progress". Here's my current view.

[...]

All of this compounds into an unrecoverable mess of complexity. The exact same mess you find in human-made enterprise codebases. Those arrive at that state because the pain is distributed over a massive amount of people. The individual suffering doesn't pass the threshold of "I need to fix this". The individual might not even have the means to fix things. And organizations have super high pain tolerance. But human-made enterprise codebases take years to get there. The organization slowly evolves along with the complexity in a demented kind of synergy and learns how to deal with it.

With agents and a team of 2 humans, you can get to that complexity within weeks.

web dev here who also plays guitar. i've been using audacity for recording and musescore for notation but wondering what else is out there.

anyone using anything cool for practice, transcription, or just messing around with sound?

Since the Material 3 Expressive update, the Material color utility library uses a 'ColorSpec', with two predefined specs: ColorSpec2021 and ColorSpec2025.

How do I create a custom color spec using a new spec name not defined there (they have SPEC_2021 and SPEC_2025) and using a Variant name not present in the original spec? Does this require e.g. modifying files like color_spec.ts, material_dynamic_colors.ts, and variant.ts?

It’s a popular joke among software engineers that writing overcomplicated, unmaintainable code is a pathway to job security. After all, if you’re the only person who can work on a system, they can’t fire you. There’s a related take that “nobody gets promoted for simplicity”: in other words, engineers who deliver overcomplicated crap will be promoted, because their work looks more impressive to non-technical managers.

The other day at work I stumbled upon this bug and thought it was worth to write a blog post about. Spoiler: It has nothing to do with timezones!

TLDR: According to ISO standard 8601 (which is what Python's date.isocalendar().week uses for example), the first week of the year is the week with the first Thursday of the year. So sometimes the first few days of January belong to the last week of previous year, and sometimes the last few days of December belong to the first week of next year :D

Never heard of pull_request_target before today and I think I'm with him, I don't know what I would possibly use it for that would justify the risk of unreviewed code getting access to build environments. Seems bananas.

Hello,

I am thinking about teaching my students JavaScript first so that they can start creating websites and make their career, what are your thoughts?

What I like about this text is a focus on what are positive goals, what is desired, and what is desirable.

Instead of a negative focus on what we don't want. I think focusing on something positive is a far better strategy.

This is a pragmatic piece of Fowler on the rather dry topic of Object-relational mappings - in short, the attempt to marry an object-oriented code base with a relational data base.

Usually you'd get enough early success to commit deeply to the framework and only after a while did you realize you were in a quagmire - this is where I sympathize greatly with Ted Neward's famous quote that object-relational mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science

What Fowler refers to here, is Ted Neward's article "The Vietnam Of Computer Science"

Code review answers: “Should this be part of my product?”

That’s a judgement call, and it’s a fundamentally different question than “does it work.” Does this approach fit our architecture? Does it introduce complexity we’ll regret in six months? Are we building toward the product we intend, or accumulating decisions that pull us sideways?

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/47658995

Related discussion:

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47479751

Hello everyone 👋, I’m seeking advice from experienced devs. I understand the fundamentals of Python (I've got them down pat). The challenge is that when I actually work on real-world projects, even though I know how the project should be built (theoretically), I have trouble executing it.

I understand the thought process behind the project and can identify what I need to do, but when I am faced with a specific task, I tend to forget the actual implementation of the task.

I'm trying to transition into AI/ML; however, I'm struggling with the above issues.

Can anyone give me:

• Suggestions on how to become better at practical thinking while coding?
• Suggestions on how to effectively use learned concepts in real-world projects?
• Suggestions on how to increase my problem-solving skills?
• Recommendations for some sort of practice project or project-based learning?

Any support, thoughts, guidance or past experiences you can share would be a great help and Share Some Material For Learning.

Thank you.

As the title says, it's a rather simple golang script for creating memories in Immich based on certain criteria, since there aren't any customization options in the official app.

As you may gather from the README, I created this for very personal reasons. But I wanted to share it here in case someone else finds it useful as well.

Currently it can do filtering based on people, and tags. But I'm more than happy to add more options, if requested.