jorin @jorin@mas.to

If Germany would be a programming language it would be more static than C++. It might even be TLA+.
Is the system reliable? Sure. Is it secure? Definitely.
Is there change and innovation happening? Slowly. Is there space for humans and are people happy? Rarely.

https://twitter.com/Kurz_Gesagt/status/1517488479374036998

Lovely video with all this hopelessness concerning climate change:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxgMdjyw8uw
The video is not as naive as the title suggests. Worth watching 🙂

Sometimes Postgres is the right answer even if a problem screams Kafka. Being able to build problem-specific queuing logic is invaluable. Great breakdown! Thanks for sharing @RudderStack@twitter.com!
https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/why-rudderstack-used-postgres-over-apache-kafka-for-streaming-engine-cccfa2dda0f2

Really cool talk by @Jonathan_Blow@twitter.com!
Even if I don't care too much about civilization, for my own sake working in software:
What can we simplify?
How can we build more stable software?
How can we share our knowledge and thus create value that lasts?
https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko

"don't EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle"

https://groups.google.com/g/fa.linux.kernel/c/bzuK77VWNIA/m/mxwSsUpN8FIJ?pli=1

Another thing I noticed is that decisions are only right in the current context. Document this well. In a few years down the line you come to the opposite conclusion. And a year later you change your mind again.
We moved from monolith to services to monolith and to services again

Knowing what we need in the future is really hard. We always have to plan also for the opposite of our assumptions.
We have to be able to maintain a piece of code for a long time but we also have to be able to throw it away again next week.

Working on the same codebase almost daily for 4y+,
one thing I noticed is that the temporary hacks will stay around for years and great ideas with thoroughly thought out solutions might be replaced or completely removed in a few months down the line.

"Every single one of them ... were adamant that they would leave any position that managed them no better than a burger-flipper.

No lawyer, accountant, doctor, engineer, scientist or other professional stands up each day to report *to their peers* on their progress."

"The response was both extreme and universal: How the hell do you all accept being micromanaged to such a degree? Don't any of you have any dignity?"

"I mentioned how stand-ups work briefly, and that it might not be a bad idea to adopt for (for example) an accounting department to keep things on task."

"This is actually quite interesting as I was just talking to a few other professionals about this in a social setting. I was the only one in software development."

"We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30410856

"I'm willing to add increased coupling if it makes my code more stateless. I'm willing to make it more complex if it reduces coupling. And I'm willing to duplicate code if it makes the code less complex. Only if it doesn't increase state, coupling or complexity do I dedup code."

"I try to optimize my code around reducing state, coupling, complexity and code, in that order."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11042400

"how much time is spent worrying about decisions that don't matter. To just be able to make a decision and see what happens is tremendously empowering, but that means you have to set up the situation such that when something does go wrong, you can fix it."
https://www.artima.com/articles/collective-ownership-of-code-and-text