Yeah and this still wouldn’t cover something like xz-utils because I would only be aware of end user projects and not the libraries behind them. I’d have to draw up entire dependency graphs.

Tom Jones - It’s Not Unusual

Now run an emulator within an emulator for extra acceleration.

If you don’t already, use version control (git or otherwise) and try to write useful messages for yourself. 99% of the time, you won’t need them, but you’ll be thankful that 1% of the time. I’ve seen database engineers hack something together without version control and, honestly, they’d have looked far more professional if we could see recent changes when something goes wrong. It’s also great to be able to revert back to a known good state.

Also, consider writing unit tests to prove your code does what you think it does. This is sometimes more useful for code you’ll use over and over, but you might find it helpful in complicated sections where your understanding isn’t great. Does the function output what it should or not? Start from some trivial cases and go from there.

Lastly, what’s the nature of the code? As a developer, I have to live with my decisions for years (unless I switch jobs.) I need it to be maintainable and reusable. I also need to demonstrate this consideration to colleagues. That makes classes and modules extremely useful. If you’re frequently writing throwaway code for one-off analyses, those concepts might not be useful for you at all. I’d then focus more on correctness (tests) and efficiency. You might find your analyses can be performed far quicker if you have good knowledge about data structures and algorithms and apply them well. I’ve personally reworked code written by coworkers to be 10x more efficient with clever usage of data structures. It might be a better use of your time than learning abstractions we use for large, long-term applications.

I really liked how coupling is described as “knowing.” I find we talk about “does x need to know about y?” more than we do “is x overly coupled to y?” because the former is a relatable indicator of the latter.

I was going to say that Cloudflare uses nginx but I found that’s no longer true.

I use a UK keyboard, | is pretty easy to access and $ is Shift+4.

I’m guessing you mean more exotic keyboards. I’ve used a Swedish keyboard while helping a friend and I had to ask where every key was. You probably just learn the combinations eventually.

I feel like this is overlooked far too often. I rarely see anyone use data structures outside of (array) list and hash table and any attempt to use something descriptive of the problem is often shot down because of “familiarity,” which is sort of self-fulfilling.

I get away with flagging lists which should be sets, though.

Dual Core - For Aaron

Where did you get 100 from? I’m just asking if it’s a real limit or a guess at “some manageable number” under one million.

It can be worth experimenting and tuning this value. You might even find that less than 100 works better.

I agree. I use Proton and I have exactly one service which supports GPG. It’s a cherry on top but it’s not all that useful.

The big thing is to use a trustworthy service that you pay for. It’s not bulletproof but at least the incentive is there to keep your email private and away from advertisers.

To be honest, I agree they should be able to be larger at times.

I had a lot of disagreements when I was on a new codebase, knew what I was doing and I was able to push a lot of code out each day.

The idea is to have them small, easily readable with a tight feedback loop. I argued that bootstrapping a project will have a lot of new code at once to lay the foundations and my communication with the team was enough feedback. If I split it up, each PR would have been an incomplete idea and would have garnered a bunch of unnecessary questions.

That said, I think it’s generally pretty easy to put out multiple PRs in a day, keeping them small and specific. As you say, half of the job is reading code and it’s nicer to give my coworkers a set of PRs broken down into bite sized pieces.

I’d be pulled up at my job for any PR exceeding a few hundred lines. I don’t even know what they’d do if I just dropped a 15000 line stinker.

Funny, that’s in line with the $1 a year WhatsApp was going to charge.

Sounds like just $5 will pay for me and 4 others, so that’s nice.

Nice to know, I was pretty sure my experience was purely anecdotal.

I can anecdotally say that the more right-leaning people I know are the most anti-FOSS but I’m not sure that applies generally.

Even that comes with a caveat: the people I know disagree with it philosophically, i.e. they can’t see how it can work for the maintainer and won’t donate, yet are as happy as anyone to use something for free.

I need to get into NixOS but I have a similar variation on servers: ansible for state of systems, Borg + Borgbase for data (kept in /srv) and code (including ansible) are in Git.

The separation between data and state is really great. You want to be able to go from a base install and only bring in everything which makes your setup different.

Even some shops working with Windows Server are asking “wait, why are we paying for these licenses?”

Then it comes down to whether it’s cheaper to rewrite legacy applications or continue to pay for licenses.

Yep, it’s usually an existing idea with progression in a few areas. You could definitely achieve serverless with a cluster of servers hosting the same scripts in cgi-bin and I think that context helps to put it into perspective.

Yeah and ARM servers are cheap. You can often get twice the processor cores and memory for the same price.

That doesn’t always map to twice the performance, though some benchmarks would suggest it could for certain applications.