Joy & Curiosity #10

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

Last week we took the kids to a small amusement park. We got there early and when we walked in, employees of the park were still getting the park ready for the day: sweeping, feeding animals, raking leaves, putting new bags in trash cans. And I kept thinking: “this is exactly like in Rollercoaster Tycoon!”

So this week, let me remind you: “Sawyer wrote 99% of the code for RollerCoaster Tycoon in x86 assembly language for the Microsoft Macro Assembler, with the remaining one percent written in C.”

• Patrick and Mariano are organizing a meetup in Munich called Hombrew Systems Club and it sounds wonderful. I’m going to give a short talk on writing Tucan, the optimizing compiler in Rust that I hacked on for a few years. Filling 10 minutes won’t be an issue, but I’m really worried about creating slides that match the “~~Vibes~~”

• Derek Sivers was on the Andrew Wilkinson podcast. Derek’s books have meant a lot to me over the years and listening to him talk like this for an hour created some very enjoyable moments of reflection. Super interesting bit from the episode: the Derek Sivers as I know him — author of books, TED talker, blogger, /now-page haver — only started to exist when he was 38.

• Where did the \n in the Rust compiler come from? Mind-bending, to-the-point, fun blog post. “perfect blog post” indeed.

• As a response to my post here, Glad I did it in Go, a reader sent me an email to share a document he authored with me: Argument against Python in Education. I don’t enjoy a lot of discussions around language design because most of them are very abstract and very academic — this document though, it’s refreshing and interesting because it’s grounded in practice, in reality. Really enjoyed that, thanks for sharing Patricio!

• And as a response to my post this week, Use data that looks like data, Sam shared this blog post: Greppability is an underrated code metric. Again: this is as real, as rubber-hits-the-road, as practical as it gets. I love it. I’ve used greppability as a metric in the past and it makes me happy that I now have something to link to.

• I’ve thought a lot about the PATH environment variable in the past few months (due to fixing or improving a lot of environment-handling things in Zed — I wrote a long doc about it here) and then came across this blog post this week: Modern PATH environment variable. “as of the year 2024 that's it”, they write, and present a really short PATH — I’m telling you: if everyone would have a well-managed PATH like this, 50% of the world’s bugs would disappear (not really, but still.)

• Deno 2 was announced this week and, again, it’s all about practice and tooling. I guess that’s a given, since Deno is a runtime and tooling and not a new language, but it still made me think back to what a friend said last year: “Ruby missed the boat because Matz thinks developer happiness is purely about the language and they missed that it’s more and more about the tooling.”

• A Haskell programmer wrote about their “negative views on Rust”. I agree with some of it (on the Good and the Bad side), but what stuck with me was use of “tamagotchi”: “This aspect of Rust puts me off. I don’t need another tamagotchi.”

• This whole discussion around the Deppenapostroph in German was fascinating — so many flashbacks to early 2000s internet and people being annoying and annoyed by wrong punctuation on forums and IRC. Plenking was a capital offense just like Deppenapostroph and while I haven’t thought of that term in ten years, I still get shivers when someone puts a space in front of puncutation mark.

• Keep thinking about this Patrick Collison tweet on distraction. I only have half-formed thoughts here, but Zed’s Slack is the quietest Slack I’ve ever had in a workplace and over the past year I’ve been thinking a lot about that and which effects it has.

• Another good tweet: “capital structure ripples through management and ultimately ripples through employee experience.” Nice lens to look through at past experiences working at startups — in Germany, in US, inside large corporation.