Joy & Curiosity #7

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

Greetings from Montreal! Been here since last Sunday for RustConf and a Zed team summit. I haven’t seen a single talk at the conference, because I spent all day at the Zed booth, talking to people, hacking, demoing. Then there were long, relaxed team dinners, great conversations, and a bike tour. Good times.

• I found this discussion about asynchronous IO and whether it’s “the next billion dollar mistake” very interesting. Someone in there commented: “All IO is asynchronous. Synchronous IO is an illusion created to simplify the life of the programmer.” I wonder whether the debates around async — which I’ve been witnessing for the past ten years — will settle on something in the next ten, or whether it’s just a “this fits your brain, this fits mine” kind of thing.

• Vicki Boykis asked whether there is “a website that keeps track of the best essays and blog posts about programming and computer science?” I’ve been thinking all week long about this question. It immediately reminded me of Kevin Kelly’s The Best Magazine Articles Ever list and that in turn made me wish for a programming equivalent.

• What would be on my list? Interestingly enough, what comes to mind first are things that aren’t highly technical. On Being A Senior Engineer, for example. Chad Fowler’s job description. Recurse Center’s social rules. stevey’s Rich Programmer Food. Pieter Hintjen’s blog post on optimistic merging. Jason Fried saying give it 5 minutes. Kent Beck’s StackOverflow comment on how much tests to write and this twelve year old tweet of his. Not highly technical, as I said, but all things I constantly think of in the context of programming. (And now I kinda want to compile a full list.)

• I really enjoyed reading about Fatih’s homelab. It made me want to take a vacation just to rewire everything in my house.

• Had to smile when reading Derek Siver’s blog post on syncing files between macOS and Linux/BSD machines. Derek Sivers, the guy who publishes these amazing books and blog posts about life, is also still blogging about rsync commands.

• There are some gems in this Kent Beck post from this week: “Plan incrementally. The team, every week, must be prepared to decide what to do that week. […] Deliver incrementally. The team must be prepared to support production while developing.” That last sentence will be reused, I’m telling you.

• In one of the conversations this week we ended up talking about when each of us starting programming and with which language. I don’t think it was my first language, but the conversation made me remember that I did write quite a lot of code in the mIRC Scripting Language back in the day. What a thing, huh?

• At a team dinner this week, Richard asked us: what are your favorite technical talks of all time? I immediately said: Rich Hickey - Simple Made Easy. Then, thinking about it some more, I said that James Mickens’ Computers are a Sadness, I am the Cure would make my top five. As would Gary Bernhardt’s Wat. This lightning talk about deleting your code is also always with me, ever since seeing it live twelve years ago. I often think of Kathy Sierra’s Badass: Making Users Awesome. There’s a lot more — quite a few 30 minute talks have been with me for years because some 30 seconds in them were special.

• Funnily enough: I tried to find some “best talks of all time” lists and Richard’s talk Making Impossible States Impossible made it on quite a few of them. I haven’t seen it but am now looking forward to that.

• “All you have to do is write one true sentence.”