The Software Ark: Issue 17
Quote of the week
A year from now you may wish you had started today. — Karen Lamb
Standouts
This is a brilliant article about how to debug an issue. And debugging is something that you can always get better at. It's why I love reading war stories about when something went wrong: to build that mental model of the sorts of things that can go wrong and how people figured that stuff out.
At the end of the day, debugging is all about constraining and validating hypotheses. You gain context, you pick what you think can go wrong, and you tweak it and see if that was actually it. The framework that Phil provides really frames the scientific method in a coding context.
And this applies beyond just debugging. The same approach applies to coding as well. It's why you always want to start with the hardest things: you'll either figure out you can't do it. Or you'll figure out you can, and the rest of the project feels more feasible. Very "fail fast".
This sort of work is not unique to coding. But it is more common when coding for sure. This takes up mental bandwidth, and you need some free time to think it through. Hence the push for a maker's schedule.
Some fun war-stories: - The heisenbug server - Debugging under fire
I used GPT3 to test out some webRTC stuff for a person project. Just to see if I could get started faster using it. Kinda scary how useful it was. It output code where all I had to do was change the import URLs, and debug a few errors. What would've taken me a few days took me 6 hours.
Links
- How startups read resumes - a lot of good details on optimizing your resume.
- I always knew numbers were hard - here's the proof: floats are hard, ints are hard too
- Build your own internet of things
- MSFT don't care about no VR, less competition for us
- You only need HTML - a case against the prevalence of JS
- Drip pricing is a dark pattern, don't do it
- Tech Debt is like working out - you don't do enough of it. Just remember, bundle your TD with a project... sneak it in, and don't ask for permission. And remember to prioritize it. If all that doesn't work, bring up Southwest airlines.
- Resilience in software = a minor blip instead of a catastrophe. Related: How AWS Lambda builds resilience
- Mess around and find out with git. I miss git - it was great!
- The 7 challenges of big-data analytics. Especially data governance - no one likes it when you do that. But you have to do it.
- Small Form Factor (SFF) PCs look very very sleek
- Contracts developers should never sign
- Product market fit and the risks to mitigate also related High performing product teams
- Lisp at JPL
