• 2023 / Feb 02 / 15:40 CET Erlang: the coding language that finance forgot talks about how being proficient in another programming language (Erlang) can improve your coding skills in others. Specifically going from an „esoteric“ functional language to a non-functional one. I feel like there’s some truth to that. A good example are immutable data structures. Bringing this practice to JavaScript, Python et al makes for readable code. It takes some discipline when not enforced by a compiler. But that applies to other high level patterns and principles too. You don’t have to be an expert in those other languages, often an understanding of the key features suffices. Go build something in OCAML, Elixir, Clojure or Crystal. It’ll widen your horizon.
• 2023 / Jan 23 / 19:53 CET Today I witnessed layoffs for the first time from the inside. While not being affected myself, it was (and still is) a horrible process. Sitting there waiting whether you get an e-mail from HR or not is torturous. Reading the messages of people losing their job makes it so real. There’s a lot of criticism about how companies implement the decision to let people go. While a lot of that is valid on a case by case basis, there’s just NO good way to do this. Other than not doing it. There’re good and bad reasons leading up to the decision, but the implementation is always going to suck.
• 2023 / Jan 20 / 10:43 CET First time working on a vscode extension for Spotify Hackdays. The docs explain the process and anatomy really well. One major downside is that you can’t use ESM modules. So you end up with a mixture of imports and requires. What a mess. Also went through the source code of the markdown extension that vscode is shipping with. It feels overly complex, gives me Java vibes.
• 2023 / Jan 18 / 11:17 CET This „blog“ reads a bunch of blocks from a single Notion page. If a block starts with a date, it will get published to the Atom feed and the website. The block parser is really dumb right now. It only supports paragraphs and links.
• 2023 / Jan 17 / 09:50 CET “Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas” makes some good proposals. Makes you reconsider whether you’re building the right thing. Whether your organisation’s structure has purpose. Whether your processes make sense. It’s one of the downsides of doing everything iteratively, you tend to lose a sense of direction.
• 2023 / Jan 05 / 18:53 CET I have been gambling around with the Crystal programming language a bit. It’s quite fun and productive. The stdlib has a lot of stuff, reminds me of Node.js. Docs are great, the cli is easy to use. What’s lacking is better editor support. The vscode extension is just way too slow. Cross-compilation is also giving me a bit of a headache, though I’m mostly used to interpreted languages and those running on VMs. I’m keeping an eye on it!
• 2023 / Jan 05 / 00:00 CET Welcome to my microblog. Let’s see how this pans out. The inspiration comes from Brandur‘s Atoms.