After a long hiatus, I’m back to doing the CTM bookclub. It’s been quite busy at work, but we (Terrateam) delivered GitLab support, are working on Bitbucket, and we’ve delivered a host of other changes. Needless to say, I’ve been too busy for other fun activities like blogging. But I’ve scraped some time together and going to aim to be more consistent. What’s helping is I’m doing this bookclub with my co-worker, so now there is a support group. Chapter 3 Chapter 3 is about decla...| Blog on pid1
I was a big fan of the original Chromecast. The UX was simple: install the thing, get it on your Wifi, and then just send stuff to it from your phone. The end. No remote. No account. Barely even any security! It didn’t do anything other than be a destination for whatever content I want to see on my TV. I recently bought whatever Google is calling the latest generation of Chromecast and it involves a whole account setup, it has a remote, collects a bunch of data about me (which it probably c...| pid1
The first few chapters are dedicated to getting the user acquainted with the basics of the programming language, the system, and the base concepts that will be expanded on through the book. Preface [Programming is] the act of extending or changing a system’s functionality. Programming is a widespread activity that is done both by nonspecialists (e.g., consumers who change the settings of their alarm clock or cellular phone) and specialists (computer programmers, the audience for this book) ...| pid1
Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming, otherwise called CTM, by Peter van Roy and Seif Haridi is my "one book" for software development, if you need to pick one. What I love about CTM is that it covers a huge range in topics, from programming in the small to in the large, functional programming to object oriented programming, and sequential programming to concurrent programming. Not only does it cover all these topics but, in my opinion, covers each of them sufficiently suc...| Blog on pid1
Every few months there is a news story about some AI company CEO saying that in a year almost all code will be written by AI. The software engineer, where previously having tremendous bargaining power, is going from scarcity to redundant. The valuations are huge. Windsurf was recently bought for $3bn. Anthropic raises money on a bi-weekly cadence and most recently has a valuation of $61.5bn. Even the French are getting in on it, Mistral having a valuation of $6bn. And Cursor raised at a $10bn...| pid1
The infrastructure startup Wing Cloud, creators of Winglang, recently shutdown, after receiving a $20 million investment in 2023. I did not find this surprising. Not because the developers aren’t great or because I’m a genius business person. It wasn’t surprising because the idea of Winglang went against my mental model of how technical progress happens. The idea of Winglang is to combine application code and infrastructure code. You use a "queue" object in your code and the Winglang en...| pid1
I recently got sent the slides for a talk titled On Bloat by Rob Pike, that can be found here. I don’t know the origin of the talk or what the intention was and only have the slides to go by. The presentation makes the superficial observation that hardware has become significantly faster since the first mainframes yet software does not feel like it has utilized those gains well. Computers don’t boot instantly. Logging into your bank has some noticeable latency, etc.| pid1
One of the primary skills I try to impart to people that I mentor is to "think before you type". This is obviously not a new idea but I suspect, with the proliferation of LLMs to write code, that stopping to think will be a rarer skill in software engineering. An analogy I use is that coding is like getting from A to B. You don’t start going in a direction until you know which direction you need to go. You need to understand where you want to be before even any automation can help you. In m...| Blog on pid1
This week I implemented a pattern I find myself reaching to quite often. I call it the Match Set/Query Pattern. The pattern is simple and requires two elements: Associating a piece of data with a Match Set. The match set describes the data, usually key-value, like a database. Maybe for a person you have first_name = John, last_name = Adams, occupation = President. Defining a small Match Query language for performing queries on the match set. Something like first_name = John or occupation = Fa...| pid1
I was trying to use the mobile Google Authenticator app today and I couldn’t read the entire name of the last code I have installed because of the stupid floating "+" button. The reality is, I sort of know which codes I have installed so I knew which one it was but it struck me: someone thought it was a good design system to have something that obscures the data the user is trying to look at. The Gmail app is another offender, here. The button to create a new email is floating over the list...| Blog on pid1
I created a Discord server. To join follow the link below. Join Discord Server| pid1
I’ve been, rightly, downvoted in r/terraform for recommending using -target in production. I say "rightly" because I know it’s a controversial suggestion and I’ve just sort of dropped it like a bomb without defending my position. So here is my defense. tl;dr When and how to use -target My concrete recommendation on when to use -target is as follows: If your infrastructure is hitting the point that plan operations are taking too long and slowing you down, rather than refactor your code i...| pid1
Mitchell Hashimoto post As Code this week reflecting on what "as code" means to him. Different from the popular interpretation of being literal code, his view is that the "code" in "as code" is a 'system of principles or rules", like a "code of ethics". The poor guy has probably been the target of angry emails for a decade. My experience in the Infrastructure-as-Code world has been that a lot of people do take the "as code" a little too literally. Usually it’s being strict about workflows, ...| pid1
The Unix Philosophy defines a culture of how to write tooling in the Unix world. At its core, the Unix Philosophy is about designing tools that work together. A consequence is that there must be some rules or convention such that programs can communicate. The power of the Unix Philosophy is that it lets us both automate our workflows and also build more sophisticated and powerful solutions by combining tools. The most common conventions in the Unix world are:| pid1
I like an API that captures a problem and expresses it concisely. I imagine this is how mathematicians feel when they create a beautiful proof. I’ve always enjoyed a good API but it wasn’t until I worked with one of my best friends, who has a background in type systems, that I really started to appreciate what it means to create a good API. I have a bunch of APIs I like but probably my favorite is retry, which I’ve implemented in several languages.| pid1
Welcome to the pid1.| pid1