koreth1

6 ms·

31.
by koreth1 2y ago
I kind of hate the fact that the term "API" has lost its generality in the minds of a huge number of practitioners, and people now assume it refers to a set of network (usually HTTP) request and response formats. It's great t
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by koreth1 2y ago
By way of example: when I worked on payment code in Java, we accepted numeric JSON values in request payloads but they were deserialized into "BigDecimal" fields in our payload classes, not "float" or "double".
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by koreth1 2y ago
That's an excellent point too. Some payment systems have abysmal technology. The product I worked on was focused on international payments and in a couple cases, the "API" was literally, "Upload a CSV file via FTP, and a
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by koreth1 2y ago
Right, Stripe is a middleman and part of the value they're giving you is that you don't have to work directly with the underlying payment companies. If you had to support the same range of payment options without a middleman, you&
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by koreth1 2y ago
Based on my previous experience on payment systems, there's a surprising amount of value in not having to maintain direct business relationships with the underlying payment providers. It is much, much easier to work with a company like
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by koreth1 2y ago
> If you hate writing code but do it for your job, then you are going to really hate writing code in two different languages with their own syntax and paradigms. I don't wish for this, but sometimes I wonder how different the indu
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by koreth1 2y ago
What killed Quora for me was that they decided to prioritize quantity of questions over quality of questions, and as I recall, they even set up incentive programs to reward people for asking as many questions as possible. The site was inund
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by koreth1 3y ago
Scrum is the thing that has tainted "agile" in my opinion, because Scrum is so widespread that many people think they're the same thing. Leaving aside the "agile is a philosophy, not a methodology" argument, there a
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by koreth1 3y ago
That last one is an interesting example. If I needed to do that, I would write something like this (in Kotlin, my daily-driver language): fun foo(list: List<Bar>) = list.filter { condition(it) }.associateWith { transform
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by koreth1 3y ago
This is useful, thanks. Since you're using this for learning, would it be fair to characterize this as asking the LLM to write code you don't already know how to write on your own? I've definitely had success using LLMs as a
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by koreth1 3y ago
> My prompts are long and complex, with a paragraph or two about the general objective followed by 15 to 20 numbered requirements. Often I'll include existing functions the new code needs to work with, or functions that must be refa
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by koreth1 3y ago
That childhood native-fluency analogy is insightful! Your experience matches mine. I started programming at age 7 and it's true that the way code forms in my head feels similar to the way words form when I'm writing or speaking in
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by koreth1 3y ago
I've read that it's common for mystery writers to start with the ending and work their way backwards so the clues all line up.
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by koreth1 3y ago
Isn't that true for all stores, though? If I'm buying something like that, I'll always search for reviews before deciding, whether or not Amazon is involved. Even if it's at a brick-and-mortar store. The phrase "cav
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by koreth1 3y ago
I threw in the towel after about 10 years but not because of deliverability problems. When I first started running an email server for myself and my friends and family, it was a great learning experience. And it kept being a good learning e
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by koreth1 3y ago
The biggest problem I've seen with OKRs as an engineer is that the objectives are business goals the engineering team has little or no ability to influence. Like, an objective of "onboard 5 new large customers" makes sense fo
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by koreth1 3y ago
I keep hearing this explanation (executives want to keep commercial real estate values up) but it has yet to make sense to me. Can someone lay out an example scenario? "Having investments in commercial real estate" isn't suff
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by koreth1 3y ago
Another unfortunate thing in this context is that coursework is almost always greenfield development of small projects. Coming up to speed on a large existing code base of inconsistent quality and style is another enormously important job s
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by koreth1 3y ago
That's one aspect of reliability, but the one I was more curious about was determinism. If I repeatedly run the same test suite on the same code base and the same data and configuration, am I guaranteed to get the same test results eve
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by koreth1 3y ago
I think "most of what I learned is inapplicable to my job" is kind of inevitable in any CS program that tries to expose students to a breadth of topics before they graduate and get hired into specialized jobs. The trick is that th
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by koreth1 3y ago
2 deploys isn't enough for robustness. It depends on what the change is, but the full sequence is often more like * Add the new schema * Write to both the new and old schemas, keep reading from the old one (can be combined with the pre
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by koreth1 3y ago
And a tricky part of this, for certain kinds of nonprofits, is that you'll be penalized for it because your efforts to raise more money will be classed as overhead and will lower your efficiency rating on various charity-rating lists.
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by koreth1 3y ago
I don’t doubt at all that this has happened to you, but as a counterpoint, in 35 years in the industry, I don’t remember ever having been lied to by an interviewer at a company that ended up hiring me. Of course I have no way of knowing for
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by koreth1 3y ago
> I think Kotlin is at risk, though, of having the JVM force them to support two competing models to accomplish the same thing - coroutines and virtual threads is a good example I don't think it's that good an example, though
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by koreth1 3y ago
Glad I'm not the only one who was irked by this, and I do need to know a lot about Unicode for my job! I believe there actually are topics that every software developer ought to know something about, but this isn't one of them.
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by koreth1 3y ago
> with a bit of back and forth you can get pretty good results that work with only a bit of revision The problem for me is that the "back and forth" and "a bit of revision" steps very often end up taking more time tha
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by koreth1 3y ago
My theory has always been that it's purely an artifact of the spoken language. When we're saying a date out loud, we Americans tend to say, "September 21st, 2023," whereas I've noticed many of the Brits I've wo
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by koreth1 3y ago
Kagi is my default search engine and I'm happy with it except for one category of search: location-sensitive. I live in San Francisco, and if I type "sf weather" into Google, I get a weather forecast for San Francisco. If I t
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by koreth1 3y ago
What would "quality control" look like for self-published books?
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by koreth1 3y ago
I have a Miele dishwasher and it does a great job of washing ceramic and glass dishes. But reusable plastic food containers (Gladware, etc.) always come out sopping wet and I have to hand-dry them. The Miele is nice and quiet, but sometimes

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