nickm12

6 ms·

1.
by nickm12 2mo ago
Ok, not execs, but director and senior-director-level positions.
2.
by nickm12 2mo ago
I remember Snow Leopard as a particularly stable release, but it's been so long this could easily be misremembering. One other thing that was notable about Snow Leopard, though, was that it was the last release before the iOSification
3.
by nickm12 2mo ago
Glad that the ebay execs who did this got prison sentences. I really wonder what kind of environment could make six high-ranking people think this was acceptable.
4.
by nickm12 2mo ago
I believe both that code should be self-documenting but also that comments and documentation are a critical part of the code. Comments and documentation explain the functional contract of the code and why implementation choices were made. E
5.
by nickm12 2mo ago
Yes, I've seen this a bunch too and agree completely. Sometimes I've also see Claude comments reference details about the calling or even code in completely different modules. There are many reasons I don't like it, but a top
6.
by nickm12 2mo ago
During the rise of agentic assistance, I've gotten the advice that "If the generated code isn't what you want, fix the steering, not the code". I've also been advised to not change the sometimes verbose comments and
7.
by nickm12 3mo ago
I'm with you in not wanting to see these types of comments in my code. I aim for each revision of the code to stand on its own, and not reference its past or future. There are exceptions and nuances, of course, such as TODO comments or
8.
by nickm12 5mo ago
It's strange that he shows the graphs with the age of vulnerabilities going up without any real commentary on it (except to say that it's an argument that the number of bugs is not close to zero). I'm not so sure—I think a de
9.
by nickm12 5mo ago
It's been a while since I taught anyone to juggle, but I generally disrecommended scarf juggling. It's fine if you want some quick validation, but the hand movements are so different from balls/bags that I don't think th
10.
by nickm12 6mo ago
1) I would generally use BBSes daily. Probably for an hour in the evening or however long I could tie up the family phone line. I would log into two or three, read and respond to messages. Very much like reading email at the end of the day.
11.
by nickm12 6mo ago
Team CLI. I generally think we should build tools that are usable by humans and agents alike. An anti-pattern is having to use an agent to do something because you didn't build a human-accessible one. Another anti-pattern are MCP (Mode
12.
by nickm12 7mo ago
This is a really nice take and matches my experiences as well. It also calls out one of the biggest incongruity of this current age: the sudden desire from management to have good specs and documentation for the benefit of the coding assist
13.
by nickm12 7mo ago
This is such a strange take. The definition of "magic" in this post is apparently "other people's code" and it even admits that that no practical program can avoid depending on other people's code. I think what
14.
by nickm12 7mo ago
Python crossed the chasm in the early 2000s with scripting, web applications, and teaching. Yes, it's riding an ML rocket, but it didn't become popular because it was used for ML, it was chosen for ML because it was popular.
15.
by nickm12 7mo ago
Because you generally cannot test every possible input, output pair.
16.
by nickm12 7mo ago
Yes, because no one conflates an engineer with a compiler. But there are people making the argument that we should treat natural language specs/prompts as the new source and computer language code as a transient artifact.
17.
by nickm12 7mo ago
No, for the reasons given in the sibling comments: you won't want to be locked into a single model for the rest of time and, even if you did, floating point execution order will still cause non-determinism.
18.
by nickm12 7mo ago
I'm not sure what the high-level point of the article is, but I agree with the observation that we (programmers) should generally prefer using AI agents to write correct, efficient programs to do what we want, to have agents do that wo
19.
by nickm12 8mo ago
Thank you. I had to scroll way down to find anyone defending using SI prefixes to mean what they mean everywhere else. A decade ago, I decided to alias "du" to "du --si" and not look back. Entire countries have switched
20.
by nickm12 8mo ago
I use the phrase "drive-by review" frequently too. As a senior engineer, I worry about doing drive-bys myself. Sometimes my gut tells me something is not quite right about the project, but I just don't know enough about the p
21.
by nickm12 8mo ago
This article resonates with me a lot, but as a senior engineer I would not share it in a big team setting. Even though it's correct, it's too cynical for big team morale. I think it would be worth sharing with peers or managers wh
22.
by nickm12 9mo ago
Two random anecdotes: when the concept drawing were first shown to the graduate students, someone asked what the swooping walkways above the main corridor were for. The answer they gave was "lightsaber battles". When we first move
23.
by nickm12 9mo ago
Yes, I think this is what seems to be missed by everything I've read about Gehry in the mainstream. As I said in another post, I worked in the Stata Center at MIT for five years. It was indeed a fun space to walk around in and explore,
24.
by nickm12 10mo ago
I worked in the Stata Center for the first five years and it was just a very poor office building to work in. Even setting aside the leaks and other construction defects, individual working spaces, traffic paths, and communal spaces were no
25.
by nickm12 10mo ago
This is yet another very good critique, but it's long past time that we stop paying attention to Uncle Bob. Not only are his ideas about how to write software patently bad, but he is willfully obtuse when asked to provide nuance or dis
26.
by nickm12 10mo ago
Thanks for taking one for the team. I had zero expectations for Clean Code second edition after reading Uncle Bob's dialogs with John Ousterhout. I thought Ousterhout bent over backwards to give Uncle Bob the benefit of the doubt and d
27.
by nickm12 10mo ago
- Archive: Anything you have a feeling might be useful - Delete: Anything you’re pretty sure would be useless in the future This has always been my strategy, though some might say I'm closer to "archive almost everything". I
28.
by nickm12 10mo ago
That's just Archive with fewer steps
29.
by nickm12 1y ago
$240/yr is a lot to just have a couple of family mailing lists. Even for creating mailing lists for youth sports teams, local civic orgs, and things like that it's really high.
30.
by nickm12 1y ago
I agree that the available features can steer the online community culture and behaviors, but it's not determinative. I don't see why online communities should give up useful features just because other communities use them in a

More ›