Started subscribing to (only) @FT ePaper online. That's an amazing subscription option and exactly what I was looking for to a reasonable price. Works well in Chrome on Android.
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Hampus Wessman
1.6K posts
In a big and complex software system, end-to-end system testing is almost worthless without good testing at other levels and good ways of locating the source of issues (e.g. observability). It is expensive to fix regressions based on system testing, even if automated.
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@gssgek @pmddomingos Possibly, but I think the tax system etc in Sweden could also affect this (don't know about Switzerland). It's been discussed lately. Sweden has high taxes on income but not on wealth and capital. Quite unusual mix of policies.
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@DartezMatthew @davefarley77 @SergioRocks Totally agree! Good leadership is what's needed to make it work and build strong teams that collaborate well and avoid these problems.
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"Our Product Manager is only prioritising features that help increase the company's profit.
Our backend refactor keeps getting backlogged. It's non-sense!"
- A Software Developer told me last week
Well... The PM's job is to help increase the company's revenue, indeed!
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@SergioRocks This is true. The only way to succeed is together. It's neither productive to have a PM tell the devs how to do their jobs without understanding the tech nor the reverse (devs ignoring business priorities). Working together as a team with great communication and trust is magical.
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It's the job of technical stakeholders to raise awareness for these things in terms that business stakeholders can relate to.
Eg: "If we don't upgrade this framework's version until X date, it will break and cause users to not being able to register and pay, thus revenue loss"
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@davefarley77 @SergioRocks Indeed. For some reason, many people don't find this obvious in software. Demanding work on 'only features' is a bit like not allowing scaffolding or not investing in proper tools when building a house because the customer doesn't (directly) care about those. Empower dev teams.
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@SergioRocks It's a very common, but very big mistake. Part of the problem is that a kind of "organisational learned-helplessness" is induced.
We let non-tech people do this! Why's it better for non-tech managers to org the work for technical teams?
Tech needs to take responsibility!
3/3
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I'm attending an online session in LSE's online course on AI Ethics today. Interesting topic!
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It's interesting to follow the ongoing AI regulation efforts by EU. There's a draft to read, which I'm planning to do. This is likely to play just as big a role in the future of AI as technical development. The current status: europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-…
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Exporting Perfetto (perfetto.dev) trace data to SQLite and loading it into Python for data analysis (with numpy, scipy, pandas, matplotlib, sklearn etc) is great fun and quite useful.
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Finished reading the book 'Trustworthy AI'. Good introduction to AI ethics and related concerns. Recommended. trustworthyaibook.com
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Different framing can be helpful in different ways. Sometimes, it helps to think of AI/ML as simply data-driven function approximation. Takes the focus away from 'intelligence'.
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Reading about the huge GDPR fine in today's ruling against Meta. This is very interesting as the situation has been complicated the last few years. News from EDPB: edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2023…
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Working with software performance optimizations is loads of fun! Always makes me think of how important it is to consider the whole system, measure instead of guessing, and to understand the core problem area in detail. Performance aspects usually leak across abstractions.
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Tried ONNX and ONNX Runtime lately. I really like it for embedding machine learning models into applications. Works cross-platform including desktop and mobile, with hardware acceleration. There's an interesting onnx library for Rust too!
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Deploying software often and with good quality and availability is very much within reach using modern practices. Still, impressive!
Kenneth Auchenberg 🛠@auchenberg
In 2022, Stripe deployed its core payments APIs 5,978 times (16.4 times a day on average) ... API reliability is now consistently in excess of 99.999%, and, during the peak week of Black Friday and Cyber Monday , exceeded six nines (that is, 99.9999%, — the equivalent of around 600 milliseconds of unavailability. (It takes about 300 milliseconds for a human to blink.)
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Sometimes, it's nice to first get software to work correctly with a naive implementation, without optimising it. That gives you a nice performance baseline to compare to. It's very satisfying to know how much faster your clever algorithm really is :)
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@SebAaltonen Indeed. It's absolutely magical how much can be accomplished on modern GPUs every millisecond if done well! Never gets boring.
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The nice thing about slow software is that well optimized rendering code feels like magic. Renders a massive scene in the same time that normal code uses to parse some JSON that it translates to some other JSON.
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Finished reading 'A Tour of C++' by Stroustrup. It's a good book. C++ is improving and I like the additions in C++20. Modules will be great! I would still prefer Rust for new projects when possible. C++ can't compete with its memory safety and we know that it matters by now.
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I believe there's something like a 'placebo effect' for single-core software micro optimizations that are only (if at all) visible using a profiler. Very fun, but also very different from optimising the whole system in a way that has a real impact on the end-user.
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Productivity of software development teams is very interesting. Some seem to believe that there can be no real knowledge about this because it's hard to measure. It's just social science. Depends on the team but general knowledge is still possible. Science of all kinds is useful!
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