Roben Kleene

The Five-Year Rule of Software Transitions blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/sof…

@dhh @cerv3ra The flagship applications for the most creative pursuits still use old-school desktop apps, from media editing to painting to CAD to 3D modeling. Some folks are philosophical "but there's no *reason* they can't be web apps", I just take the pattern at face value.

@cerv3ra I think software is hard, and most of it is bad. But at least on the web, it's portable, updateable, and sandboxed. Your alternatives aren't between a bad web app and a great desktop app. Never was.

Most MacBooks serve as glorified Chromebooks these days. Apple still has a clear advantage on hardware, but their grip on the software side has never been softer. For normies, almost everything happens on the web when they're in front of a computer.

@lexfridman @awesomekling appears to be a once-a-generation talent, able to accomplish things that most programmers would consider impossible.

I'll be interviewing some video game designers/builders. Previously, I've spoken with Todd Howard and John Carmack, both people who I'm a big fan of. They are legends! Coming up I'll be chatting with Tim Sweeney, creator of Unreal Engine & Fortnite. If you have recommendations for game desigers/developers to interview, please let me know. I love videos games, they have brought me endless hours of happiness in my life ❤ And I find the engineers and artists who build video games to be amazing, inspiring humans. So to talk to them for many hours is a real honor and pleasure. Btw, if you have questions for Tim Sweeney, let me know. I'm gonna have to play some Fortnite to "prep" for conversation 🤣

@lexfridman I think @Jonathan_Blow is easily the most lucid commentator on the state of programming as a craft, and how the accretion of complexity is shaping the future of our platforms and tools.

@Nairebis @ID_AA_Carmack (You can usually dump the thread ID for multithreading issues, but this a scenario where the debugger just removes so friction it becomes essential)

@Nairebis @ID_AA_Carmack Heh yeah I would have thought that too, but in practice I've found this often doesn't exist. Also this doesn't work with concurrently called reentrant functions.

I am always bemused by programmers that don’t use debuggers. It isn’t just about breakpoints and examining variables, but also being able to break into a process that has been running for an hour and issue something like: (observation_ring*255).to(dtype=torch.uint8).view(128,16,4,3,128,128).permute(1,0,2,4,5,3).cpu().numpy().tofile('results/ring_128x128.rgb')

@eeuoss @meow464_ @ID_AA_Carmack That's all also true of Xcode with the C family of languages at least, Swift is less reliable fortunately.

It just works. Intuitive UI. E.g. you set a breakpoint in the source editor, press run and can see what’s going on. On GDB you need to have a build with -g, you need to figure out command line (and oftentimes things like permissions), run set breakpoint (location often does not work for a number of reasons), know commands how to explore program state.

@Nairebis @ID_AA_Carmack Simple question I'm always curious about for folks that don't use debuggers: If you're debugging an unexpected value in a function with multiple call sites, how do you determine which call site you're function logging is coming from?

@ID_AA_Carmack Unpopular opinion: Print statement debugging ends up being faster than debugger debugging. Why? Because print statements give you an automatic run log. Debuggers also lull you into wasting time with single stepping. People get dependent on debuggers.

@GergelyOrosz @AdiKumarSaroj Maybe this all stems from more backend architecture complexity being concentrated at the company itself? E.g., a lot of frontend architecture complexity tends to exist in third-party frameworks (e.g., React)?

1. There's a glass ceiling within frontend and mobile teams to grow as an engineer (and leader). You always depend on backend 2. To end up leading backend AND mobile+web teams, it's natural for the BE leader take over. 3. BE is more organized and "clean" and easier to reason about engineering complexity, architecture, approaches etc

When you look at most CTOs and engineering executives at most tech companies: their engineering background is more often than not backend engineering. Worth considering what this means esp if they lead a co where the main product *is* mobile, web - or to delight customers!

This is just how brains work en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_r… But you do have to spend a lot of time reading code first before you can offload the majority of the work in understanding code to your subconscious. That's why I mention the thousands of hours above (note I'm not sure how long this actually takes).

@robenkleene @EchoOfPixels When considering the list of things that interrupt my ability to read other people's code, "style" is the last thing on it. It's practically not even on the list.

I will never understand the autistic obsession many "programmers" have with "coding style". You are looking at the code produced by a highly competent highly experienced programmer and your first instinct is to criticize the way it looks? Seriously, fuck you.

When you're skimming code (and you've spent thousands of hours skimming code before) the "meat" of a function just jumps out at you (e.g., your brain just ignores the boilerplate [like, say, variable initialization]). Inconsistent style disrupts this because the style inconsistencies also jump out.

@EchoOfPixels So, you are saying, if you see one line do this: if (x > 10) { do_something() } Then some other place does this: if y < 10 { do_something_else() } You'd be totally confused?

@vaibhavsingh97 @morajabi In an ideal world, this would be enough to stop web apps from existing (until the problem is solved).

@morajabi Slack is a web app, while the other app is native. Native will always provide the best performance. I believe we are comparing apples and oranges, which is incorrect in my opinion.

can you spot the difference

@_trish_07 Transitions in computing usually happen very quickly, the fact that this isn't already happening is strong evidence it will never happen blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/sof…

today my colleague told me rust will eliminate c/c++ programming languages. i just laughed and said, "you need a good doctor 😂." what do you all think about this?

@RhysSullivan @theo Messed this one up... you should be focusing on the challenge. Waking up early is just like a task that you now do without exception. But the thing you're focusing your problem-solving on is falling asleep early because that's the challenge.

@RhysSullivan @theo 3. There's not a contradiction between #1 and #2. Falling asleep is practically impossible to control, but waking up is possible to control entirely, so *the challenge* is falling asleep, *the focus* is on waking up early.

Has anyone successfully shifted themselves from a night person to a morning person, if so how? I feel like I'm best at working & being focused from around 6 pm to 4 am, but that does not work well with the rest of society

5. For the first 1-3 months, you'll be useless when you wake up, so don't try to use the time productively. Instead indulge yourself with something you don't let yourself do normally: Play video games, binge your favorite show, doom-scroll your phone, doesn't matter as long as you're awake.

I did this, and I was one of the worst night owls there could be ("It's true, I was there, even worse off than most of them"—Bukowski). There's lots of great advice in this thread but most of it is what you'd expect. I'm going to share some unintuitive tips as replies to this tweet that I found helpful when I made this transition.

4. At the heart of the change is a loss of ego, you have to become a different person, you have to value different things. E.g., if you like night life, you don't anymore. Think of yourself as someone who gets obsessed with a problem until it's solved? Not anymore, now you make slow steady progress towards your goals. You're probably going to have a host of blockers wrapped up in your identity that you'll need to untangle.

2. The challenge of becoming a morning person is more about falling asleep early than it is about getting up early, so that's your focus. I think of it like landing a cross-continent flight, you don't land safely by not worrying about where you're headed and then trying to eke out a landing at the last minute. Instead your focus from the moment you start your journey (waking up) is traveling to your destination and landing safely (falling asleep).

1. Sleeping in used to be one of my greatest pleasures in life, for the new you the times you get to enjoy this are never. It took over a year to get used to this, but now I don't miss it. The linchpin of this transition is getting up at the same time every day without exception. Going to bed at the same time every day is also important, but *it's so much less important that it's dangerous to even consider it.*

@zack_overflow I still find searching, debugging, and understanding code difficult, so I optimize for those. I mainly like the flexibility of ripgrep for search (the CLI is great at iteratively refining a command [e.g., an exact search]), so that pulls everything else to the command line.

@zack_overflow I don't think LSP is really an IDE feature itself? I think of it more as an implementation of autocomplete and jump to definition (in addition to other features)?

I've been fascinated by a special type of programmer, the devs who don't use IDE features like: -autocomplete/copilot -LSP - go-to-def What allows them to just rawdog text editors? Do they have superhuman coding ability? I asked them and here is a thread of what they said: