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#programming

146 posts121 participants3 posts today
Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"While haste and speed often get confused, they differ in that the second shows control instead of panic. You can maximize speed while keeping accuracy quite high; beyond a certain point, though, spending more time on accuracy, style, or other aspects that prevent a document from going live always yields diminishing returns.</p><p>Nobody reads perfect yet outdated docs, except historians. Even then, docs aren’t perfect, because documentation can’t ever be perfect. This is a key principle I stand by (call it the Ferri Paradox if you want): Any document describing a system is necessarily inaccurate. And yet, this reality doesn’t significantly alter the impact of our work, because we aim for simplicity and usefulness over extreme faithfulness. Given how imperfect products are, docs are a charitable portrait.</p><p>Now, how you write docs quickly depends on a number of factors. Some of those factors you can’t control: your overall amount of experience as a writer, your initial expertise with specific technologies, and the way features are developed and released in your organization. But other aspects are yours to act upon. For example, you can decide how to best use the technical resources at your disposal and how to approach writing the docs and asking for feedback."</p><p><a href="https://passo.uno/how-write-tech-docs-quickly/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">passo.uno/how-write-tech-docs-</span><span class="invisible">quickly/</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/TechnicalWriting" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>TechnicalWriting</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/TechnicalCommunication" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>TechnicalCommunication</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SoftwareDocumentation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>SoftwareDocumentation</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SoftwareDevelopment" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>SoftwareDevelopment</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Programming" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Programming</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Docs" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Docs</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Documentation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Documentation</span></a></p>
Shane Celis<p>Re: Using ChatGPT to format your code. </p><p>Oh my god, stop! There are plenty of code formatters out there that don’t require a subscription, don’t leak your source code, don’t take a ton of compute resources and electricity, and won’t surreptitiously substitute their own stupid slop code just ‘cause. </p><p>Self respect, you could have it. <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/tags/programming" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>programming</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/tags/ai" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>ai</span></a></p>
ACCU<p>Get Early Access To ACCU Spring Conference Videos</p><p>🎤 The ACCU Spring Conference is one of the most respected in the coding world.<br>Get early access to videos from the 2025 conference by joining ACCU today!<br><a href="https://accu.org/menu-overviews/membership/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">accu.org/menu-overviews/member</span><span class="invisible">ship/</span></a></p><p><a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/coding" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>coding</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/programming" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>programming</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/software" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>software</span></a></p>
Lobsters<p>Working on a Programming Language in the Age of LLMs <a href="https://lobste.rs/s/obhc4f" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="">lobste.rs/s/obhc4f</span><span class="invisible"></span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/programming" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>programming</span></a><br><a href="https://ryelang.org/blog/posts/programming-language-in-age-of-llms/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">ryelang.org/blog/posts/program</span><span class="invisible">ming-language-in-age-of-llms/</span></a></p>
screwlisp<p>Installing lisp for beginners.</p><p><a href="https://screwlisp.small-web.org/fundamental/installing-lisp-etc/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">screwlisp.small-web.org/fundam</span><span class="invisible">ental/installing-lisp-etc/</span></a></p><p>So much computing is predicated on having this or a conscious alternative decision to it. Here is my attempt to help beginners get this far. What do you think?</p><p><a href="https://gamerplus.org/tags/commonLisp" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>commonLisp</span></a> <a href="https://gamerplus.org/tags/emacs" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>emacs</span></a> <a href="https://gamerplus.org/tags/beginners" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>beginners</span></a> <a href="https://gamerplus.org/tags/lisp" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>lisp</span></a> <a href="https://gamerplus.org/tags/programming" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>programming</span></a> <a href="https://gamerplus.org/tags/setup" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>setup</span></a> <a href="https://gamerplus.org/tags/software" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>software</span></a> <a href="https://gamerplus.org/tags/developer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>developer</span></a></p>
Lobsters<p>Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers <a href="https://lobste.rs/s/cvhdvw" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="">lobste.rs/s/cvhdvw</span><span class="invisible"></span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/programming" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>programming</span></a><br><a href="https://bitbashing.io/gc-for-systems-programmers.html" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">bitbashing.io/gc-for-systems-p</span><span class="invisible">rogrammers.html</span></a></p>
Eugenia L<p>I would like to raise awareness regarding finding developers to help add VST3 support to LMMS. LMMS is the best foss midi-based DAW, but it's missing that one crucial feature to get to the next level of acceptance among new users. They've been looking for more devs to add this feature for a while now. Anyone can help them? <a href="https://github.com/LMMS/lmms" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="">github.com/LMMS/lmms</span><span class="invisible"></span></a></p><p><a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/audio" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>audio</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/musicproduction" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>musicproduction</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/music" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>music</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/development" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>development</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/programming" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>programming</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/lmms" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>lmms</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/foss" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>foss</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/opensource" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>opensource</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/linux" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>linux</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/midi" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>midi</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/vst" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>vst</span></a></p>

I've found that I don't have much of a liking for backend infrastructure and that 90% of my irritation with it is the need to keep changing problem languages and contexts.

In UI, everything is written in one, maybe two, languages and you can see the changes immediately.

In backend full-stack? Every day, every ticket is a new family of languages to use to solve related but non-overlapping problems. I'm using Python to write and maintain the RPC service (and configure the database), YAML to script workloads (except the bodies of workloads, those are Python), SQL to build query state (unless I'm in the Python layer, then I use sqlalchemy because let's be honest, SQL is an ass language and it's safer to use an object-oriented tool that can build a sanitized SQL query with parameters than to roll your own), YAML again to bind queries to interface (but a different YAML, this yaml is configuring something else), some light C++ to fix a bug in this compute engine, a bit of protobuffer to bind the compute engine to its workload, oh but wait, we need to drive the compute engine, so that's Python that writes the protobuffer and stuffs it in S3 than fires an RPC (another protobuffer, but here it's JSON representation of that proto) to a server to spin up the workload...

... and now I want to display it all, so let's pop into TypeScript for a bit to extend the browser-based UI and I want to deep-link from this to a Superset dashboard with a dynamically-configured filter, that's no problem the filter is modified by query params that are of the form.... What the hell is Rison?

It's like this every day and it's getting to the point where opening my ticket queue feels like less of a fun challenge and more like "What fresh hell...?"

I'm reminded of a blog post Steve Yegge did ages ago, about a conversation between him and a staff engineer at Google about adding one new language. The staff engineer noted that the real cost wasn't in adding one more language and a few thousand lines of code... it was paid in the need for every engineer into the future forever to have deep knowledge of that language to maintain the code written in it. And, yeah, there's wisdom in that. Of course, in practice Google was little better... They'd put hard clamps on adding new languages and then internally multiply DSLs and frameworks about as fast as promotion cycles came around (this is not coincidence 😉 ).

Anyway...

To echo GLaDOS... I used to do just a game engine. You know what my days used to be like? I just coded. Nobody made me set up monitoring with Grafana. Or ran me in the Cloud. Or fed my data to a workflow engine. I had a pretty good life.

Replied in thread

@FrancoisPrague
No, probably never. Because #JSON is a primitive data interchange format, XML offers more versatility and reliability.
I like this sentence from the article "XML may not be trendy, but it remains the backbone of system-to-system interoperability" and I fully agree. It is used far more often than other formats, but many people simply don't know the facts. Often young programmers dislike #XML because it's an old format, but that's a silly reason 😬
#programming
@libreoffice