• 19 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • You know, I wish I could enjoy IRC - or chatrooms in general. But I just struggle with them. Forums and their ilk, I get. I check in on them and see what’s been posted since I last visited, and reply to anything that motivates me to do so. Perhaps I’ll even throw a post up myself once in a while.

    But with IRC, Matrix, Discord, etc, I just feel like I only ever enter in the middle of an existing conversation. It’s fine on very small rooms where it’s almost analagous to a forum because there’s little enough conversation going on that it remains mostly asynchronous. But larger chatrooms are just a wall of flowing conversation that I struggle to keep up with, or find an entry point.

    Anyway - to answer the actual question, I use something called “The Lounge” which I host on my VPS. I like it because it remains online even when I am not, so I can atleast view some of the history of any conversation I do stumble across when I go on IRC. I typically just use the web client that comes with it.








  • Honestly, for any large scale project in Python, Pydantic makes it bearable. We use Python heavily at work (and I’d argue we shouldn’t be for the projects we’re working on…), and Pydantic is the one library we’re using that I wouldn’t be without. Precisely because it allows us to inject some of these static typing concepts and keeps us honest, and our code understandable.






  • I have read a few of these books. As for non-fiction:

    Pragmatic Programmer Excellent book; should be compulsory reading for all software developers.

    The Phoenix Project Enjoyable enough. It’s a fictional story and has some extremely role-cast, trope filled characters. But its purpose is not to be a great novel. Its purpose is to teach the history of and purpose of how dev-ops came about. I think it’s worth reading. I’m yet to try the Unicorn Project which I understand is actually more about software.

    Eloquent JavaScript I am not a huge fan of working with JavaScript or front end, but I did read this when I got placed on a long term project where I would be using it for the duration. I found this book excellent, and my JavaScript certainly benefitted from it.

    I also read a bunch of the fictional books. Bobiverse is one of my favourite series ever, despite the weirdness of the fourth book (it was still good). I’m just over halfway through Children of Time, and seriously regret not picking it up sooner. Well kind of, if I had I suppose I wouldn’t be enjoying it so much now!








  • I particularly enjoyed a recent company meeting that spent considerable time talking about the importance of flow state. It had an awkward pregnant pause when someone (usually very quiet) unmuted to ask, “is the policy to increase the number of days we must spend in our open-plan office kind of undermining this?”. Literally all of our directors just shifted on their seats hoping another would answer that.

    Eventually, HR director stated “Not at all, that’s what headphones are for!”

    Which was particularly delightful, as our tech director had only 20 minutes before stated how he would like to discourage people sitting in the office in silos with their headphones on.