Posts

LOLWUT. Random. Yes. Kinda. So here’s the thing; I recently watched a reaction video by ThePrimeTime for a clip about the “Best Programming Setup” from the Lex Fridman interview with John Carmack, and for some reason it sparked an urge to write about something. The specific bit was here (from around 19:45 to 21:12), where John talked about making the move from 2 to 3 monitors, and Prime commented on being a 1 monitor person. ...

Clarity for the purpose of this post 😏 code monkey, n. a computer programmer who is not involved in any aspect of conceptual or design work, but simply writes code to specifications given programmer, n. an organism that can turn caffeine into code. Introduction Once upon a time, (many, many moons ago) at the very start of my career, I was just a “code monkey”; an individual contributor to the grand scheme of the digital jungle being fed instructions from primates higher on the food chain and was expected to simply do what I’m told. ...

Right, so it’s been a minute since I last posted something. Like many other companies this last year, we weren’t spared layoffs. While I still have my job, my team has been greatly reduced, both from people leaving when they saw the signs and from people being let go. So while fighting survivors guilt and an increased workload, posting hasn’t been my first priority. But while doing my day to day and trying to keep my head down and deliver as much as possible as quickly as possible, I noticed something. And I’m not sure how I feel about it, other than we need to talk about it. ...

Introduction So very many years back when I was but a fledgling coder, armed with BASIC skills and deep into a Turbo Pascal with Objects book, I remember a conversation with my dad. Frustrated by the level of specificity needed to communicate with a machine, I asked, “Why has no-one made a programming language where I can just tell it ‘build this game for me’?” My dad, in his infinite wisdom, mused that cracking that puzzle – creating a natural language programming language – was a feat yet to be achieved. “Whoever manages to do that,” he predicted, “will make a fortune.” ...

Ah, another “trend” I’ve seen online in the last year. I wonder which AI recommendation tool suggested this one to the thousands of small YT channels and influencers who needed a topic… Okay, saltiness aside, I actually found this one quite interesting. And not because I agree with most of the approaches I’ve seen people recommend (it is shocking how many just want to punt their own products or their sponsors), but mainly it was interesting because I was thinking that… ...

Just a quick one here, but I used this a lot today and realised after chatting to some other devs that a lot of people don’t know about this trick. That trick is: History Expansion Let’s say you are SSH’d (or SSM’d on AWS if you want to be more secure) onto a Linux box and you want check the status of a service with systemctl status cassandra.service You see that the service is exited for some reason, and you want to restart it after determining that’s all that is needed. ...

Today again, I was triggered. So here is a hastily written post about my thoughts. sigh 😔 I feel like every week there is new thing which my inbox spams me with. If it’s not AI taking our jobs, it’s some [insert new and shiny framework] which will render [insert current “industry standard”] useless, or it’s about how everyone will get let go because of the market correction and recession, or whatever, so many stupid things. ...

I originally started writing this post at the end of 2022 but never finished it. Originally titled “Why LowCode/NoCode both excites and terrifies me!”, with the buzz around ChatGPT over the last months, I decided to 1) finish the post, and 2) update it to include AI tools like CoPilot and ChatGPT. So here, finally, is the update. Also a little different to my usual style. I didn’t like it. ...

… why developers should focus more on code than how much they make. Been meaning to do this myself for a while as a discussion post, but haven’t gotten around to it. I’m busy reading Masters of Doom, which has been on my “to read” list for a long time, but after watching the 5+ hour interview between Lex Fridman and John Carmack, I decided it’s time. And in there I was reminded of a quote attributed to Carmack about his motivations for getting into development. ...

A while back I posted my first blog post, and the key take-away it seems people had from that was that “intentional learning” is key growing in your career and profession. The discussions I had following this made me think of another conversation I had with a new developer I recently hired. He noticed on my LinkedIn that I have a LOT of completed courses, and asked how I go about learning this much and if what I learn sticks. I gave him a brief overview, but thinking about things over the last week, I figured I could probably share more. ...