It's such a simple thing, yet it's been my experience that so few actually say the words. One thing I'll never regret is that I always tell people I appreciate them.❤️

@lisavogtsf i really enjoyed your tweets from Strange Loop, Lisa

While I’ve never been I’ve always wanted to and seeing the highlights that people like you post every year reminds me how cool a place it is. Thanks for that.

@alpha honestly I’m not sure when was last time I got value from reading a resume. Aside from perusing which companies they were so at they don’t need to explain everything to you when they introduce themselves

@alpha i regularly tell people the time I interviewed a candidate from Microsoft in an objective C project who had brought their own keyboard that they had assembled (or soldered?) themselves. Three-ish hours pairing with someone who on paper seemed too bizarre to work out.

Best interview I ever conducted. Great hire. Never would have known if we hadn’t sat down to write software together.

Excel is so wild.

My mind was blown. I had thought, naively perhaps, that circular references in Excel simply created an error. But this data scientist showed me that Excel doesn’t error on circular references—if the computed value of the cell converges.

You see, when formulas create a circular reference, Excel will run that computation up to a number of times. If, in those computations, the magnitude of the difference between the most recent and previous computed values for the cell falls below some pre-defined epsilon value (usually a very small number, like 0.00001), Excel will stop recomputing the cell and pretend like it finished successfully.

https://basta.substack.com/p/no-sacred-masterpieces

A former coworker of mine made this and posted to our shared alumni slack: https://doyouneedatruck.autos/

It’s a very simple quiz that asks everything relevant about your situation and provides you an answer personalized to you. I can vouch that it’s actually 100% correct.

@dwfrank Naw. You’re not missing much.

tfw u show up and *all* of the splines are completely unreticulated

Be like Tim. https://dannorth.net/2023/09/02/the-worst-programmer

@alpha interesting, i haven’t read that yet.

Let’s catch up sometime soon - I’d love to hear your thoughts and see how you’re doing.

New blog post, in which I argue that work is play, and that jobs should be fun

https://medium.com/@LeftSaidTim/work-is-play-e634882740d3?sk=bfa60e60cc33113ad9bcaaa951fc31aa

This is either obvious and dumb or flame worthy. I’m prepared either way. 🔥 😎 🔥

There was a time when a nation could only afford one person living like a king. It was the king. They had to move around the country because their life style depleted the area’s resources. We have dozens of people living like that today and they are using the our resources such that a large portion of the population are barely surviving. We used to have a tax system and a safety net that helped some. We don’t even have that anymore

Tried the Telescope plugin out this week, it's great.

My favorite feature is that you can use Telescope to search its own command list. A nice touch for discoverability, which is often a challenge with command-line oriented tools. #neovim

https://neovim.substack.com/p/why-arent-you-using-telescope-yet?sd=pf

@alexch I really wanted to pick this up when it came out but between work, kids, and other games I decided to pass until it’s on sale and maybe had a few updates.

Each day that decision looks more and more wise. (But I’m still looking forward to playing someday…)

@diji Ah that's a good point. I should have pointed out that I was considering this as an exercise of defining our own interface, separate from knowing anything about len(), or other python built-ins.

It's a bit of a strawman argument as a result, but there's certainly other cases where you're building your own interface and it's tempting to expose a variable directly, rather than a method.

@diji I think i would understand better if you share a snippet. Pair programming over mastodon is challenging.

@llimllib hey you’re absolutely right. Thanks for checking that. I gave you a shout out at the end 🙌

Still thinking and blogging about #python. There are some practices that python encourages that are ... frankly dangerous.

Turns out sometimes writing more lines of #python is better than writing fewer.

Surprised ?

https://medium.com/@LeftSaidTim/the-curious-case-of-more-code-being-better-than-less-code-18d834e72e5?sk=a23543481bf71377ace092e8963414ba

@nat it’s exceedingly stable. Sadly it hasn’t needed much maintenance and so ramping people up on it is … quite hard as a result, to say the least.

It solves a real problem we have but the fact that’s elixir is such a different language from Python discourages a lot to contributors. Especially on the frontend, sadly.

What it does it does quite well. It was a good experiment to see how well a proof of concept can easily go into production and handle many concurrent requests