From a quick look at the repo, it is end-to-end testing for web applications.

Also, it seems that their big selling point is a verbose, English like syntax.

It is mutually assured destruction. The job seeker AI spams out a resume to every listing and the hiring AI rejects all applicants for not meeting some unknown criteria. In the end, no worker can find a job and no employer can get applicants. Companies go back to only hiring friends and families of existing employees.

I am used to seeing ring buffers implemented using an array. They are FIFO if you write to the maximum offset and read from the minimum offset but they are double ended if you have a method to read from the maximum offset and write to the minimum offset.

I was a bit surprised that deque is implemented as a linked list and not, for example, a ring buffer. It would mean that index reads would be constant time (though insert and delete at an index would be linear time), the opposite of using a linked list.

TAOCS has a reputation for being very deep and thorough, not for being a good introductory text. One of my professors said that in his (very long) industrial career, he only met one person who actually read the books beginning to end but everyone looks something up in them once or twice.

That has been my experience. I once needed to find out how to solve a very specific problem (I think it was calculating statistical values on an infinite stream). I found the single copy of TAOCS in the office reference library, read the relevant section, and implemented the suggested algorithm.

Maybe it is just my experience, but in the last decade, employers stopped trying to recruit and retain top developers.

I have been a full time software engineer for more than a decade. In the 2010s, the mindset at tech giants seemed to be that they had to hire the best developers and do everything they could to keep them. The easiest way to do both was to be the best employer around. For example, Google had 20% time, many companies offered paid sabbaticals after so many years, and every office had catering once a week (if not a free cafeteria). That way, employees would be telling all of their friends how great it is to work for you and if they decide to look for other work, they would have to give up their cushy benefits.

Then, a few years before the pandemic, my employer switched to a different health insurance company and got the expected wave of complaints (the price of this drug went up, my doctor is not covered). HR responded with “our benefits package is above industry averages”. That is a refrain I have been hearing since, even after switching employers. The company is not trying to be the best employer that everyone wants to work at, they just want to be above average. They are saying “go ahead and look for another employer, but they are probably going to be just as bad”.

Obviously, this is just my view, so it is very possible that I have just been unlucky with my employers.

pip is a perfectly usable package manager and is included in most python distributions now. Is it perfect? No, but it is good enough for every team I have been on.

I had a worse experience. My first internship was doing web development in ColdFusion. Why that language? Because when the company was first starting, none of the funders wanted to learn Linux/Apache administration and CF ran on Windows.

Also, the front end development team did not have version control but shared code via a file server.

Are we really doing fine? 4% linux market share? Windows is a default?

I suspect that the issue hindering adoption is GNU and other user land projects, not the Linux kernel. Plenty of people use devices that pair a Linux kernel with an easy to use UI and popular software (see Android and Chromebook).

Many people would happily switch to a Linux based OS that had the exact same GUI as their current OS and ran the exact same software. That is not a realistic requirement in practice.

It is possible that Linux would have more adoption if they invested more money into having drivers for a wider range of hardware, but having Linux kernel develers write drivers instead of hardware vendors is not a strategy that scales well.

Why should we keep leap seconds? Let noon drift by 1 minute per century (or whatever).

I am not a hiring manager (or, more likely a recruiter/HR), so I cannot speak about the value of having a MS listed on one’s resume.

I am a senior developer with a masters degree and I am very grateful for the knowledge I got from that degree. Since I graduated, I have never needed to write a compiler, but i know how to implement a bunch of language features and it makes new languages easier to learn.

Could I have learned all of that without going to school? Definitely. It is all in white papers, software documentation, and textbooks, but for me, that is not the best way to learn. From what I have been able to find, even the most advanced MOOCs are only at advanced undergraduate level but don’t cover grad school level concepts.

I always feel a little paranoid when I explicitly close transactions, connections, and files (for quick running scripts, the OS will close the file when my process exits and for long running applications, the garbage collector will close it when the object leaves the scope). Then I read a blog post like this an remember that it is always better to explicitly free resources when I am done with them.

Not at all in my org, as far as I know. We are a team of senior engineers somewhat set in our ways and I am not sure how good Copilot plugin for Emacs is.

We are part of a large company and we had a mandate from up top to come up with ways to incorporate AI into our product. We prototyped a few, but could never get it batter than “almost good enough to be useful”. Other teams have presented promising prototypes of inhouse AI assistants that we can incorporate into products.

My team pivoted to the inverse: seeing if we can make our product more useful to ML developers.

Did you find the answer to your question, and if not, could you explain it better?

Also, a quick tip: if you are using Python 3, you don’t need to join your variables before passing them into print. print accepts any number of arguments, converts them to strings, and prints them as a single line separated by spaces (which is exactly what your code seems to be doing).

Kotlin jvm is extremely stable

I don’t want to use Kotlin on (just) JVM. The reason I am working with Kotlin is Kotlin Multiplatform (so JVM and JavaScript). The JavaScript side is where all of my frustrations have come from.

I also like checked exceptions. I like having a compile time check that I thought through error scenarios.

Is it perfect? No, but it should be iterated upon, not discarded.

FYI, catching and rethrowing as an unchecked exception is a pretty bad anti-patern (and a foul code smell).

The point of using a cache is to have data in memory and not on disk. From what I can tell, Postge Unlogged tables are still written to (and read from) disk. It is just that the write is done in an unsafe way.

The article explains how one would go about benchmarking performance but forgets to actually include performance metrics. Luckily they link to another write up that does. Using an Unlogged table vs. a regular table reduces write times about 45% and gives you about 3 times as many transactions per second. It is not nothing but it is probably not worth the code complexity vs. writing directly to a persistent table.

Even the “no persistence” behavior of a cache is not strictly true: an unlogged table is only truncated if Postgre is shut down unexpectedly (by kill -9 the process or by killing the VM). If you restart if you shut down the process in a controlled manner, the unlogged table is properly persisted and still has data when it starts.

I have used Kotlin a bit for a hobby project and it felt like they were 95% done with a 1.0 version. I love the promise of a single code base that can run on the JVM and browser, but it is not all there. Until recently, the API was not guaranteed to be stable. Every one in a while, I hit a feature that is JVM only or does work right in JavaScript. The JS compiler will “helpfully” remove uncalled public functions unless you explicitly mark them with JsExport.

Also, from what I can tell, only InteliJ is the only supported IDE (which makes sense, since they are the language developers). There is an official Eclipse Plugin, but the last time I tried it, it did not work and tried to take the entire IDE down with it.

Having said that, it was very close to complete and I have not worked on that project for a few months, so it could all be perfect now.

They forgot the Erlang approach: throw exceptions but never catch them. If you are throwing an exception either your code is wrong or your system is bad. In either case, you should crash violently and let another instance handle the retry.

As someone who was a web developer since the mid-2000’s (and not more recently), an HTML first approach speaks to me. I am still of the belief that your contents should be in HTML and not pulled in via JavaScript.

The article is a bit self contradictory. It encourages specifying style and behavior inline and not using external styles and scripts but also discourages using a website build pipeline or dynamically generated HTML. So how can you maintain a consistent look and feel between pages? Copy and paste?