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Things don’t always go smoothly! My reflex is usually to buckle down and fight it. I’ve learned it’s okay to step away when I don’t have the concentration available to do my best. If I lose at chess online, my reflex is to mash “next game” and keep going. I’ll win next time, then I’ll stop, I swear, mhm, yep. I’m flustered and frustrated, my…
Apologia This isn’t topical. This is a story from the past that I thought about this week and want to write down before I forget more details. What Compiling and linking objects are things that you do a lot. Compiler flags are all very useful (particularly when trying to make your builds reproducible or cacheable). Linker flags can be too! What’s fun is that ld has an entire scripting…
This may seem pithy but: The best thing to do when you’re frustrated at something is to walk away for a moment. Your perspective is not the only one. What might seem incredibly obvious to you might not be to anyone else. Other people have reasons for doing what they are doing. If it’s unreasonable or you have a way to help them, they’ll probably be receptive if you can present it…
I wrote up some notes on using HTTP versions in production to help clarify some thoughts on transport mechanisms for larger systems. I’ve expanded a little on those for a blog post. Disclaimers I do not work on web browsers or HTTP implementations. These are notes from vaguely using them to make backend servers talk to each other. There are also changes to the actual bytes being sent over…
I’ve started a new job. There’s a very large culture of writing since there are people around the world working for this company (it is the largest company I have worked for). I haven’t been great about keeping written notes publicly, but I want to build the muscle. So here we go! This post states my intention to publicly write (at least) a note a week with some interesting…
I finished Having and Being Had by Eula Biss earlier this weekend. Biss tries to walk through her ascent from starving artist to gardening homeowner, her discomfort at the tension between her egalitarian principles and the comfortable space she has created for her life and work. It’s short, with some wistful and ironic witticisms from the author mixed with generous quotations of David…
I read a lot and want to share. I’m not the most prolific reader I know personally or know of online (those would be my oldest sister and Charity Majors, respectively), but I read enough that people sometimes ask me for book recommendations. I often end up recommending the same books over and over to different people. I keep a list of what I’ve read for myself, but I’m going to…
One of the most useful blog posts I’ve read is Dan Luu on what he calls “normalization of deviance.” It covers a lot of different ways that the collective lowering and raising of standards can occur in large organizations. A hypothetical conversation described in the post is something I want to talk about more: *new person joins* new person: WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF old hands: yeah we…
One way to cope with lots of possible submitters to a project, each of own may have their own definitions of quality, is to enforce a quality bar with tooling. This means everything from running a linter to using static and runtime analysis to find dormant bugs. Quick list of some completely reasonable things to use: Linters: clang-format , flint , et al. Static analysis: Coverity, scan-build ,…