thoughts on code, music, misc.
A person contacted an airline’s customer support chatbot after a family death. They wanted to know whether they qualified for a bereavement fare. The bot told them yes, and explained that they could book a regular ticket and apply for the discounted rate afterward. They followed the instructions. The airline later refused to honor the discount. The case ended up in front of a tribunal, which ruled…
Don’t get excited, I’m not promoting you. I’m simply pointing out that the craft of software engineering is changing rapidly and managers are going to adjust expectations accordingly. This isn’t some AI-pilled cheerleading perspective, by the way; but I think most fair-minded people can agree that code has become cheaper to produce over the past year or so. This comes on the heels of a much more…
For a brief moment in the 1990s, a significant portion of the software development world thought it had found the Holy Grail. I am referring, of course, to UML. The field had matured enough to crave predictability and discipline, and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) was prophesized to deliver it. At last, there would be a way to describe software systems with the rigor of an electrical diagram…
Under the hood, the AI era can be understood as the migration of users from producer-published software to platform-published software. The specifics of how that happens have massive implications for our everyday lives. These predictions are built on the stipulation that users will increasingly make AI platforms an indispensable part of their daily lives. It’s completely valid to reject that…
LastPass recently notified users that their free product will drastically change on 2021-03-16 in a recent blog post . I believe this change is being made irresponsibly, but you can read my opinion in a follow-up post I'm planning. Many non-paying users are looking around for alternatives. Bitwarden fits the bill nicely for me: it has desktop, mobile, and web apps with the same features as…
I had the honor of being a guest on the Rubber Ducking podcast with Spencer Miskiovak and Chris Schmitz. Find it wherever you get podcasts or right here !
I had the honor of writing an article for LogRocket about Using React Testing Library to do TDD in a React app. Read it here !
I lied a bit in the title: this works for any static analysis tool. So if you're a RuboCop , Pylint , or [insert awesome static analysis util here] user, this solution has you covered. The impetus for this post was ESLint , though, so I'll use that for the sake of a specific example. I found myself in the unenviable position of trying to introduce a new linter rule. The reason this was such a pain…
I've been using the vim text editor for a while now. I know some basic vimscript , but not much more. A while ago, I settled on a version of the cobalt color scheme as my theme of choice. I made a few tweaks here and there over the course of a few years. It started to become more noticeably painful to change colors after a while - sometimes I'd update a hex color and forget to update the…
It's 2020 and people work from home . The benefits are intuitive: commutes are often risky and can be a waste of time and natural resources; plus removing geographical barriers can increase the size of the recruitment pipeline. Even though some companies are making headlines by bucking that trend , remote working is a fact of life. People get sick; they make appointments during business hours;…