Hi! I'm Tomas. Software should work. I do my best to make working software, currently as a consultant at The Tech Collective. I'm unresonably into soft...
I. We have won, what now? Meeting your 'internet' people in real life is bizarre. You've been following them on the interwebs, potentially for years, and always rationally knew that they are real . But still, when you see them in the flesh for the first time, it's like they finally emerge from Narnia, come to Earth, and your brain reclassifies them into the 'indeed exists' category. Last week I…
When you want to introduce a formatter in an existing project, you have two extreme options - do a 'big bang' reformatting, or reformat only changed lines. A big bang reformat is enticing because you get it done and can add a CI formatting check straight away. However, you would polute git blame with a bunch of no-value changes. --ignore-revs to the rescue! TIL that you can except commits out of…
I. It is the dev's responsibility to choose a good default It is the developer's responsibility to choose a good default behavior. In case the software is not flexible, the default behavior is the only behavior - by definition making it something you need to care about. In case the software offers customization, the default behavior is still what most people will stick with . So you should still…
I. Blunders So far, I've missed two flights in my life. The first I missed because I forgot to check in in advance and left home too late to check in at the airport. Since then, I've been more diligent about having enough time. The second flight I missed because reality presented me with facts and I denied their existence. The facts were: 'your flight is boarding, go to the gate now'. My mind was:…
Discussion on LinkedIn , BlueSky In Simple Made Easy, Rich Hickey has this quip about bugs. What's true of every bug found in the field? It got written. What's a more interesting fact about it? It passed the type checker. What else did it do? It passed all the tests. And I would add And where did you find out about the bug? In prod . So here's one of my bugs I wrote that made it in front of a…
The defaults are bad LLMs for learning are bad because most people use them in a "ask question - get answer" kind of way. That gets rid of a whole lot of friction - which is where learning happens. Learning is traversing the void between your current knowledge and a new problem. Shortcutting that traversal with an LLM helps you complete the next assignment, but it kneecaps your learning. You…
Being someone who is easy to help is one of the greatest productivity hacks I know. You get more done. Your colleagues see you in a better light. And they are more likely to help you next time! But most people still regularly commit the hi sin. Yuck. Bad. Bad, bad, bad. Bad for you and the receiver. Because essentially, when you decide to ask for help, you're blocked until someone helps you. Being…