Recent content on Douglas Vaghetti
I’m currently 30 years old. A lot of things start happening around this age range: Sex and the city starts being funny, you start to know what mortgages and Minoxidil are, and your friends start having kids — on purpose(!!!). And just like having kids, talking about the decision of having kids also becomes a common thing. Don’t get me wrong, the demographic implosion is just as real among my…
I work in a pretty big Typescript code base on my day job. The one thing I see people struggling the most when learning it is the type system. Typescript types are rather special in that they exist during compile time but not during runtime. I believe it is a better mental model to think of them as type annotations than proper types like the ones you get in a language like Go or Java.
Consider TV weather forecasts – Every day, someone will show up in your television and give you a prediction of what the weather is going to be like in your area over the next couple of days. Everyone knows weather forecasting is never 100% accurate. Sometimes it says it will rain, and it doesn’t. But they’ll mostly get it right so people listen to what the weather forecast says…
It’s an everyday thing at this point. Amazon abused its position as a platform to use third party seller data to compete against them. Apple abuses its position as an application platform to compete with Spotify and other streaming services. YouTube abuses its position as a video platform banning content producers without offering any recourse. The list goes on. In a more traditional…
I started this personal blog a bit more than a month ago. It has been a really interesting experiment. Some posts even made it to the front page of hacker news. Google analytics tells me this blog had about 46 thousand page views across all posts! Even with way more views than I was expecting, it’s been really hard to convert these viewers into a more regular following for the blog.
The internet can’t seem to get tired of complaining about how bad modern journalism is. There are lots of reasons for this perceived loss of quality, but there is one that I find specially worrisome that I don’t think is mentioned often enough: Modern journalism is being censored by marketing departments. How things were before Journalism has always been at least partially funded by…
Text editors are a funny piece of software. They are undeniably important. You can’t write any code without them1. Text editors are like the software engineer equivalent of a hammer for a woodworker: not the only tool we use, but one we’ll certainly use a lot during our entire careers. It would make sense, then, to invest as much time as possible trying to be as good as possible with…
Here is an interesting thought exercise that I have been seeing around the internet for some time now: Think about libraries as a concept – the government builds a huge building, buys loads of books from many different authors and allows everyone to just go there and read the books for free or some small fee. Sometimes you can even take the books to your home! – Now imagine libraries…
I live in Brazil. Brazil is a developing country. It is definitely not a rich country, but it is definitely not among the poorest either. We are placed on 84th in human development index rankings. You will find Brazil similarly in the middle of other rankings like per-capita income, education or life expectancy. There is, however, one ranking where Brazil is a solid 1st: Having expensive Macs and…
Here’s a very 2020s experience: You get to a friend’s house for dinner. You start chatting about random things. You open a bottle of wine or something. “Hey let’s orders something for dinner, I’m starving”. Chaos ensues as everyone argues about what to order for 10-30 minutes. A compromise is reached eventually, food is on the way. Chatting continues.…
Tibia is a 2D MMORPG released in 1997. It is one of the oldest MMOs still active. You can see their official screenshots page to get a sense of what it looks like. Tibia’s graphics improved since the game was released, but not much. Although the game was pretty solid technologically when it was released, it was quickly surpassed graphically in the following years. Even with dated graphics,…
Way too often, I see tech companies provide their developers with tooling that can get their job done but doesn’t spark joy. I believe that’s a big mistake. Developers expect joy from their tools, and they will go to great lengths to get them, either in their current job or elsewhere. Which tools spark joy? I’m not going to get into the topic of which tools spark joy and which…
I have a diary. I’ve been writing on it somewhat regularly since 2014. I find it extremely useful and I think everyone should at least give it a try. I do it for two reasons: When writing, a diary is a great tool for organizing thoughts and making decisions. The process of writing forces you to articulate thoughts with much greater clarity than you could by just sitting down and thinking.
I love Wordle. I play it pretty much every single day. I also play the portuguese version immediately afterwards too. It is now part of my morning routine. Wordle is one of those ideas that just click and immediately have you wishing you were the one to have them. If you don’t know what Wordle is, just click here and play it. Give it a try, you’ll probably like it. It won’t take…
It is a good time to be in tech right now: soaring salaries, daily LinkedIn recruiter spam, people bootcamping their way into career switches to tech, remote work allowing you to work for a major tech company making triple digit salaries from the beach. It really feels like every single company is trying to recruit programmers nowadays, and doing whatever they can to get them. I’m certainly happy…