Highlights / summaries that I made while reading Coderspeak by Guilherme Orlandini Heurich

On Community

When they contribute to open-source projects, they often say they want to ‘give back to the community’, (…which…) comes from the connection between the programmers who wrote it and the program they created.

Heurich cites Marcel Mauss’ The Gift:

What imposes obligation in the present received and exchanged is the fact that the thing received is not inactive. (…) It is something attached to me, the giver, and it will be permanently attached to me, even if you pass my gift along.

That is why, Heurich concludes, it is not the companies who contribute graciously, instead, but the individual developers who reciprocate. And not for the prestige (as Eric S. Raymond tends to think of it), but for a feeling of belonging to a…

These are notes I made while reading Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows. It is a book on Systems Design, or perhaps better, understanding systems. These systems can be software, drinking water systems, political systems, or the world climate “system”

On resilience

Resilience is not the same thing as being static or constant over time. Resilient systems can be very dynamic. Short-term oscillations, or periodic outbreaks, or long cycles of succession, climax, and collapse may in fact be the normal condition, which resilience acts to restore!

System traps

Sometimes systems fail to work, Meadows refers to these as ‘traps’ and identifies a list of common traps, and how to escape from these. It is good to reference the book in case you encounter such traps.

One of the trap mentioned is success to the successful, which may kill compe…

In “We Just Build Hammers”, Coraline Ada Ehmke explores historic parallels to moral issues in technology & software development. Referencing both fiction, historic and scientific sources, the book moves in four parts towards the current day and age.

I start of with a summary of the book, followed by a short reflection.

Summary

In the first part H.G. Wells’ writings set the scene. Wells’ has an almost scientific approach to his writing. Ehmke writes:

Wells’s future histories shined a light on what was possible and gave people permission to imagine alternate futures. But he insisted on the need for rational approaches for bringing these futures about or averting their catastrophe.”

His literature is compared to events that were developing in that same era. Leo Szilard is quoted saying:

In so far as the present discoveries in physics are concerned, the forecast of the writers may prove to be more a…

I am currently selecting a static site generator for an upcoming project. I value technical simplicity (exit React based solutions), like ruby and in the Static Site Generator category Jekyll is an established name. But doesn’t the project that started in October 2008 show signs of age?

Pro’s:

• It is ruby based (whether that is a pro for you depends on your aesthetics)
• It is simple
• It is easy to extend
• Format for posts is Markdown
• Hosting it is simple

Con’s:

• Liquid (a templating language developed by Shopify) is limiting, I’d preferred ERB as a template language.
• “There is a plugin for that” disappoints, many are pre-bundler era (hence requiring copying code) and quality differs a lot.
• Lacks even a simple asset pipeline for JavaScript; hence bundle minified JS files together or build the final JS in a separate webpack-process.
• The builds won…

I’ve been able to stay away from PHP-based projects for quite some time. Until recently. I needed a small API. The idea was that the API would be transferred to a relatively old server that had been running stable for years and the client didn’t want to risk installing additional script interpreters on it. It might even have been my own suggestion, it would be a really small API, requiring no special changes on an already operational 24x7 managed server. On top of it I’d write a modern style front-end, running entirely in the browser.

Of course the API that was intended to be simple got a bit more complex. I wanted the API to output clean JSON messages, which required some data mangling, as data was stored in CSV’s, TSV’s, and misused XML-files or only accessible through crappy soapy API’s. So what does present-day (well, the Red Hat PHP version I was able to use is still in 5.x-series) PHP look like? TL;DR: sometimes it was definitely ugly, but at I can happily live with the cod…

De afgelopen tijd heb ik geëxperimenteerd met alternatieve e-mailprogramma’s voor mijn Mac. Een alternatief dus voor Apple’s eigen Mail.app. Ik stuur zo’n 30-40 mails per dag waarvan een groot deel naar Outlook gebruikers. En hier begon mijn frustratie: zij zien mijn mails niet zoals ze er uit horen te zien, sterker nog: delen vielen soms weg en de gebruikers ontvingen spookbijlagen (meer hierover later). Naast deze, en andere kleine frustraties en gewoon nieuwsgierigheid leidde er toe dat ik actief op zoek ging naar het beste e-mailprogramma.

Tijdens deze zoektocht heb ik mijzelf verplicht tot het daadwerkelijk gebruiken van de e-mailprogramma’s in ‘productie’. Dat was gelukkig niet zo lastig meer zoals het vroeger ooit was. Alle mail staat immers tegenwoordig op IMAP servers, en wordt niet langer ‘definitief’ gedownload vanaf (POP) servers (een Exchange-server forceer ik overigens actief in IMAP door gebruik te maken va…

My ticket was sponsored by The Bean Machine.

Friday was the last day of this next web. In this post I'll be discussing the talks of Bradley Horowitz, Jim Stolze, Eric Meijer and Michael J. Brown.

Bradley Horowitz

Bradley Horiwitz's background is in technology. He is currently employed at Google and responsible for its apps. Google's main philosophy is: think big, change the world as we know it. But as an advise to startups: if you ain't got nothing, you've nothing to loose (Bob Dylan). Attention is limited, so there, computers can be of help. One thing is to use all types of context parameters when you're recording data. A photo taken in the time that I was on holiday in Scotland, is probably made in Scotland (made up example by ed.). Bradley pleads for not neglecting the power of wetware, humans. Take advantage of what humans do, e...