Hasnain says:

Been a while since I've read PG's stuff in detail since it's been more hit than miss lately. This one was noncontroversial and useful for just practicing and getting better at writing.

"If you narrow the topic sufficiently, you can probably find something you're an expert on. Write about that to start with. If you only have ten readers who care, that's fine. You're helping them, and you're writing. Later you can expand the breadth of topics you write about.

The other constraint you can relax is a little surprising: publication. Writing essays doesn't have to mean publishing them. That may seem strange now that the trend is to publish every random thought, but it worked for me. I wrote what amounted to essays in notebooks for about 15 years. I never published any of them and never expected to. I wrote them as a way of figuring things out. But when the web came along I'd had a lot of practice."

Hasnain says:

Interesting take on development practices in today's agile world. Some of the advice is sage and wise: "Having unique problems will kill a small to medium size team. It will sap you of your creative energy, which is better used creating value for customers who want to pay you monies for your software. Use your innovation tokens wisely!"

Though there's then some stuff which is, well, kinda off, like the advice on only testing in production.

Hasnain says:

Interesting read on growing both people and organizations by fighting with problems and inefficiencies upfront rather than sweeping them under the rug. Something that sounds obvious but is hard to put into practice.

“Not complainers, but champions. Problem spotters don’t especially enjoy bearing bad news, but they do it to advance the organization. To help you, the leader. Maybe it’s because they have a different perspective, or a fresh take based on that spot in the world where only they stand. Maybe it’s that they are better at expressing the issue, where others struggle. Stop making it so hard on them to help you. Don’t say “I hear you have a problem with us.” Say, “I appreciate you helping us to get better.””

Hasnain says:

Interesting and engrossing read on software engineering best practices, written in light of the recent Iowa Caucus debacle.

"But as I said earlier, “We’re decent at building software when the consequences of failure are unimportant.” It fails horribly when failure isn’t cheap, like in Iowa. Common software engineering practices grew out of the internet economic model, and when the assumptions of that model are violated, software engineers become bad at what we do."

Hasnain says:

This is most admittedly a rant; but has good and useful insights into why the software engineering interview process today is just so bad.

“In conclusion to this point, it seems that the popular conception of what is to be a software engineer is driving the structure of the hiring process more that the traits that actually make software engineers successful on the job.”

Hasnain says:

Great read on housing, both policy wise and the human interest story of one person’s attempt to change policies in a local town.

If I could wave a magic wand...

“All cities — even small ones — have a responsibility to address the most significant challenges of our time: climate change, income inequality, and housing affordability,” Mr. Falk had written. “I believe that adding multifamily housing at the BART station is the best way for Lafayette to do its part, and it has therefore become increasingly difficult for me to support, advocate for, or implement policies that would thwart transit density. My conscience won’t allow it.””

Hasnain says:

This is such a sad and moving human interest story - interspersed with solid data around Alzheimer’s.

“People with these genetic mutations usually show symptoms around the same age as their parents. A 2012 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine traced the insidious groundwork of the disease through “biomarkers” detectable in the body long before symptoms surfaced. Twenty-five years before Jo would have noticed any major cognitive problems, the levels of amyloid in his cerebrospinal fluid would have begun to decline, as the protein began to accumulate in his brain. Jo would have been about 10 years old.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting set of data around how Rust is as a usable programming language especially in the gamedev ecosystem.

"The language has a higher upfront cognitive load than any other mainstream language. Which means that on an established, bigger project (maybe with a team behind) the productivity is amazing compared to C++! It's much easier to express strong & safe interfaces that make bugs just harder to introduce. It really shines in network code that needs to be 100% safe and resist bad actors! My current game server code has 0 unwraps/panics/expects and so I just know it can't crash... I wish I could have that feeling in C++. C++ on the contrary makes it easy to whip up something which then has a 20% crash rate and tanks perf and takes 2 weeks to hammer into shape, and after those 2 weeks it looks like Rust code anyway."

Hasnain says:

Such a good read on how to safely evaluate which technologies are worth investing in; and how to do it in a way that minimizes disruption.

“When in doubt, remember: you’re accountable for your team’s technical success, and your team’s technical success is–in the long run–judged by the people using your stuff.”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for future reading and trials.The roguelike tutorial, implemented in Rust; and extended a lot further towards a fully featured game

Hasnain says:

Such a good read, and definitely something that needs internalising. I've seen far too many instances of NIH syndrome as folks get lost in details that don't matter as much in the grand scheme of things.

"So what’s the takeaway here? It’s simple, really. Either spend the money to get the tools you need, or just focus on making your own product make more money. But don’t waste your engineering resources on things that don’t make a big, long term impact."

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking this for the future.

Also a great reminder that working, successful, software is more about translating great ideas and being able to iterate fast on them rather than just crafting code for the sake of code.

"I dunno, what can I say? I was young and more interested in getting something on the screen than implementing it properly. Maybe the best thing about VVVVVV’s source code is that is stands as proof of what you can hack together even if you’re not much of a programmer.

Looking back through it myself all these years later, I find it really funny how much of it is basically just the same parts copy and pasted over and over, with the values changed. This basically makes it impossible to read and maintain ten years later, but back when I was in the thick of it, it made it really fast to iterate and add new things. I’ve gained better habits over the past decade, and I’m definitely a better programmer now – but it does seem to take me longer to do things."

Hasnain says:

Sigh. This whole story is nuts and keeps getting worse.

“Officials at the Democratic National Committee, who were alarmed that the rushed app might not be ready for rollout, pressed Iowa to pay for an independent security review of the Shadow app, which found very basic bugs, a person familiar with the matter said.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting analysis of data from student and employee productivity metrics - trying to debunk the 10x programmer notion.

I personally think the data is intriguing but then the jump at the end to concrete suggestions seems unfounded - they do say there’s more posts coming, however.

“The idea that top performers can easily be identified and can then be expected to improve productivity may represent a hasty conclusion based on small and insufficient data samples. It takes a substantial body of work to evaluate a programmer's true performance. We had 10 samples each in our study, with identical requirements, under controlled conditions, with no distractions, and it was barely enough data to draw meaningful conclusions. The real world, of course, is far more complex than the limited, controlled study that we conducted.”