Hasnain says:

Interesting read on one person’s perspective trying to make it as a solo dev. Gotta respect the hustle.

“The other big decision I’ve made about 2021 is that it’s time to flip the narrative of what I’ve been doing.

For the last four years I’ve thought of myself as a professional developer/freelancer who also played around on the internet trying to make money from side-hustles.

But barring an unexpected turn of events—I expect 2021 to be the first year I make the majority of my income from my own businesses. A change I hope just might hold for the rest of my life.

In other words, the side hustles have become the main hustle. I’m no longer a side-project entrepreneur. I’m a mother-fucking real entrepreneur.”

Hasnain says:

Ugh.

“On Aug. 21, 2019, the girlfriend told Nashville police that Warner "was building bombs in the RV trailer at his residence," the MNPD report states.”

Hasnain says:

Big Pasta strikes again.

“Ultimately, I had more questions than I did answers. I did not, for example, understand who from Big Pasta had targeted De Cecco and why. I was also slightly worried that I had inadvertently made myself a target of Big Pasta. And more importantly, I did not know if I would get to taste De Cecco’s brilliant, sentient noodle ever again. At time of press, I am still waiting for the fruits of my FOIA request, as well as for literally anyone from De Cecco to reply to me. De Cecco, if you’re reading this: Please contact me immediately, then also put 2.1 milligrams of iron into your freaking bucatini and help rescue us from this national nightmare.”

Hasnain says:

Oof :/

“But the story behind the backlash also reveals a more complex portrait of behavior that for generations had gone unchecked in schools in one of the nation’s wealthiest counties, where Black students said they had long been subjected to ridicule. “Go pick cotton,” some said they were told in class by white students.

“It was just always very uncomfortable being Black in the classroom,” said Muna Barry, a Black student who graduated with Ms. Groves and Mr. Galligan. Once during Black History Month, she recalled, gym teachers at her elementary school organized an “Underground Railroad” game, where students were told to run through an obstacle course in the dark. They had to begin again if they made noise.

The use of the slur by a Heritage High School student was not shocking, many said. The surprise, instead, was that Ms. Groves was being punished for behavior that had long been tolerated.”

Hasnain says:

Pretty good read on the financial system in the US, mortgages, and how it all came to be.

"Attention conservation notice. This jeremiad is all about financial policy, which I know is not a topic all of my readers are interested in. This piece is only relevant to you if you own a home in the US (because mortgage rates matter) if you rent in the US (because market rents are set in comparison to the cost of owning), or if you save and/or borrow money anywhere in the world (because of the US mortgage system’s effect on long-term interest rates. Readers who live in monasteries, survivalist compounds, or the Sentinel Islands can safely skip this one."

Hasnain says:

Continuing the Rust hype train, this was a good example of how to model correct code by construction - utilizing the type system.

"But also, restructuring your program so that state is neatly separated, so you don't get into heated discussion with the borrow checker. Fields will start being grouped by "mutation affinity" rather than by "theme", as you may have done in other languages previously. You'll end up naming quite a few structs State.

It really is a wonderful journey, and even if you still have to write other languages for your day job, the experience you'll acquire learning Rust is applicable in other languages too - even C++!"

Hasnain says:

This was a very long read, but oh so worth it - capturing a lot of thoughts I've had over the last couple of years when designing new APIs to ensure they are ergonomic and hard to get wrong.

(also inb4 Rust fanboy-ism - the type system definitely does make it easier to enforce these patterns)

"But there is a silver lining - once you have experienced "good design", it's really hard to go back to the other kind. Even after acknowledging that "good design" inevitably comes at a cost, whether it's cognitive load, compile times, making hiring more challenging, etc."

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for later use, this seems to be a great source of practice project ideas.

Hasnain says:

So much rage all through reading this article, sadly.

“Simien has watched the ISA market grow with bafflement and anger. “All this buzz is so weird,” he told me. “It’s gonna come out how much they are screwing people.” Looking back, Simien recognizes that he should have been more skeptical. He had thought the ISA would allow him to do what many of his new, wealthier San Francisco neighbors had done: go to school without assuming crippling debt. His disappointment in how things turned out has become more acute in recent months. He’s been unable to work during the lockdown—a problem San Francisco’s remote-working software engineers have largely avoided. When we last spoke, he sounded especially despondent. “In this city, people are deaf to what’s going on in other people’s lives,” he said. “If you have just a little bit of something, there’s always going to be someone ready to take it away from you.”

Hasnain says:

Pretty intense debugging story - I like it because it exposed me to a bunch of concepts while being a good reminder to not take anything for granted and continue debugging until you really know what’s going on.

The conclusion was also quite satisfying.

“Unsurprisingly, upstream’s first guess was that it was a hardware issue. This isn’t unreasonable: after all, I’m only hitting the problem on one specific machine. All my other machines are happily running node_exporter. While I had no other evidence of hardware-linked instability on this host, I also had no other explanation as to what was so particular about this machine that would make node_exporter crash. “