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.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting post mortem from a long tenure at a big tech company.

Brad is no lightweight; he’s written a bunch of critical software that powers the internet - even before joining Google.

The reasons for leaving were also interesting:

“Little bored. Not learning as much as I used to. I've been doing the same thing too long and need a change. It'd be nice to primarily work in Go rather than work on Go.

When I first joined Google it was a chaotic first couple years while I learned Google's internal codebase, build system, a bunch of new languages, Borg, Bigtable, etc. Then I joined Android it was fun/learning chaos again. Go was the same when I joined and it was a new, fast-moving experiment. Now Go is very popular, stable and, while there's a lot to do, things--often necessarily--move pretty slowly. Moving slowly is fine, and hyper-specializing in small corners of Go makes sense at scale (few percent improvements add up!), but I want to build something new again.

I don't want to get stuck in a comfortable rut. (And Google certainly is comfortable, except for open floor plans.)”

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting take on procrastination and productivity - and proposes an approach that might lead to better outcomes

“Increasingly, however, psychologists are realising this is wrong. Experts like Tim Pychyl at Carleton University in Canada and his collaborator Fuschia Sirois at the University of Sheffield in the UK have proposed that procrastination is an issue with managing our emotions, not our time. The task we’re putting off is making us feel bad – perhaps it’s boring, too difficult or we’re worried about failing – and to make ourselves feel better in the moment, we start doing something else, like watching videos.”