Alberto (Alt-s) 🤔 @botwhytho

IntelliJ has ~9k plugins. Worldwide. VS Code has ~60k plugins. Worldwide. Glamorous Toolkit has ~5k plugins. In the core.

@girba Bringing back the data science angle (hadn't heard it in a while) seems to add a lot to this explanation, especially combined with the concept of optimizing for question/answer speed.

X : Software engineering is wrong? Me : A lot of the practice is due for some challenge. X : Isn't that arrogant? Me : More arrogant than saying "Business strategy really needs to look at its landscape?" ... I've been here before, 20 years ago.

THIS! A whole industry that's technical, at a higher level, basically runs 'on feels'

Simon Wardley @swardley

2 years ago

X : Isn't this normal in software? Me : Nope. The normal process in software is to gather some documents (statements of beliefs on what the system is, these rarely match reality), try to read lots of code to understand the problem and then make decisions based on gut feel.

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The largest problem to solve in engineering today: Developers spending most of their time reading code. The time they spend is not the problem. Reading is the problem. The reason developers read code is because they want to understand enough to know what to do next. The goal is decision making. Reading is just a tactic used for extracting information out of systems. And this happens to be the most manual possible way to extract that information. Interestingly, most software exists primarily to automate information gathering and presentation to help other people make better decisions without those people ever seeing the raw data. This automation replaces manual work that is most often not essential for the actual work. It is an optimization. Software developers possess this magic ability of transforming data into information useful for decision making. So, when they have problems, the most interesting solution is not to manually go through data to make senses of it. "Yes, but software is not like data" But it certainly is. Everything in the computer about your system is data. Once you see it like this, many opportunities become apparent. "Give me an example" Ok, say you want to search for the methods that are annotated with a specific annotation, sends a specific messages and also refer to a specific string. How would you do it? In most environments, you might be able to search for one of those, but not for all at once. "I'd probably use regular expressions" When you do that, you treat code as text with no structure. As a consequence, your search will be approximate and you will fill the gap through reading. "So, what's the alternative then?" Take a look at the example from the picture. It's a search that takes the structure of the code into account. The annotation (called pragmas in this particular language) is searched in one way, the message send is searched in another way, and even the string is searched only among the literals from the code. Code is not text. Code is structured data. And everything else around your system is data, too. Stop reading it. Ok, I know this might sound hard, but it's really not. You already possess the skills. You are using them for someone else's problem. You just have to start acknowledging that you can use them for your problems, too. The rest is just details.

"In 2005-2006 we used to have lovingly named servers like pets and we realized they are more like cattle. You are doing this with tools" @swardley youtu.be/abArhHOwdEc?si…

nobody will remember: - your salary - how “busy you were” - how many hours you worked people will remember: - that your were insisting that they should stop relying on reading code.

First Moldable View?

Tudor Girba @girba

2 years ago

Anything in a software system can be explained in a way that other humans can understand.

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And as a corollary, the tools we use to read and write code should be different. Sad state of affairs that the entry point to analyzing code for most people is still an 'editor'.

Tudor Girba @girba

2 years ago

There is no single way to look at a system. There are always many. We must write the system pieces in single forms (eg, code in a programming language). But we can look at any part of it in a myriad of ways. Viewing is different than editing. We should not conflate the two.

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How do you explore Ruby on Rails routes? How about: - Left pane: all API entry points in a searchable list. - Right pane: for a given entry point, we see the routes definitions linked with the corresponding controller implementations. #MoldableDevelopment with #GToolkit

From the demo: "Instead of Test Driven Development, you do View Driven Development". Although that doesn't fully encompass what Moldable Development is,it captures ~80% of it. Hadn't thought of it that way but will use it as I practice & teach it to others. Props to @khinsen!

Tudor Girba @girba

2 years ago

Excellent! Moldable Inspector for Common Lisp based on CLOG by @khinsen #MoldableDevelopment is neither hard nor confined to #GToolkit. You just need to want it. The opportunities are not that far afterwards. A demo: diode.zone/w/5ac43123-91f… Code: codeberg.org/khinsen/clog-m…

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An open-source maintainers guild, with real bargaining power, would make our software supply chain more secure.

.@gokoyeb seeing the platform is based on firecracker. Is there support for running non-Linux based services? Services built on top of OSv, Nanos or other #unikernels? Firecracker supports these. Curious how koyeb interacts with the underlying firecracker implementation details.

Quick reminder: just because you type code in an editor, it does not mean either that your system is text or that you necessarily need to actually read the text to understand the system.

Using GenAI for creating new code takes a utilitarian view. But as long as humans are involved in the decision of what code gets deployed, faster code creation will not help much. We need to expand our ability to figure systems out. Interestingly, GenAI can help there … 5/

Automating the writing part of programming is not a source of productivity improvements.

Dominik Tornow @DominikTornow

2 years ago

Watching me write code would make any editor and keyboard maverick cringe－I am super slow However, that has never been a problem for me: When writing code, I am always limited by my speed of thinking, never my speed of typing

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I spent 20yrs+ discussing the benefits of test driven development. I've spent 2wks learning GT - gtoolkit.com I've learnt so many lessons on how we are doing things wrong. We should have been using example driven development - medium.com/feenk/an-examp…

And what a journey this is …

Simon Wardley @swardley

2 years ago

dX: Do you have talks on this? Me: I've talked about conversational programming since before 2018, there's stuff online etc. The contextual nature of the toolset is something I've come to more recently. It's why I'm working with @girba and diving into gtoolkit.com

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dX: Why do you care if ChatGPT is Turing complete? Me: The addition of external memory (the pen and paper argument) has the potential to make an LLM Turing complete. NB that's different from the Turing test. ChatGPT is at the very least on the path. dX: So what? Me: ...

Lots of people use the “Jack of all trades, master of none” in a degrading manner. A reminder that the full saying is this: “Jack of all trades, master of none, Oftentimes better than master of one.” It’s how it’s meant to be used and quoted if you do :)