When Developers Leave - Where Does the Knowledge Go?

Software development isn’t straightforward. Software projects are built to the unique requirements for a unique company. If the software was standard, all companies could use the same, but like the company, the software is unique. Asking a developer to look at software created on a project, isn’t like a dentist looking in a mouth. It’s complex, confusing, and takes months to understand. Building up relationships with other developers/consultants/customers takes a month.

Job title vs job position: What is the difference?

The job title and job position concepts regularly overlap and feed into each other, it’s just that one of them (title) highlights your spot in the company, while the other (position) is more focused on your skill and competence levels. Ultimately, both will play a role in shaping your professional journey.

This clip popped up in my Youtube feed and piqued my interest. A snippet of a longer conversation between Dave Farley and Michael Feathers, in this clip Michael Feathers talks about how OOP and FP can look quite similar, and goes on to talk about the “surface area” of tests and how that relates to the traditional OO concept of separation of concerns. It’s a nice and nerdy 10 minutes.

John Carmack has raised $20 million in order to create an Artficial General Intelligence by way of mad science. I suspect the mad science is mostly going to be a lorra lorra C++ code. I like how raising the money wasn’t to fund the work but a reason to get serious about it.

Stable Diffusion is an open source AI model similar to DALL-E that you can run on an M1 Mac

I’ve been doing a little bit of Ruby programming, working in an old codebase. As I threw WTFs at past-me, I remembered this talk from Katrina Owen on the satisfaction of accumulating tiny changes to make things better.

In May, Lee Robinson wrote The Story of Heroku documenting the history of the service from browser-based editor for Rails apps to the low-friction infrastructure support and dead simple git push deployment process. Lee Robinson notes that in 2022 a lot of folks who loved the idea of not having to care about infrastructure are now re-evaluating their options in the face of better tooling and more and more focus on microservices. Last week Heroku announced it is discontinuing free plans.

Did you know that resonant frequencies in Janet Jackson’s song Rhythm Nation could cause laptops with spinning metal hard drives to crash? That reminded me of Brendan Gregg’s advice against yelling at servers: “You’ll discourage them.”