Posts

I saw quite a lot of comment on this job advertisement on LinkedIn by Galen Hunt, who is a distinguished engineer at Microsoft. There was widespread derision on Twitter/X in response to this which I think is a bit unfair. Quite a lot of it seemed to be about the use of Rust (which seems to relate to some cultural issues I don’t care about in this context). Yet more of it was about the wisdom of replacing ‘battle hardened’ code with ‘AI generated slop’ which I thought was a bit of a basic take. Yes, we all know that history is full of disasters when it comes to upgrades, replacements and rewrites. Yes, we all know that it’s possible to generate bad code using these tools. This might well end up being scrapped for all kinds of reasons, but that’s Microsoft’s issue. ...

It used to be a given that every programmer would eventually end up writing their own compiler and language. I’m not quite there - yet - but I am at the point where I want to build my own peripherals - starting with a trackball. I’ve always liked them as an element of an interface. I think it harks back to those early 80s halcyon arcade days and playing Missile Command, Crystal Castles and Marble Madness. I liked the pinpoint accuracy you could get - or as pinpoint as a bit of hardware that was battered daily by hordes of kids could get. This was years before I ever even saw a mouse, let alone used one. ...

I’ve always had a problem of wanting to do to many things and having too many interests. Of course the advice and sensible thing to do is to realise what you can and can’t achieve and concentrate on one thing or a small number at most. Ideally you find your passion and go all in for a while. I’ve never been very good at doing that, to my detriment. I would overthink things, get put off by the steep initial investment doing something in say, a new language needs. Buy a book, decide which framework is the best etc. I’d end up bogged down and something new would come along. But that idea would remain, annoying me like grit in an oyster that was destined never to have its shot at becoming a pearl. ...