I don’t normally post single links — but this is a fascinating teardown of Mr Brightside by The Killers, courtesy of 12tone. Despite not understanding any of the terminology, I feel I learned a lot. And yeah… subscribed.
TakeoutExtractor v1.0
Reading
This dropped theough my letterbox today and I’m very excited to finally be able to read it
SLotD: Serialise/Deserialise is Copy
Software Lesson of the Day for 2/12/2022. Rather than waste all that time writing a perfect universal .net object copy library that copes with every possible variation of nested reference types, value types, fields, properties, statics, and twenty-plus years of special cases and regret and technical debt baked into the framework… just serialise your damn source object to json and de-serialise it back out again. And then be on your way.
Eighty Years is…
SLotD: File->New
Software Lesson of the Day for 17/11/2022: A quick hack. Every time you do the equivalent of File->New Project for something other then a trivial test app, make a note of it. After a while, take a look at your notes and see how often you’re actually creating new stuff. Have a think about that: about what is enabling you to do that, and perhaps more importantly what’s stopping you.
Key rotation time
SLotD: Premature Abstraction
Software Lesson of the Day for 2022-10-04: Note to self. If you’re struggling to create a generic, reusable, well factored, abstraction to implement a simple, application-specific piece of functionality – then it may just be that instead you can get away with a couple of simple data fields and a static function or two. Remember this for the next time.
(Lets see if I can remember to do this more often…)
Ambiguity
Me: Ok Google – remind me to do my expenses on Friday
The algorithm: When do you want to be reminded?
Me: 9am
The algorithm: Ok. I’ll remind you to “do my expenses on Friday” tomorrow at 9am
Me: FFS… Ok Google cancel that reminder
The algorithm: Ok I’ve cancelled the reminder “do my expenses on Friday”
Me: Ok Google – on Friday remind me to do my expenses
The algorithm: When do you want to be reminded
Me: 9am
The algorithm: Ok. I’ll remind you to “do my expenses” on Friday at 9am
Global conquest by our AI overlords may need to be put back a bit.
Twenty Years On
Today is twenty years to the day since my first post on this blog. Time passes. You move house, change jobs, children are born and leave home. And other things change too.