Posts

The standard shouldn’t be never to make a mistake. It’s to make as few mistakes as possible, but quickly recognize, acknowledge, and address the ones you do make. – John Gruber

I wrapped up my C# 12 session at the ABP Dotnet Conference 2024, and I wanted to share the take-home points, at least about the most relevant features in this language version. Posting the slides made no sense as they were minimal; all the content was packed in the live demo. In a follow-up post, I plan to address Collection Expressions (done) and maybe “type any aliases”; this is about Primary Constructors....

I went for a walk in the local pinewood the other day. It’s one of my favorite places, especially the least frequented parts, where one can walk for hours (and risk getting lost) without meeting anyone. I cut it shorter this time as it started to drip rain, and I had nothing with me.

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me. – Ralph Waldo Emerson (debated, see here)

It’s very fast to build something that’s 90% of a solution. The problem is that the last 10% of building something is usually the hard part which really matters, and with a black box at the center of the product, it feels much more difficult to me to nail that remaining 10%. Closing that gap with gen AI feels much more fickle to me than a normal engineering problem. It could be that I’m unfamiliar with it, but I also wonder if some classes of generative AI based products are just doomed to mediocrity as a result....

The moral is obvious. You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself. No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. – Ken Thompson His 1984 Turing Award paper on supply chain security is only four pages long and is worth reading repeatedly.

This one looks like a promising read: Tor, one of the most important and misunderstood technologies of the digital age, is best known as the infrastructure underpinning the so-called Dark Web. But the real “dark web,” when it comes to Tor, is the hidden history brought to light in this book: where this complex and contested infrastructure came from, why it exists, and how it connects with global power in intricate and intimate ways....

Yesterday, Serena and I went to see Spellbound Contemporary Ballet’s The Art of Fugue, a performance based on J.S. Bach’s unfinished work. I have been gifting Serena two subscriptions to our city’s theater’s dance season for some years. She loves dance, both classic and contemporary. I thought I did not. Usually, she goes with one of her best friends. I don’t remember ever going before, and yesterday, I only went because none of her friends were available....

I have been following Cowboy Bebop on Netflix (the anime, not the spinoff TV series). The opening is a visual and musical marvel; I’m enthralled by it. The show’s soundtrack is a unique blend of jazz (big band hard bop, mainly), blues, and a bit of rock, which I’ve never seen before in anime and probably in movies. Even episode titles pay tribute to jazz, blues and rock tracks. We have “Valtz for Venus,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” “My Funny Valentine,” and stuff like that....

Vicki Boykis has a good piece on Redis’s recent vicissitudes. At the same time, she recaps where we stand and sings the praises of a project that many are fond of, and not just for its technical worth. I, like many developers who have worked on high-scale, low-latency web services over the last fifteen years, have an intimate relationship with Redis. At any new job, when you ask where the data is, and someone points you to a server address with port 6379, you know you will meet an good, reliable friend there....