Posts

The latest issue of The Economist focuses on solar energy. The introductory article is short, compelling, and optimistic. On the economics, they make a good point: Consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel. Solar power faces no such constraint. The resources needed to produce solar cells and plant them on solar farms are silicon-rich sand, sunny places and human ingenuity, all three of which are abundant. ...

When you’re playing a point, it is the most important thing in the world. But when it’s behind you, it’s behind you… This mindset is really crucial, because it frees you to fully commit to the next point… and the next one after that… with intensity, clarity and focus. The truth is, whatever game you play in life… sometimes you’re going to lose. A point, a match, a season, a job… it’s a roller coaster, with many ups and downs. And it’s natural, when you’re down, to doubt yourself. To feel sorry for yourself. And by the way, your opponents have self-doubt, too. Don’t ever forget that. But negative energy is wasted energy. ...

Charity Majors1 has a good, long-form article on the Stack Overflow blog. The title is misleading as, while AI’s impact on software engineering and its hiring process (spoiler: you’ll still want to hire junior engineers) is at the heart of the article, there’s so much more in it. It gets exciting in the second part, where she dispenses much from-the-trenches advice on team management and building. Hiring engineers is about composing teams. The smallest unit of software ownership is not the individual, it’s the team. ...

I love this concise checklist on detecting fake experts, with which my experience wholeheartedly agrees. The first one: Imitators can’t answer questions at a deeper level. Specific knowledge is earned, not learned, so imitators don’t fully understand the ideas they’re talking about. Their knowledge is shallow. As a result, when you ask about details, first principles, or nonstandard cases, they don’t have good answers. For more advice, see the original post. ...

We’re doing a DevRomagna meetup on container security. It will happen on June 26 at 7pm, it will be in Italian, and the speaker will be the one and the only Ugo Lattanzi. Details and signup here.

Lately, I have become increasingly interested in sound. Of the short films I shoot while hiking, for example, I’ve noticed that I’m primarily interested in their sounds. Footsteps on the ground, birds singing, wind rustling through leaves, things like that. During my motorcycle ride across Europe, I caught myself recording a walk with the Memo app on my iPhone. Listening to it allows me to reconstruct a sharp and surprisingly clear memory of that early morning, just out of the tent at Shelsley Walsh. My interest in sounds is not new; I’ve written about the Field Recordings podcast for example, but lately, I’ve become more aware of the importance of sound memory. During my daily early morning walk, I happen to listen to audiobooks or podcasts with the AirPods Pro, but there is always a lot of friction; I have to force myself into putting them on and, usually, after half an hour or so it is a great relief to take them off and listen to the world around me again (the jury is still out on whether I should leave my AirPods at home or not.) ...

just writing down notes is all that really matters. Any tool that allows you to compose and save text will do. It is the act of writing, not the act of linking or reading or revisiting, that clarifies thought and leads to insight. The rest is all superfluous. – Sean Voisen Just yesterday, I fixed a bug in our legacy application. Once I was done, I turned to my notes to log what I’d just done. I was only partially happy with the fix, so I articulated what would have been ideal and why I didn’t achieve my goal. Right in the middle of a sentence, the solution surfaced. It was so evident and straightforward! The simple act of writing down the problem led me to the solution. Relieved, I returned to the project and promptly improved my code. ...

I went on a motorcycle and hiking trip yesterday. It was a glorious day, albeit windy, which helped keep the temperature chill. Mixing hiking with motorcycling is something I love, as it combines two of my hobbies. However, it requires some careful planning. I still want to wear full safety gear on the bike but not take any of that with me as I walk in the wilderness, where I’ll be in hiking gear instead. ...

Today, I learned how to handle custom claims in an Open ID Connect authenticated ASP.NET Core app. The scenario goes like this. I have an ASP.NET Core app that authenticates with Open Id Connect. It receives a bearer token from the authentication server. Besides OIDC claims, this token has been forged with additional custom claims for use in the app. However, only ODIC claims exist when I parse HttpContext.User.Identity.Claims in my middleware. If I retrieve the token with HttpContext.GetTokenAsync and decode it, I confirm it contains all the claims I need. Where have my custom claims gone? Or, how can I get User.Identity to provide them along with the OIDC ones? ...