Peter Bhat Harkins @pushcx@octodon.social
Joined Apr 2018
The petty hill I will die on: it's always "changed from X to Y" and never, ever "changed to Y from X", sentences like "Alice moved to Seattle from Austin" or "revenue grew 33% to 3 MM from 2 MM" can go right to hell.
Once or twice a year I get a week into a giant refactor and belatedly see a way I could've spent an extra hour at the beginning to do the whole thing incrementally instead of one multi-hundred line path. Gah.
I guess my grocery store read the room - first thing in the door is champagne.
If you run Arch and are annoyed by kernel upgrades removing the running kernel's modules, I've updated a script to keep them around: https://github.com/pushcx/archlinux-update-modules
Really interesting interview + research of how misinformation propagates between mass media and social media: https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-yochai-benkler-mass-media-disinformation-campaigns Picked up the book to read.
"Ah yes, this explains that odd extra log message I figured I'd look at after the bug... five hours ago."
Every time I finish debugging I look back to see what I can learn from it, how I could've found the bug faster, and like 75% of the time the lesson is: when I see something weird, check it out and question assumptions, I probably just saw the bug and waved it away.
It is a crying shame that the animated Clerks show predated giffers because I want to quote it all the time and nobody ever gets the references.
tx JKirchartz on twitter for pointing this out
In 1980 GML defined a TITLE tag. Based on it,
in 1986 SGMLguix defined a TITLE tag. Based on it,
in 1991 HTML defined a TITLE tag. Based on it,
in 2020:
A year ago I bought clippers and started cutting my own hair. My haircut was supposed to mark me as a joyless miser but now I look like a reckless asshole. This is not the fashion mistake I signed up for, thanks 2020.
Everything in this story is incredible, but this section is especially notable as a sign that a journalist is doing some of the finest work possible in the face of complete institutional failure. https://www.ft.com/content/745e34a1-0ca7-432c-b062-950c20e41f03
One time I helped a group of devs at a trade school solve a design issue and one said to the other, "See, that's why I wanted to invite Peter, because he's been programming longer than you've been alive." These surprise milestones knock me on my ass.
I've been really enjoying @nayafia's Working in Public because it thoughtfully explores the complicated incentives and implicit tradeoffs in open source communities and then an example reached out and goosed me.
We have graduated from pandemic bread to pandemic bagels. A couple of them kinda have corners but overall big success, high fives all around.
Somewhere in Mountain View there's a asshole who got a spot bonus for PMing the programmer who realized this was possible.
GitHub, who do I bribe to replace the radio button I always skim over and thus get wrong with a button for each different action? (Use the matching color + icon from the Conversation view.)
Brand guidelines always seem silly and mockable and then I remember my industry has an unresolved fifty-year-old argument over which invisible character we should indent with and I'm like "yeah, legit, shame you can't write a linter".
Joined Apr 2018
