Peter Amstutz @tetron@octodon.social

It may be Rails is to blame, but I find most #ruby code to be challenging to fully understand on visual inspection. The design patterns with frameworks, caller introspection, duck typing, monkey patching, and declaring methods via "eval" results in code where not only is it difficult to know what it actually does do, it is nearly impossible to prove what it *does not* do. I'm curious how others manages this complexity, aside from "rewrite in a sane language". #programming #peteonprogramming

I once tried starting a blog once called "Pete on Programming" and as these things go I wrote one post and then abandoned it to be overrun by spambots in the comments. I realized I am too much of a perfectionist for blogging, spending three hours on a three paragraph blog post is unsustainable. (evidence: I just went through 4 rewrites of the previous sentence to get it right). So I'm going to try tooting on #programming instead.

This op-ed is a pretty good summary of how Mitch McConnell is uniquely responsible for poisoning US politics over the last decade. I don't know how he sleep at night.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mitch-mcconnell-the-man-who-broke-america/2017/04/07/8e12f1d8-1bbd-11e7-9887-1a5314b56a08_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.d3f0bc6f1468

Just spent five minutes trying to take a picture of my cat he wouldn't sit still and now he's run away. oh well, happy #caturday anyway!

This is a really long winded way of saying that mastodon is incredibly exciting. One of the things that I hoped for in my project was to see it take off and see what people would do with it, and that never really happened. But to be part of another community enabled by technology with similar values is gratifying. thanks @gargron

So I think it was worth it, even if the effort ultimately failed. With VR starting to emerge as a more viable technology, there might still be an opportunity for an open, federated 3D VR social space. But I don't think I would try again without a full development team to back me up.

But ultimately it worked out. I learned a lot about 3D graphics, distributed systems, and managing an open source community. The first one helped me get my first job, the second helped me get my current job, and the third helped with the success of the http://commonwl.org project.

Now, I don't think my project would have ever succeeded as an open source alternative to SL. There were some fundamental technical flaws as well as simply being too much work for one person to do.

Interestingly, while Second Life rode a huge wave of hype for a while, they never open sourced their core technology (at least, not when it woul have mattered) so these days nobody talks about SL any more.

I spent about five years and countless hours working on it. Eventually technologies with a similar vision but more development resources sprung up, like Second Life.

It was outrageously ambitious, the Virtual Object System / Interreality Project managed to attracted a small community, although the software barely worked.

We didn't just want to build a client/server system though, it was going to be peer-to-peer, anyone could set up their own 3D world and link to other people's worlds.

Years ago, in college, I decided I needed a big programming project to help sharpen my skills. I had recently read "Snow Crash" and decided (together with a couple of friends of mine) to create the Metaverse.

From Konrad Hinsen, reproducible research in Python, a reality check:

http://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2017/04/06/reproducible-research-in-the-python-ecosystem-a-reality-check/

Does this make mastodon the federated social network of people building federated networks?

It just occurred to me that I come here for all the self referential #onhere conversation in part because I'm working on adding federation features to http://arvados.org and the details are critically important.

hey, so, I'm working on this federated version of github. The idea is anyone can host their own code repo, and "push" and "pull" between them. Think it'll work? </snark>