Chris_Newton

16 ms·

91.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
I’d say there are two common patterns for implementing behaviours like transition animations in declarative UIs. The platform and/or the engine that is doing the rendering of your declarative UI might provide facilities to describe ani
92.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
SEEKING WORK | Cambridge, UK | Remote preferred (occasional travel OK) I have over 20 years’ experience building software, specialising in: • Technical applications (mathematical, scientific, engineering) • Software for hardware (IoT, embed
93.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
I’ve noticed similar trends. After a while, I started to realise that a lot of the critics don’t really understand the principle they’re criticising. For example, take DRY. The important principle was never really about repeating code . It
94.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
At first glance, JavaScript/TypeScript and Python seem like similar cases, but in practice, I have never found them to be so. The JS/TS community has enthusiastically adopted static typing, to the point where (a) the type system i
95.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
SEEKING WORK | Cambridge, UK | Remote preferred (occasional travel OK) I have over 20 years’ experience building software, specialising in: • Technical applications (mathematical, scientific, engineering) • Software for hardware (IoT, embed
96.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
No, see, I don't accept the moral rights of authors as legitimate. What do you believe determines the legitimacy of any legal construct? Why should it be OK to say people can’t copy information without paying for it, but not OK to sa
97.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
But there are other forms of compensation that some creators are evidently willing to accept in exchange for their own contribution: see FOSS, Creative Commons, etc. If you restrict the compensation to purely financial forms then copyright
98.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
I’d be in favour of excluding certain types of work from copyright protection entirely. Copyright isn’t there to create a barrier to interoperability or a way to artificially prevent competition in markets, so IMHO things like data formats
99.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
Copyright seems to be a less than ideal solution to a real problem. Most of us would probably agree that if someone provides something of value to someone else then the beneficiary providing something of value in return is “fair” on some ba
100.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
SEEKING WORK | Cambridge, UK | Remote preferred (occasional travel OK) I have over 20 years’ experience building software, specialising in: • Technical applications (mathematical, scientific, engineering) • Software for hardware (IoT, embed
101.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
Some financial institutions are bizarrely inept when it comes to security. I had one once that had an authentication question in their phone banking script that asked how a certain system was set up, option A or option B. Given that I was c
102.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
But, in all of those cases, things are done because they beneficial impact in final code and speed of delivery. Beautiful git history does not have such tangible measurable benefit. I respectfully disagree. In my experience, a tidy histor
103.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
Sorry again, but I’m still not seeing the distinction I think you’re trying to make here. I see version history as an asset, just like the code itself, tests, developer documentation, the bug tracker database… None of these things are direc
104.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
It looks like you’re talking about rewriting history that has already been shared. Pretty much everyone agrees that is a bad idea. It even has a prominent warning in the git book. What others here, including myself, are advocating is rewrit
105.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
If a strategy requires humans to be virtuous AND vigilant it is doomed to failure. Sorry, but I don’t buy that. By the same principle, there’s also no point in writing unit tests or defining static types or having code reviews, all of whi
106.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
I’m firmly in your camp on this one, but I’ve noticed that advocating a tidy history gets a lot of push-back online. I think there is an element of self-fulfilling prophecy here. If a team habitually leaves a messy history behind, that hist
107.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
SEEKING WORK | Cambridge, UK | Remote preferred (occasional travel OK) I have over 20 years’ experience building software, specialising in: • Technical applications (mathematical, scientific, engineering) • Software for hardware (IoT, embed
108.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
Possibly worth noting that the encoding speeds for AV1 have improved out of all recognition over the past few years. Depending on what Twitch were using, even back in 2020 it might have been orders of magnitude slower than encoding other
109.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
I haven’t checked the laws in those jurisdictions, but having worked with a mobile radio network in the past, that doesn’t look entirely unreasonable. People don’t realise how much carnage a single rogue device (whether through failure or i
110.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
It’s easy to become disheartened, particularly in the world of web development. It looks like we’ve been around the industry for a similar amount of time, and I agree that the amount of wheel-reinventing in web development is shockingly bad
111.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
But how will language performance evolve as the nature of the hardware our programs run on evolves? IMHO this is not an easy question to answer right now. C compilers don’t produce 100% optimal assembly language in all cases, but typically
112.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
If anything, in my eyes it's exactly because programming languages matter is the reason why we should have less of them. We should start folding some languages inside others. (Or abandon them.) As a counterpoint, the programming in
113.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
That was interesting and not always what I’d have expected. Thanks! :-)
114.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
Would you mind elaborating on the “pretty mixed results”? I’ve been curious about trying this for a while, but it looks like you already have, so I’m very interested in what did or didn’t work well in your experience.
115.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
One of the things I recommend to the startups I advise is to include documentation within the repository. Agreed, this can help. I sometimes wonder, having written a substantial project in literate programming¹ style once, whether that ap
116.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
Often, things are not even written down, because "there's not enough time". This one is the epitome of the “If you think X is expensive, try [not doing X]” meme. I’d take a decent software architecture diagram, a detailed d
117.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
Stylus friendly devices don't solve the whole thing either. Maybe not today, but if everyone had stylus+pad and knew how to use the related software/UI, what else do you think would be useful?
118.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
The current generation mostly have shared witheboards already I think (zoom, teams, etc). To the extent that this is true, I don’t think I’ve ever seen them used routinely in any team or organisation I’ve worked with. I believe a large pa
119.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
Sorry, I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make here. Finding ways to present information that are both functional and attractive — and stay both of those things as the information evolves — can be a challenge, but I don’t believe
120.
by Chris_Newton 3y ago
One thing I miss about in-office work is that people would spontaneously draw diagrams in meetings. [...] This doesn’t happen (IME) with remote work. Drawing diagrams takes for-fricken-ever so people tend not to do it in meetings. I agree

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