This is a follow-up to my previous post, which I hope to keep as a regular series.

When I first started, after a few months I was wondering how this post was almost as long as the previous one but covering less time. Going over it, I noticed that I fixated on articles that’d bemoan the strifes on working in tech. But I want to keep the tone of this positive, so I removed all that stuff, and made sure everything is focused on tech, instead of what I found interesting in general.

Articles

A Spectre is Haunting Unicode: How errors are still present in Japanese Kanji font encodings from when they were first transcribed in the 70s.

Austin Amazon KFAUWI device randomly appeared under Network Device: The same motherboard maker for Amazon Fires and Kindles uses Linux source code for automatic device discovery. So any device running the same code will cause Windows to detect it as an Amazon Fire.

Brown M&Ms, or Why No One’s Reading the Manual: Writing documentation isn’t enough; it’s should be written so it can be easy to read and search for, and kept recent by letting anyone make changes.

Career advice for people with bad luck: It’s okay to go for the safe job, it’s also okay to take risks, because you’ll regret it either way.

Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation: Instead of trying to automate everything at once, write down what you’d do by hand first, then automate each step in the process.

Docker for Windows won’t run if you have the Razer Synapse driver management tool running: Both applications lock the wrong system-wide global check to ensure that only one instance of an application runs, but then neither of them can run at the same time.

extra line breaks on event description: An explanation as to why I always have to use Notepad to normalize new lines whenever I edit events on Google Calendar.

Falling Into The Pit of Success:

“The Pit of Success: in stark contrast to a summit, a peak, or a journey across a desert to find victory through many trials and surprises, we want our customers to simply fall into winning practices by using our platform and frameworks.”

- -Rico Mariani, MS Research MindSwap Oct 2003.

Fire drill: In the same way you plan for a fire (or other disaster) by having drills, by doing the same for a software team, you can see how well they’ll react and how your plan would work.

fyi: You can bypass youtube ads by adding a dot after the domain: By using the entire Fully Qualified Domain Name, embedded ads won’t load.

How many GNU/Linux users are needed to change a light bulb?: In total, 1298.

Is non-deterministic the same as random?:

Random: A bunch of stuff happens that doesn’t make sense
Non-deterministic: Something happens but there’s no obvious reason as to why
Deterministic: We know what happens, and how to make it happen.
Random events can sometimes be non-deterministic, but non-deterministic does not mean random

Law of the Instrument:

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

- Abraham Maslow

LEGO blocks and organ transplants:

“Integrating two software systems is usually more like performing a heart transplant than snapping together LEGO blocks. It can be done—if there’s a close enough match and the people doing it have enough skill—but the pieces don’t fit together trivially. And failure may not be immediately obvious; it may take a while to see signs of rejection.”

- John Cook

List of 2020 Leap Day Bugs: A collection of various software bugs due to the extra day this year.

My GPT-3 Blog Got 26 Thousand Visitors in 2 Weeks: A GPT-3 blog was able to get trending articles multiple times on Hacker News, which shows how Buzzfeed-like media companies could increase revenue by either: increasing output, or firing writers.

On Coding, Ego and Attention: Your ego keeps you from learning by tricking you into thinking that “If you’re so smart then this should be easy”.

No Hello: When asking a question in a text chat, include it with your greeting. Though it makes sense when speaking IRL, it saves time with text since typing saves time.

Pressing YubiKeys: A complex solution, to the simple problem of pressing a button with another button.

Sell yourself, Sell Your Work: Being able to talk about your technical accomplishments is important, as it allows you to show your value to an organization.

The ‘AI Effect’: Once a task has been mastered by AI, the difficulty of the task is discounted and not a measure of ‘True Intelligence’. See also: Moving the Goalposts and No True Scotsman

The Bible for SWE Salary Negotiations: Salary negotiations are between you and HR, not you and your Hiring Manager.

The History of the URL: Partly about how URLs came to be, along with the Internet as a whole.

Things I Believe About Software Engineering (excerpts):

Being aligned with teammates on what you’re building is more important than building the right thing
How kind your teammates are has a larger impact on your effectiveness than the programming language you use
The amount of sleep that you get has a larger impact on your effectiveness than the programming language you use

The Computer Scientist Who Can’t Stop Telling Stories

“I write an average of five new programs every week. Poets have to write poems. I have to write computer programs.”

- Donald Knuth

Up or Out: Solving the IT Turnover Crisis: a.k.a. The Dead Sea Effect. No matter what, top talent will leave an organization, while the under qualified will stay since they can’t move on. Instead of instead of struggling to retain top talent, embrace the turn-over and learn to train top talent. Hire for attitude, train for aptitude.

What To Do When You Reach Number 1 On Hacker News: A follow up to The Horrifically Dystopian World of Software Engineering Interviews and the overall state of technical interviews.

Windows in the Browser: Various Windows versions that are able to run in web browsers.

Your statement is 100% correct but misses the entire point: Though most “Well, Actually…” comments, though factually correct, often miss the context of a problem.