@shortridge anything by justine tunney … her code is nuts but it’s also hilarious and art and it works AND often contains manually constructed justified width comments.
@shortridge Any kind of notable design gestalts I can discern. I love finding combinations of ideas that are much more than the sum of their parts, that lead to high mental compression of other ideas. I love stacking as many meaningful puns on top of each other as possible.
The main example I've been working on more-or-less my entire life is what my essay Kevin Bacon and the Stern-Brocot Tree describes:
Writing the associated study guide was so very helpful for me, I should have done something like that a long time ago.
Soon after finishing the first reasonable-ish (but still rough) draft of the "Physics and Metaphones" essay in the associated study guide, I understood self-documenting cryptography was very likely possible, though I had no words to describe it. It took nearly a year to realize that uncanny feeling.
@shortridge, well-designed serverless solutions. There's something magical about dividing a problem into small, manageable pieces, solving each piece while basically ignoring parallelism, and then having the runtime and autoscaling take care of that parallelism for you.
@shortridge Old physical user interfaces, like the buttons on a 1980s-era HP calculator, the IBM Model M keyboard, power switches with integrated breakers, etc. Ok, so I guess anything that goes, “click.”
We are privileged to work on hard, mostly funny, daily changing, requiring constant learning, and with highly compensated jobs
—that aside of still suffering over teams management issues leading to burnouts, or even worse— still makes us privileged in comparison to most of our fellows other jobs!!!
• —— •
Favorite top notch computing work life career retrospective lecture:
„Odysseys in Technology:
Research and Fun“
by Ivan Sutherland
@shortridge To me it's hosting my own website. I haven't gotten much time to do it (hence I'm not linking it here) but it really feels like my own home on the Internet. I'm hoping to eventually do more with it!
@shortridge the surprise and delight of a new idea - solving a problem, hacking a system, thinking different
i was telling some friends the other day about some blog post i read maybe 15 years ago, which said as an aside “there are only 4 billion single precision floats, why not test them all?” and in a few words it yanked me forwards past 10 years of moore’s law and gave me a new perspective on how astonishingly fast computers are
@shortridge The wild west feeling of technology and the Internet in the 90s. There was so much opportunity to explore/learn/build/do and all it required was a modem.
@shortridge well this sent me down the rabbit hole of colonizing my terminal (colorizing but I thought the typo was funny).
Single monitor, solarized terminal with tmux frames and a colorful command line. I don’t have colors set up on my current box and now I’m thinking about how much I miss it. Seems like such a frivolous thing to spend time setting up, but it makes the terminal feel happier.
@shortridge ddrescue (AKA gddrescue). Simple, powerful, elegant - revealing a deep understanding of the problem space (FOSS cmdline recovery of max amount of data from dying media)
@shortridge Theoretical CS. A good example is the max-cut problem. It's a simple problem to explain, but we can't say exactly how hard it is. Just trying to estimate how hard it is involves the math behind soap bubbles and voting, among other things. Feels like computation is something humans discovered about the Universe, rather than created.
@shortridge also video calling. When I was a kid international calls were so expensive that if a parent traveled for work they were gone. They didn’t exist.
If I’m on the other side of the Pacific I can video call my kids at bed time. It’s magic, it’s the sci fi future we were promised
@shortridge I love the industrial design of some modern switches and server chassis.
I like horizontally mounted PDUs, with big, chunky, backlit switches and flip covers.
The reasurring simple design and hefty weight of an enterprise 3.5" HDD.
What I miss... Web 1.0, the sound of HDDs that is being supplanted by the silence of NAND drives. I also kind of miss the huge CRT displays of my youth.
My little server rack is probably my favourite set of possessions. The blinking lights, the hum of fans, the whirring of enterprise HDDs. I never get tired of it and I sit next to it every week day while I work.
A miniature (and much cheaper) version of the hardware my team has deployed all over the country. I love it.
@shortridge The sheer power those things can have and the people, who make them do awesome things. Like the old Thinking machines mainframes that had a LED for each of their 64k CPUs and you could see how busy the system was by just looking at the LEDs on the side. Complete synergy of design and function, I think. Now in the computer history museum in Mountain View.
@shortridge the FreeBSD handbook (both how useful it is and how it shows good design of an OS), how well vim still works for literally all of my programming, and generally that feeling of being a wizard when I want to make the computer do something and it works (I wrote about this almost 10 years ago and still feel the same for the most part https://unwiredcouch.com/2014/05/21/computers-are-awesome.html)
@shortridge event driven architectures. There's a zen in doing it properly, where each thing just does it's own piece and lets go of the other pieces that it can't control.
@shortridge I miss skeuomorphism. I liked that the old Apple Books app had a wooden bookshelf. Or the Game Center app had a felt table. I liked that buttons looked like buttons and things had visual cues.
@shortridge I have a soft spot for retrocomputing in general, especially for old Macintoshes and Amigas. Looking back at those times and what was able to be achieved with very strict constraints, it's truly a great example of how limitations breed creativity.
@shortridge
I like the hum of a datacenter, all those machines working together, all the blinkenlights. It's almost like an orchestra when you visualize it.
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