@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk
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jezhiggins

@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk

Freelance software grandad -
software created, extended or repaired

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Floppy, to random
@Floppy@mastodon.me.uk avatar

TFW you merge a PR that represents your entire week's work. Lovely.

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@Floppy Eek!

Floppy, (edited ) to random
@Floppy@mastodon.me.uk avatar

It’s May 4th! What shall I get the kids to watch tonight?

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@Floppy I feel like your kids might be a bit young for Jay and Silent Bob. You'd have to have a break in middle to explain who George Carlin was, for instance, and their attention might wander.

jezhiggins, to random
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

pikesley, to random
@pikesley@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Imagine if Britain was a real place

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@Floppy @CatherineFlick @pikesley https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheepy

Floppy, to random
@Floppy@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Met a friendly chap in town yesterday. I recognised his @openrightsgroup t-shirt and said hello, he recognised my @emf t-shirt. There was an exchange of nerd appreciation. 🤓

No idea who it actually was, but nice to know my people are secretly all around, even out here in the sticks.

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@Floppy Used to often chat with a guy who would be getting home from work in his van as I was walking past with my dogs. Initially spoke to him because he was wearing a New Japan Prog Wrestling t shirt. We'd have little chats about wrestling, kids, dogs, just small stuff. Never knew his name nor him mine 🙂

GeePawHill, to random
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social avatar

I hesitate to ask, but what's this about dhh being a freshly-renewed ass-clown?

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@GeePawHill Uncritical rah-rah-rah of a book on child mental health by an author who's a newspaper columnist, and consequently, like anyone who has opinions for money, probably not somebody we should be uncritically rah-rah-rahing.

jezhiggins, to random
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Day's peaked lads. Won't get better than this.

Edent, to random
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

If you run a small business in the UK, what are your must have subscriptions?

Boosts very welcome!

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@Edent For what definition of small? Just you?

Your email, your domain name, your phone, your accountant (I know that's not a subscription as such, but I pay a flat fee for payroll and end of year), your Internet provision, whatever you need to do your MTD VAT returns (which might depend on your accountant).

Anything else depends on what you're up to 🙂 I pay for JetBrains for CLion and Webstorm and have an O'Reilly books subscription, but hardly universal needs

CatherineFlick, to random
@CatherineFlick@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Hello baby seeds! One of the benefits of seed blocks I’ve discovered is you can see the first germination really easily. Here are some seed blocks with day one tomato and carrot seedlings.

image/jpeg

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@CatherineFlick I saw the picture and thought they were brownies 😢

jasongorman, to random
@jasongorman@mastodon.cloud avatar

A minute's silence, please, for the LinkedIn guy who just posted that testing steals time from shipping features, and that's why developers shouldn't do it.

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@jasongorman Do you want to punch him, or shall I?

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

Shocked and baffled to see Jacob Rees-Mogg writing an op-ed in The Spectator that I actually AGREE with:

"Shamima Begum shouldn’t have lost her British citizenship"

I mean, WTF?

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/shamima-begum-shouldnt-have-lost-her-british-citizenship/

/1

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@cstross I buy the logic but not when applied to Rees-Mogg. He's shown no hint of any kind of compassion or intelligence in the past, and GB News sure as hell aren't forking over 350,000 a year for him to talk sense. My bet was he's trying to put the boot to Sajid Javid because Javid came straight out to condemn Lee fucking Anderson

jezhiggins, to random
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Just swallowed a fly, lads

jezhiggins, to random
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

For a talk I'm thinking about for later this year, early next, I've decided I need a text prediction engine. The basic idea is that there are lots of things in software that seem kind of amazing, even to people who work in software. Compilers & interpreters, o/ses, windowing systems are obvious choices, as is lots of games stuff (and not just fancy graphics stuff) but they're all pretty large. You can't write an o/s in 40 minutes. I can't anyway. But I think I can do a text predictor.

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

If I can explain how a "magic" piece of software works in 40 minutes or an hour, demystify the whole thing, that can start lift the lid for people on some of these other "hard" things.

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Perhaps because my programming "first language" is C++ I've had people who work in C# or JavaScript or Python or similar say that all that low-level stuff is too complicated for them.

I've encountered a lot of C++ (and C and assembler) snobs who look down the noses at languages you can't cause segfault with, but they're probably beyond redemption.

It kind of boils my piss that there are programmers who've taken that on themselves. Programming's programming.

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

My phone keyboard asked me last week if I wanted to turn on some kind of AI assistant. I obviously said no, but it's stoking up the idea that text prediction is a hard problem, best left to the big brains at Google/Apple/Microsoft in their shiny offices and free lunches on Silicon Valley and Redmond.

A text predictor in few lines of JavaScript should pop that bubble. A bit. Hopefully.

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Why JavaScript?

Well,

a) Everyone can read it

and

b) People shit on it all the time (even though its actually really capable)

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Tool shaming. Don't do it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABfDJtY9l1c

jezhiggins, to random
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Well done, everyone

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@nyrath Forgive me -

You step through the door into the next chamber. As you look around an ogre crashes through the wall. What do you do?

I, er,...

It doesn't matter. The ogre rolls right over you, crushing you to pulp under its tracks.

jezhiggins, to random
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Over the past four or five months, I've been pulled into the recruiting process at work. I say pulled in because I didn't have any prior experience or training in recruiting, and because I'm not sure our process is particularly great. I don't think it's bad, necessarily, but it is quite drawn out. At least, I think so although people tell me it's not unusual. Anyway...

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

They aren't failing candidates, they're candidates that have been failed. They've been failed by the trade at large, because collectively we know, or at least have some good ideas, about people can learn and grow their skills. They've been failed by their past employers, for not have desire to help their own staff develop, not have the structures in place.

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

And they've been failed by me and my peers, who do know our stuff. It doesn't take a huge amount of time to really make a difference - half an hour here, a day or two there, even just a suggestion can change someone's course for the better.

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@CatherineFlick A Pascal like language with pre- and post- conditions? Oberon?

In this case, where I've thrown an arbitrary piece of code at you, putting tests around it helps characterise the behaviour. I can get an idea by reading but I might be wrong, am probably incomplete, and I'll certainly forget, but building tests captures and preserves that behaviour. Then I can change and shape the code, secure in the knowledge the tests will let me know if I cocked up.

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@CatherineFlick For new itch-scratching code, then tests work the other way. They describe the behaviour I want, and that helps shape what it is I need to write. You might have seen people talk about the cycle - write a failing test (ie, write a tiny spec), make the test pass (implement the spec), refactor (improve the design). You're defined and implementing in tiny steps - I get itchy, like actively uncomfortable, if I go longer than about 8 minutes when working like this

jezhiggins,
@jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@CatherineFlick Unthinking choice of words :) Don't want you thinking I've got some kind of programmer rash.

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