Tom Gamon

You can’t maintain a codebase that belongs to a defunct company.

Juan Ojeda tried using ChatGPT to write the code for an app.

Imagine you are in a car driving from Paris to visit your parents in Rome.

I avoid Javascript wherever possible.

We are in the midst of delivering a project with deadline pressure, making me wonder about whether I should trade off certain aspects of quality to get to market quicker.

Developers are creepy, according to the paper is entitled “On the Nature of Creepiness” which studied what makes people ‘creepy’.

A Taxonomy of Technical Debt link If you are going to focus on any technical debt, focus on the stuff that is contagious.

As someone with ADHD I am particularly prone to rapidly flitting between subjects, but I am sure every developer has gone through stages in their growth when they just want to know everything all at once.

In English we have the singular and the plural form.

Remote teams lose the ambient awareness that office work provides — the overheard conversation, the visible body language, the easy interruption.

Some Were Meant for C link A refutation of the arguments against the use of C, stating that C is important because there are things you can do in it that you can’t do in other languages.

Over the last year or so I have had my entire team change around me.

The other day I was cooking something in the oven.

There are many ways to cook a cow1.

One day a fortnight, our entire team stops shipping and learns.

We had a bug come in the other day that nobody in the team could diagnose - until Jing looked at it.

The idea of a “veil of ignorance” was a thought experiment coined by the philosopher John Rawls.

To say something is efficient is to say that it produces an output with little waste; be that time, resources or energy.

“Full-stack developer” is the wrong term.

Every programming language is a compromise between two audiences who can’t both be satisfied.

I refer to this quote regularly as I find it particularly apt as a developer regularly trying to wrangle a Rails monolith.

When design teams approach engineers for feasibility input, this is the question I reach for: What is the solution we could put together in a day?

I transitioned into a tech lead role around 9 months ago and I didn’t quite know what to expect.

There is a temptation to try to have opinions, especially the more senior you get.

This, if anything, is a note to future me.

Clean code and functional code are not the same thing.

I have recently moved into a Tech Lead role at work and subsequently have been thinking about the different sorts of support I have been lucky enough to receive.

Clarity of communication is the underrated skill of a developer.

The code isn’t the hard part of programming.

Today I learned of a paper published by Microsoft back in 2008.

Today I learned, from reading this paper, that a human retina would transfer data at roughly the same rate as ethernet.

I have been reading a bunch around database indexes recently.

My days at work recently have been split with about 40% on Slack, 40% on Zoom and 10% reviewing code1.

Today I learned that you can truncate tables in Rails. 1 ActiveRecord::Base.connection.truncate(Model.table_name) Quicker than Model.delete_all if you are clearing out a large table.

I needed to reset a Kafka consumer offset back to 0 on AWS MSK so I could run through the events again.

Some ideas spread from a single conversation.

A great meeting has three key elements: the desired outcome of the meeting is clear ahead of time; the various options are clear, ideally ahead of time; and the roles of the participants are clear at the time.

Running code burns energy.

When debugging problems I find it useful to form an explicit hypothesis at every stage.

Getting a read of the room is hard when the room is a grid of video tiles.

Most programmers don’t win by writing brilliant code — they win by not writing bad code.

Today I learned about stress wood1.

Prudent dating advice would be to get to know someone first, before making an everlasting commitment to them.

The invention of cooking gave a way for humans to put effort in up front to turn tough, hard-to-eat foods into something they could more easily digest.

Running scripts against plain-text notes from an iPhone requires a server.

I was facing connection dropouts with my Raspberry Pi 4 when I was using ssh to connect to it.

Today I Learnt about Benfords Law.

You, like me, might want to see all the files that you have modified on a branch (rather than just since you last commited).

Clubhouse is the best project management software for development that I have ever used.

I often find myself doing the following: Go to repo Open VERSION file Change the version number Add the file to git Commit with the message ‘Bump version to $1’ This is a tiny script which automates the above. 1 2 3 4 5 #!