Feedback is a gift.
Some gifts are little treats for you to consume. Think of a box of chocolates. You enjoy them and then they’re gone, but you remember the thought that was put into them.
Sometimes gifts are utilitarian, like getting socks for Christmas. They are not the most exciting thing to receive, but you kind of need them as part of your normal day-to-day life, and you’ll get use out of them.
When is “measure twice, cut once” bad advice?
One of my hobbies is complaining about the tendency of software developers to view choices as binary, moralistic decisions. Measuring twice is obviously correct, and anyone who doesn’t do it is an unprofessional, evil wood waster. Either that or double measurers are a bunch of know-nothing shysters selling snake oil for exorbitant consulting fees. This black-and-white thinking is a mental shortcut that many animals take, but sometimes it’s nice to apply a little more intellectual rigour than a Pomeranian.
I’d like us to think less in terms of right and wrong when it comes to technical decisions, and think more in terms of context, costs and benefits.
Today I want to coin the term bleet. It’s a type of short-form writing somewhere between a blog post and a tweet.
I made a quick-and-dirty Ruby script that animates the GitHub contributions calendar, for the express purpose of making this satirical video:
Have you ever wished that tar or zip would deduplicate files when creating
an archive? Well here’s a hacky solution using git.