Substrate

Think of this sort of thing as a journal entry you get to read, a taste of what you might get if you phoned me up and let me blather for an hour or so.

You could imagine a world where cartography never incorporated drawings of territories, and instead relied solely on written descriptions of land. “To the west is a mountainous range, with several large rivers emptying to a gulf in the south.” In such a world, there would no doubt be practised experts, capable of envisioning in their minds the described area. But these written maps would clearly suffer from a lack of depictions.

Whether you met your reading goals or not, I’m sure you did your best.

five Earth-months, which is actually nineteen heart-years You-mask

but at a macro-level: we’re fucking quarantined?? The foreground is fine, but the background is chaos.

This is "GORUCO 2014 - Samantha John, Jason Brennan - Designing a better Programmer Community" by Gotham Ruby Conference on Vimeo, the home for high quality…

you generally felt a sense of presence with your contacts. You at least knew what to expect, generally, when you messaged somebody. ​ The expectation is the conversation never really ends, but in fact, it never really starts, either.

The real benefit of doing this is it gives your team a chance to learn something. It gives anyone on your team who’s reviewing the code a chance to learn about the issue you faced, how you figured it out, and how you implemented the feature or bugfix. Yes, all of that is in the code itself, but here you’ve just provided a natural language paragraph explaining it. You’ve now created a little artifact the team can refer to. In a good description, you need to tell the reviewer: What the pull request does. How to test it. Any notes or caveats.

I can’t be the only one who has to stop and think which “direction” filter() goes. Am I filtering in or out?

That’s the sort of stuff I often write about, too. I’m not writing groundbreaking stuff, but I am trying to make some connections I (and you) might not have otherwise made. It might sound obvious when you read it, but my hope is by writing it down, by giving it a name, whatever obvious thing I write about becomes just a little bit more tangible.

“The main way to prevent software from rotting, it seems, is to maintain it: update it so that it continues to work as the platforms supporting them change underneath. In this sense, though, it’s not the same software you started with, as it’s continuously changing.”

Log in to Twitter to see the latest. Join the conversation, follow accounts, see your Home Timeline, and catch up on Tweets from the people you know.