Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0VaIKK2ijM

Personal site for John Feminella: software engineer · enthusiastic technologist · curiosity advocate

There are good mornings, goodnights, how y’all doings, and head nods and smiles and eye contact. There are neighbors who walk out on their front porch to give treats to my dog. There is polite chit-chat even if we don’t know each other. There are waves from car windows. There is communication. ​ That is where my money went. To rent, and to these women. I relied on all of them to keep me feeling safe, attractive, and emotionally healthy. I believed I could not have survived without them. And possibly I was right. ​ I was putting Band-Aids on myself for years. To survive life. I occasionally described myself as “good at New York.” I was able to maintain a life there. But that’s just it. I was only maintaining. ​ But that is what I left behind when I left New York, more than anything else. Eighteen years of building friendships. Those people are irreplaceable in my heart. I was waiting for a friend to join me, but I was content on my own, too. ​ She yelled to me, “Neighbor, come get in the picture, come on now.” She insisted on it. I did not know how to say no to her, and I did not want to. And so, I rose and joined them.

relearning the pleasures of reading for myself, which was part of learning how to be in my own company. ​ To most readers the notes would be nothing more than an eyesore, but to put them in circulation would somehow manifest versions of myself that no longer felt familiar, and seemed to risk preceding me.

Now that a huge portion of culture is filtered through software, the superiority of “doing things” to “being things” is at risk: Digital platforms build detailed profiles of us from our online behavior, which in turn dictate what we see and then recursively influence our future actions. ​ This isn’t just an academic distinction, but a fairly urgent question for the physical and digital environments that we will build for our future selves. We all intuitively know that our taste and other aspects of our identities are fluid and continuously responding to the surrounding world — that we are assemblages of actions and behaviors more than fixed data profiles (which are actually just blurry snapshots of us at a particular moment). But platforms like Spotify seem to be training us to believe the opposite

Fear of deploys is the ultimate technical debt. ​ Deploys are the heartbeat of your company. ​ as pedestrian as the day of the week. ​ Deploy on every commit. Smaller, coherent changesets transform into debuggable, understandable deploys. ​ If you do not block merges on Fridays, and only block deploys, you are queueing up a bunch of changes to all get shipped days later, long after the engineers wrote the code and have forgotten half of the context. Any problems you encounter will be MUCH harder to debug on Monday in a muddled blob of changes than they would have been just shipping crisply, one at a time on Friday. Is it worth sacrificing your entire Monday? Monday-Tuesday? Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday? ​ have all happened after holiday code freezes. Every. Single. One. ​ The “safety” of nodeploy Friday is realized immediately, while the costs are felt later later. ​ Finally, I heard from a alarming number of people who admitted that Friday deploy bans were useless or counterproductive, but they supported them anyway as a purely symbolic gesture to show that they supported work/life balance. This makes me really sad. I’m … glad they want to support work/life balance, but surely we can come up with some other gestures that don’t work directly counter to their goals of life/work balance. That's it. Because if you make it a virtue signal, it will NEVER GET FIXED. Blocking Friday deploy is not a mark of moral virtue; it is a physical bash script patching over technical rot. And technical rot is bad because it HURTS PEOPLE. It is in your interest to fix it.

honestly AWS should be free unless your like doing some crazy shit or maybe only IF your doing crazy shit it should be free

As a writer, the question of worth is still one that plagues me. Today’s existential anxiety attack was set off by missing the compost drop off bc I was working on an essay. Not a solicited essay, one I want to write so I am (hopefully it'll be published but who knows) Especially on days when I’m not earning $, I put great stock in doing chores. Since I can’t contribute $ to the family, at least I can do the dishes, make dinner, dust, etc. This in part stems from my working class upbringing. And perhaps the masculine stereotype of “providing” So when I missed the compost drop off, I had a moment of absolute panic and an irrational dip of self-esteem. I had one job to do! Dropping off the goddamn compost. If I can't do that, then what good am I? As a partner, a dad, a human being. It got BIG real fast. Is it writing if it never gets published? Is it really work if I'm not being paid for it? I keep telling myself yes, hang in there, it’ll all work out, but some days I feel like I’m just mouthing the words and I don’t really believe them. Today has been one of those.

Internet debate is very effective at changing minds— Joe Groff (@jckarter) May 1, 2019

One of the most common patterns I see in software design with Objective-C (and sometimes Swift), is the use of enumeration types (enum) as configurations for...

Speaking of last year, in 2018, I flirted with the idea of moving into a management role. I spoke with a bunch of people about the idea but ultimately decided that it wasn’t the right time for me. ​ Through this process, I figured out the skills that I’d need to gain if I ever did end up wanting to be a manager, and I’ve been working on those skills since. Though, at this point in time, I still don’t think being a manager is the right path for me. Being a tech lead, on the other hand… ​ It felt kind of weird. While I had cultural credibility of my peers, I didn’t have institutional authority of the business.

Rasowa, zaprojektowana, by cieszyć. Młoda i piękna brunetka z dużymi cyckami.

The Chemex brew method is one of my favorite brew methods. It’s fast, flavorful, and pretty easy to master. In this post, I share my process and exact re...

more or less I don’t think corporations have feelings, which is why I’m a big fan of indie software, because indie software is made by individuals, and individuals care about things and have feelings.

my philosophy on blogging has shifted from “every essay must be a perfect, shimmering artifact” to “blog posts should be short, authentic, and flawed transportation devices”. they mark off from ten to noon and three to five as “engineering time”, and spend the intervening three hours doing anything but programming. I am growing more and more tempted to steal this for myself. those “correct” Sundays, where you flit from obligation to obligation and never grow tired enough to require pause.

have to make a conscious effort to balance the tempo between your ability to absorb a page

At Grailed we’ve started using RxSwift and functional programming to simplify our navigation.

This normalization of deviance means that people within an organization stop seeing problems as problems, making it impossible to learn from them. Stagnation kills resilience. ​ A change-resistant culture, however, risks burning out those new people, as they find that they are unable to make any meaningful changes. ​ Knowing what decisions were made and why can help prevent “we’ve always done it this way” as a fall-back reason for doing something. If you understand the constraints and trade-offs around why a past decision was made, you’ll be better equipped to understand if they are still relevant in your current context. ​ push authority for decision-making down closest to where the work gets done ​ If different members of an interview panel have very different views of how the organization works, that can be a sign of deeper issues. This often indicates implicit power structures or lack of clarity around process that can be frustrating to deal with and difficult to change.

fullness to the appearance and yet an emptiness to the quality

hello! here are my slides from my talk at @brooklyn_js - thanks again for your support, and i'd be happy to work with you/your company on more cute, creative tech projects

Like many of Apple’s biggest hits, it wasn’t immediately well-understood. ​ In hindsight, I think the rollout of the Apple Watch was unnecessarily complicated for a first-generation product. ​ it’s truly the kind of product that you need to use to understand it. ​ But despite the allure of recent models’ GPS capabilities and far nicer industrial design, I have not had the itch to upgrade. ​ it’s still a little strange to see so many people wearing the exact same watch every day. ​ Rather than augmenting what I already wear, it replaces something. ​ Finally, there’s something about wearing an Apple Watch with my AirPods in my ears while looking at an iPhone that makes me feel, well, a little bit dorky. I don’t want to make a big deal out of this; I’m sure it’s just elevated levels of self-consciousness that are more indicative of who I am than of the device. This is almost certainly a me problem. But, still. Akin to Ryan’s old Rule of Three tweet about Apple devices (https://twitter.com/ryandawidjan/status/930511618529746944). Or I can leave it in the bank and add to it for a watch that’s far more like a piece of jewellery than it is a wrist computer. Even the nicest stainless steel Apple Watch is still identifiable primarily as a device. I have also learned something over the last four years that I’ve used an Apple Watch: I learned that my hesitance to upgrade is not from a lack of new features — there are plenty of those — but almost the opposite. I don’t know that I want more of anything happening on my wrist; I guess I just want less.

Category theory and intelligence seem to be deeply linked - both are guided by the goal of organizing and layering abstractions. Automation of exactly that - organizing and layering abstractions - seems to be the quest of machine learning.

a lot of my maturation as a developer has come from realizing that intuition is a disease and a crutch rather than a thing that should be relied on in lieu of formal verifications: the goal should be to delay intuition until it is reified in a thing that exists beyond your mind.

Bonus content: here's how I'd shim it into a switch statement: pic.twitter.com/W4Wu7M0923— Ben Cohen (@AirspeedSwift) April 25, 2019