Software Maniacs blog

Is this platform still massively against AI or has it moved more towards acceptance?

— Armin Ronacher

If you leave a bad argument from a prominent person unchallenged, it starts looking like an accepted common wisdom. Armin Ronacher has enough clout, and his stated position sounds wrong enough to me to not let let it just slide. Here's my argument, for those who still values what I have to say. I'm not directing this directly at Armin, as the tone of his first message should tell you everything about his readiness to have his position challenged.

So what happened was, I have developed my shopping list to the point where it got useful to me, after which I lost interest in working on it. You know, the usual story… It was however causing me enough annoyances to still want to get back to it eventually. So a few weeks ago, after not having done any programming for a year, I finally broke through the dread of launching my IDE again and started on slowly fixing the accumulated bitrot. And through the last several days I was on a blast implementing some really useful stuff and feeling the familiar thrill of being in the flow.

I'm a fan of a hypothesis about "mental capacity" being a finite quantity that you spend while actively using your brain and recover during rest. It may sound obvious, but history is full of many seemingly "obvious" truisms that were ultimately disproved by science (like geocentric planetary model or cold weather being the reason for common cold).

I don't know of any actual research into this hypothesis, but my life experience keeps providing me with confirmations.

The Dawn of Everything is a book by an archaeologist David Wengrow and an anthropologist David Graeber who methodically dismantle the simplified view of the progress of human civilization. That we went from small bands of hunters-gatherers to tribes, to agriculture, to cities, to empires and ended up with our current idea of nation states, which is supposed to be the pinnacle of societal development.

Today was my last day working at DataDog. Despite me having built and launched a pretty useful service within our department, the leadership decided to set it aside and built its next iteration with different people and different technologies. I resisted for a while :-), but wasn't really trying to save it at any cost: after all, nothing you do at work really belongs to you, so it's up to the company to decide what they want.

This story is about an accomplishment at work. Due to it being work-specific I won't go into too much detail, so it won't be necessarily useful. It's just a personal piece. For various reasons (such as changing places, raising a child, workplace politics, poor luck) I haven't got any clear wins under my belt for quite some time, probably since building a Python team at Yandex 15 years ago. So this one feels a little special.

A post about Haskell vs. Python readability came onto my radar the other day. It compares two implementations of a trie structure, and after looking upon the Python version I wanted to make my own attempt. I didn't make it to necessarily compare or "battle" against the other solutions, it's more of an exercise in the vein of "how would I do it".

When last time I lamented the unoriginality of my tool nfp I also entertained the idea of salvaging some value from it by extracting the event debouncing part into a stand-alone tool. So that's what I did.

Meet debounce, a Rust library and a prototype command-line tool.

So what happened was, I fed up manually uploading pictures I export from Darktable to my Flickr photo stream using the browser's file picker. So I decided to do something about it. The initial idea was to craft a FUSE file system which would automatically upload new files, but this turned out to be hard, so I switched to a much simpler solution: a little inotify watcher handing over new files to an upload script. I managed to code up a working solution over a weekend!

More interestingly, I made the watcher part — "nfp", for "New File Processor" — as a generic configurable tool which I published. It was only when I started writing this very blog post that I stumbled upon a standard Linux tool that does it, inotifywait :-)

Still, I hope there's something to be salvaged from this project. Read on!

So anyway, I'm making a shopping list app for Android. As I understand, "shopping list" is something of a hello-world exercise of Android development, which may explain why there are so many rudimentary ones in Google Play. Only in my case I actually need one, and I know exactly what I want from it.

See, for the past 10 years or so I've been in charge of food supply in our family, which includes everything from grocery shopping logistics, to cooking, to arranging dishes in the dishwasher. And the app is an essential part of the first stage of that chain.