Compelling proposal from Will Crichton: using EPUB as a basis for a format to replace PDF.
The second most important reason I don’t read more academic literature than I do (the first of course being other commitments) is that they’re all published as PDF, so can’t really be read on a phone. Reflowing text just fits so much better, and if they were published as HTML (possibly EPUB) I’d have a much easier time getting into them.
From back in August, Julia Evans at her best: taking a seemingly trivial operation and explaining in great detail what goes on under the hood.
This is not really Hillel’s point, but my main gripe with the “static types will save us“ philosophy of some is that there are so many things being represented as just strings, but which have de facto constraints that the type system can’t represent, meaning you either have to rely on runtime validation (which means you haven’t turned them into compile-time errors) or just expect people to adhere to the constraints.
On 1 November I got a new job. Again.
I’m back at GreenMobility, this time as CTO.
This obviously marks a big shift for me. It was only in August, joining GAN Integrity, that I transitioned out of being an individual contributor to being a manager, and now I’m also an executive.
This means I’m now working at a higher strategic level than before, something I relish. The first few months have been eventful. We’ve seen our biggest competitor announced their plan to leave our main market and announced our own decision to focus even more on that same market, while keeping pace on releasing new features.
It’s new and it’s different and it’s exciting. I believe as much in the vision as I ever have, and look forward to once again playing a part in improving the prospect for more people foregoing private car ownership and using a more communal alternative.
And from February, Stephen Wolfram’s tome on ChatGPT. This is definitely not gentle, but also very good.
High-level introduction to how LLMs work.
I’m not sure this is really a ‘gentle primer’, but I do think this is a very good introduction.
An approach to window management unlike anything I’ve seen. I really like the idea of a mosaic as a sort of multi-dimensional tiling.
Via Lukas Mathis
On Monday, 1 August 2023, I joined GAN Integrity as a tech lead.
GAN Integrity are certainly not a household name, but are a leading global provider of compliance software to large enterprises.
For me this also marks a change, not just in employer but also in job description: This will be my first entry into management. This is something I’ve been looking actively for for quite a while, and I’m really happy to be taking that on at GAN.
I must admit I’ve never given the tech debt metaphor much thought; it’s always framed as an unmitigated negative, something outside factors foist upon you, and that’s how I’ve tended to think about it.
This is a deep dive into the metaphor, examining how it works on multiple levels, including how you can intentionally taking on tech debt, using the time saved as an investment to ship faster.
Via Simon Willison
Glyph describes some concrete steps to follow to begin splitting a monolith into a micro service (steering well clear of suggestion that micro services solve everyone’s needs).
This is Simply Jonathan, a blog written by Jonathan Holst. It's mostly about technical topics (and mainly the Web at that), but an occasional post on clothing, sports, and general personal life topics can be found.
Jonathan Holst is a programmer, language enthusiast, sports fan, and appreciator of good design, living in Copenhagen, Denmark, Europe. He is also someone pretentious enough to call himself the 'author' of a blog. And talk about himself in the third person.