jmoiron plays the blues

@jmoiron I've always considered the natural world of CS to be the abstract one of computation, using models like the turing machine. The idea that it is computer systems built by engineers is interesting, and I have noticed that as a pattern in eg. papers surfaced in PWL.

@jmoiron The central case study is Mixins, which were first designed by engineers in the late 60s, had several implementations ranging from the late 70s to late 80s, but were only first described in scientific literature in 1990.

@jmoiron One of the definitions of engineering is "the application of scientific knowledge to create new things", but Gabriel argues that the new things being created did not exist in nature and therefore can (often?) preceed scientific understanding.

@jmoiron I watched this talk by Richard P Gabriel yesterday: https://t.co/uECixsyYPs The talk covers a lot of ground, but a philosophical question I found interesting was: "If Science is the empirical study of the natural world, what is the natural world of computer science?"

@jmoiron Horrific scenes in Turkey. A 7.8 in the middle of the night is terrifying. https://t.co/Cj13mRh3Rv

@jmoiron @jordanorelli must love dconf then

@jmoiron @nycsouthpaw shokupan, often called "milk bread" most convenient place to get it is probably Paris baguette.

@jmoiron is knowledge of mdadm a blessing or a curse

@jmoiron Or, maybe if they treated work transactionally and kept it at arms length, they'd be fine. Sacrifice years of engaging with your job and making this 8 hour daily commitment part of your life, so when it ends, there's less pain and disappointment!

@jmoiron Seeing loads of "don't make your job your identity" takes. Do we say this to Teachers? Artists? Athletes? Or do we think "remember, companies can fire you" is insightful advice after a huge round of layoffs?

@jmoiron Is the insinuation that people upset at losing their income, daily routine, and a bunch of acquaintances (not to mention immigration status) must have overly defined their identity on their job? If they had just focused on rock climbing or something, they'd be ok?

@jmoiron Big Initech energy. https://t.co/aFTKlumTcB

@jmoiron Using trains Korea, Japan, & HK and thinking about the MTA: https://t.co/bFQWZrZnGv

@jmoiron People talk a lot about tech bros reinventing really basic shit like buses because of an utter lack of diversity and that's absolutely a fair play, but if you're naming your calendar and scheduling app "cron" maybe you needed a nerd or two on the team.

@jmoiron @RottenInDenmark "well kid, I guess there aint no rule sayin your dog can't play basketball"

@jmoiron @phenlix @inowland It was v1/v2 message incompatibilities between gogo and the main line proto implementation, both Go implementations. The way it manifested was non-obvious and took a while to trace to what is a known issue (and gogo has very recently been officially deprecated...

@jmoiron @LastonSlappy 🤦 hopefully what i meant to communicate (that people with agency did this actively, it didn't just happen) is clear

@jmoiron @inowland Yeah, I think we agree on that. My rant is that they've been successfully marketed and sold as starter tech choices (you'll need it eventually!), and people who helped make that happen are now saying "woo boy things sure got complicated!"

@jmoiron @inowland Great example, because we recently spent >3 weeks debugging a nuanced incompatibility between gRPC implementations. At 1000 ppl, I'd agree that the benefits of the ecosystem outweigh the complexity costs, but do you want to go on this side quest at 10 people? 50?

@jmoiron @inowland It's easy to say, but is it true? I'd say that the population & influence of x-faang vastly outweighs "gods of pre-IPO", especially at large. What industry wide trends do you attribute to that population?

@jmoiron This has manifested mostly as a knack for building the right sized thing, and I wouldn't build our current tech for the company we were back then. That sounds ridiculous to me. And that's what we've done as an industry by defaulting to all these internet scale technologies.

@jmoiron As someone who played a significant engineering role at a company from full-co single-room standups to a successful IPO, I've learned a lot about scaling an org, scaling a tech stack, and the requirements of a company at many different stages of development.

@jmoiron This widespread adoption is good for big tech cos, because their scale required them to operate in a completely different technological universe from the rest of the industry. How can you bridge that gap? Export your engineering culture as "the way."

@jmoiron To paraphrase an old one from @benji_smith: "Nobody really buys hammers anymore, they're kind of obselete... What you need is a hammer factory." https://t.co/SGwUpfYKBk "Nobody really does platforms anymore, what you need is a platform platform." https://t.co/s8mcTkh5n2

@jmoiron We shouldn't passive voice "tech became complex", it was made that way on purpose. Loads of X-faang + conference circuit + devrel convinced everyone that YGNI, and with the smart money bought in, everyone else jumped board.