Probably won’t solve all of your problems, but I like to at least change git’s default pager to delta.

I agree with the article’s ideas, but certain things about the execution bother me.

1. calculate_order_total_for_customer. I’d just call it calculate_order_total. It’s clear than any order will have a customer, it’s in the type signature.
2. is_user_eligible_for_discount. I’d call it user_is_eligible_for_discount. Because inevitably that function is getting called in an if statement, and you’d rather it read closer to proper English: if user_is_eligible_for_discount: ....
3. “Designing for Tomorrow”. I agree that dependency injection is a valuable technique, but it’s not always strictly necessary and they seem to say you might as well always do it just in case. That’s counter to YAGNI. Make sure you have an immediate use case, or let future you do it if you end up needing it. It’s not hard to refactor something to inject a dependency.

As for actual coding, I use ChatGPT sometimes to write SDK glue boilerplate or learn about API semantics. For this kind of stuff it can be much more productive than scanning API docs trying to piece together how to write something simple. Like for example, writing a function to check if an S3 bucket is publicly accessible. That would have taken me a lot longer without ChatGPT.

In short: it basically replaced google and stack overflow in my workflow, at least as my first information source. I still have to fall back to a real search engine sometimes.

I do not give LLMs access to my source code tree.

Sometimes I’ll use it for ideas on how to write specific SQL queries, but I’ve found you have to be extremely careful with this use case because ChatGPT hallucinates some pretty bad SQL sometimes.

If your health check is broken, then you might not notice that a service is down and you’ll fail to deploy a replacement. Or the opposite, and you end up constantly replacing it, creating a “flapping” service.

Is your issue that it’s hard to move files around without breaking seeding, or something else?

An issue which I aim to resolve using a self-hosted VPN.

Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to about this says the same thing. LLMs are useful for one-off scripts or quickly generating boilerplate. It just turns out that those tasks don’t make up the majority of programming work unless you are in a bullshit job anyway.

We aren’t yet great at knowing when LLM will save time and when it will inflate time.

I use dufs. Copyparty seems good too.

There are CI tools like Prow and Tide which make it possible to use squash by default while still giving control to developers who want to use a different merge strategy.

-1 is common. I’ve at least seen it from python.

often ‘0’ is also used as the last element

Where? I’ve literally never heard of this convention.

Start with a language that is popular in your domain of interest. If that’s systems, learn C. If it’s data science, learn Python or Julia. If it’s web, learn Javascript.

Why not use zipapp?

https://docs.python.org/3.13/library/zipapp.html

Just a word of warning, I don’t know how much it’s actually used today. I think it had some scaling issues in practice.

Are you specifically interested in a distributed P2P social network? Maybe Scuttlebutt?

Wait is there actually a Zelda movie happening? I feel like I’ve heard of intentions to make a Zelda movie for 20 years.

If you can achieve the desired UX on web, I see few reasons to build a native app. But of course it can be hard to work with web technology sometimes; Javascript and WASM can’t do everything and they aren’t the best developer experience compared to more moderns languages.

Even for offline usage, there is increasing support for progressive web apps. For example, I don’t even need to be connected to the internet to use Exaclidraw after I’ve loaded the app once and installed it as a PWA.

Then there are times when you simply need access to native platform APIs. SQLite is a a very important technology that isn’t easily used from a web app. Most of the powerful APIs you get from an OS like the file system or graphics APIs are extremely watered down for the web.

JS is a lost cause.

Can we start a new web with a better language/platform already?

You say that like it can’t also happen to symbol names.