Robert Roskam

raiderrobert@mastodon.social

I am deliberately eclectic. I write mostly about software engineering, and I also post <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/programminghumor" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#programminghumor</a>, <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/gaming" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#gaming</a>, <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/writing" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#writing</a>, <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/gamdev" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#gamdev</a>, and lots of other stuff.I tend to write stuff in <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/python" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#python</a> these days with bits of <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/js" class="mention hashtag" rel="t

Posts

Post #3742811
You know something is afoot when these stickers are on pumps in super red South Carolina. #nokings
Post #3690203
Software principles that last don't come from architects in glass offices. They come from practitioners who noticed what kept working. These principles arose from doing the work. They did not descend from on high from those far removed from the work. This, I feel, is the most fundamental truth about doing work: those without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
Post #2904565
Renting other people&#39;s computers is expensive. Until you go look at buying them and then running them in a data center and paying for the Internet you need there for &gt;100 servers. And don&#39;t forget paying people to manage those servers.
Post #2904564
Mechanical sympathy is this niche idea that doesn&#39;t get as much play as I think it should in software engineering. Have you heard the phrase before? If so, how have you heard it invoked?
Post #2904563
If someone offered you a sum of money to quit your job today without another one to go to and you&#39;re not allowed to just go back to your current job, what&#39;s the least you&#39;d take to do that? What would you do after you quit? Why? And if there&#39;s no amount, why? Just curious. No judgement.
Post #2904562
How much would your next job have to offer you to take it? (Stated in % compared to your present job.) In all other ways as far as you can tell, it&#39;s like your current job. Same field, same benefits, etc.
Post #2036806
Internet programming attacks through the ages 80s: hehe...I pretended to be Bob on IRC 90s: 1k people went to my website at once and the server caught on fire 00s: PHP/ActiveX/Flash - we make tech that&#39;s basically designed to be hacked 10s: one of these 10k nodejs dependencies got hijacked, glhf figuring out which one 20s: the LLM got prompted-injected via emojis
Post #1746133
Any software engineering leader ignoring Shirky Principle risks wrecking their org. &quot;Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.&quot; This principle explains why organizations often resist changes that would eliminate the very problems they were created to solve. 1/
Post #1699020
Are we all just following the dopamine? Yeah, that&#39;s the entire thought.
Post #1699019
More people should embrace &quot;probably&quot; instead of certainitly. I recently had someone express nearby me that ADHD is certainly not real, and my immediate reaction was to say, they were certainly wrong. I didn&#39;t actually express this because they weren&#39;t talking to me. And upon reflection that reaction itself is wrong. Understandable, but wrong. They are almost certainly wrong based on current evidence. That is a better framing. Also for the record, this is wh...
Post #1699018
I made an index of CLI tools written in rust: https://inrust.dev Enjoy!
Post #1690549
I&#39;m not anti-LLM. I&#39;m just pro-thinking. Everyone I know who is REALLY into AI uses it for reading EVERYTHING longer than 1000 words. It&#39;s the mental equivalent of eating only smoothies, because they go down easier. I say this with love: reading is thinking. Stop letting slop think for you.
Post #1649852
Can code be objectively good? Objectively is doing a lot of work here so let me be very clear. I&#39;m thinking in terms of something like if a hypothesis in science is good. - testable / falsifiable - specific, makes a clear prediction - consistent with existing evidence - parsimonious, that it&#39;s simple - fruitful, leads somewhere 1/
Post #1558768
🔥 take for this audience. LLMs are a dead end for AGI, a dead end for many applications, and that still makes them useful. They're just not the genies that certain financially incentivized people claim they are. The big model makers are incredibly wasteful and incredibly not transparent. Why would they be? Their ability to make money hinges on this stuff seeming to be magic. It's not magic. It's math. We've taught old rocks new tricks. 1/
Post #1202774
OH: &quot;In today&#39;s AI rich env....&quot;
Post #1202772
I particularly love this cover of Tool&#39;s Schism: https://youtu.be/uDT1tniPD2Q?si=LE5N7VljmnFV8oHz
Post #1202771
I think I need more field notes.
Post #1202770
#nokings
Post #1202769
Have you ever had AI help you remove code? Genuine question. Not rhetroical to make a point. I ask it because whenever I use it claude code or anything else the codebase just seems to naturally inflate, and it&#39;ll never really suggest to you, &quot;hey, uh, we got like 10k lines in this function...maybe that&#39;s unwieldly.&quot; And before someone is like,&quot;well, it won&#39;t ever suggest a thing.&quot; I&#39;ve totally had it suggest ideas. It&#39...
Post #1202768
Recently read a book that said the central concern of software engineering is complexity. I initially was agreeing until the author defined complexity which was this: anything related to the structure of a system that makes it hard to understand and modify. I don&#39;t have a better definition to put in its place, but that one sounds suspiciously similar to the original definition of tech debt.
Post #1202767
I&#39;m suddenly both tempted to move to Mumbai and also to stay as far away as possible https://youtube.com/shorts/yuPJ5s7jVEc
Post #1176243
&#39;murica. Land of &quot;you will own nothing and be happy&quot; https://youtube.com/shorts/osml_SGSTlk
Post #1027536
https://youtube.com/shorts/NzEkKGhPshw I aspire to greatness like this
Post #292197
Software principles that last don&#39;t come from architects in glass offices. They come from practitioners who noticed what kept working. These principles arose from doing the work. They did not descend from on high from those far removed from the work. This, I feel is the most fundamental truth about doing work: those without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
Post #292196
Pulled my old ConGeeks project out of mothballs: https://congeeks.io/ It&#39;s a bit rough, so ya&#39;ll be gentle now
Post #292195
Someone told me their codebase was &quot;technical debt&quot; because they didn&#39;t know the technology. That&#39;s when I knew the phrase had died. It&#39;s why I always ask now &quot;why is it technical debt?&quot; I&#39;ve gotten a variety of responses: - the abstractions are wrong - the performance is bad - lots of duplicate code - lots of opposing world views - the technology is out of date - it&#39;s undocumented - I don&#39;t like the tech What...
Post #292194
How do you pronounce zsh?
Post #292193
We have the taste. We have the vision. We dream the dreams, not the AI. We make the art.
Post #292190
Who else in the fediverse at #TantrumCon?
Post #292188
So I&#39;ve done my part with this boycott, and I&#39;d like to suggest as a focal point to go specifically after Amazon and AWS itself. https://www.resistandunsubscribe.com/ I&#39;m concerned that actions that&#39;s too diffuse won&#39;t be noticed otherwise. Also, if you&#39;re on X _still_ and giving them money thru ads/subscriptions, take a very long look in that mirror. If you must engage with X, at least stop giving them money.