@mikebroberts@hachyderm.io

Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Jul 10, 2026

Replying to @exchgr@mastodon.world

@exchgr@mastodon.world surprisingly it’s pronounced like guckwit

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Jul 02, 2026

Replying to @tastapod@mas.to

@tastapod@mas.to Wait what now? *Dishwashers* are part of bot armies now? Good grief.

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Jul 02, 2026

Replying to @exchgr@mastodon.world

@exchgr@mastodon.world It's valid, but I'm betting data center owners aren't modifying their behavior.

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · May 08, 2026

Replying to @dannotdaniel@hellions.cloud

@dannotdaniel@hellions.cloud I think we're all Sam PrtScrman' that they do

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Apr 24, 2026

RE: @kottke@mastodon.social

This is very cool. Apart from anything else I haven't seen someone play the desk at a tiny desk concert before.

mastodon.social

kottke.org: "It's from 3 years ago, but Fred Again's Tiny Desk…" - Mastodon

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Apr 22, 2026

Today’s the 20th anniversary of me leaving the UK and moving to New York. I thought I’d be gone for a year or two. Maybe three. Funny how life turns out.

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Apr 17, 2026

RE: @lambdasierra@hachyderm.io

I coded Clojure for a few years back in the early 10’s ( @lambdasierra@hachyderm.io in fact co-led a training course on it that I went to! ) . This documentary very much made me miss it. I wonder if there's a way I can dip my toe back in its waters.

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Apr 17, 2026

Saw The Chameleons last night in Brooklyn and they were flipping great.

The Chameleons formed in Manchester and made three albums - all very good - in the early / mid 80s. They could have been another New Order / Depeche Mode / Smiths / etc. but blew apart before they got big.

I didn’t hear about them until university in the late 90s, which was just in time to see their first (brief) reforming in 2001.

Two of the original 4 members (including the frontman) are in the band today, plus 3 others. But 40 years on from the classic albums they still sounded tight and energetic.

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Apr 16, 2026

Replying to @exchgr@mastodon.world

@exchgr Sunday vs today. More subtle in the photos, but when the park pops it pops. (This is the view from my desk. :) )

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Apr 15, 2026

Replying to @exchgr@mastodon.world

@exchgr having had a park view from my apt for the last few years, it still amazes me how quickly the greenening happens.

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Apr 15, 2026

Replying to @tastapod@mas.to

@tastapod just say “Nein!” to nines

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Apr 15, 2026

Replying to @exchgr@mastodon.world

@exchgr don’t worry, it’s gonna be 34 next Tuesday (why?!?!)

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Apr 12, 2026

Replying to @rmondello@hachyderm.io

@rmondello I had an Anker charger stop working recently and I got a good response from them via their own website, so it might be worth trying that. But mine was less than a year old.

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Apr 11, 2026

Eye contact Hover or focus to reveal Sensitive

Perfect running weather in Brooklyn today

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Apr 11, 2026

Sara and I were lucky enough to see the Groff / Mendez / Radcliffe version of “Merrily We Roll Along” off Broadway a few years back, and so weren’t going to watch the recorded version of the Broadway run, currently on Netflix. But tonight we did anyway and hooboy it still hits. The lead 3 have to be phenomenal for this particular Sondheim to work, and they all are. #theatre

hachyderm.io

Hachyderm.io

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Apr 04, 2026

Replying to @deobald@fantastic.earth

@deobald@fantastic.earth No, just a normal, albeit very old, ipod :)

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Apr 02, 2026

Did I watch the launch today? This is some of my lego, so I’ll let you guess.

But damn, I wish my default emotion to human launches was still excitement and not anxiety. Oh well.

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Mar 30, 2026

My 7.5 year old iPad Pro is still happily trucking along but the keyboard / cover (“Smart Keyboard folio”) was falling apart and shedding pieces of rubber. Apple don’t sell replacements any more, I don’t think, but https://www.backmarket.com/ sell them refurbished. So I ordered one and I can’t tell it’s not new. I’ll definitely be using Back Market again.

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Mar 22, 2026

Replying to @hongminhee@hollo.social

@hongminhee Fantastic article. 👏 👏 I think there's one possible ray of light for the "code as craft" people - at least a subset of them. To me the craft'ers can enjoy coding for various reasons - the demo-scene folks, the "get it into the smallest amount of code" folks, the aesthetic folks. But another camp is the "make it easy to understand and extend" folks - and that's pretty much where I fall. People like me, who like arranging things neatly, have had a great advantage for the last few decades, because tidy code is good for industry. There's a reason @mfowler 's Refactoring book is such a big seller. What I'd argue we don't know for sure yet, is whether readable code as a valuable thing for the industry, is dead. The LLM extremists would probably say it is. But that only works if the only form of validation of code is going to be external (testing & observability, basically). I argue that if humans will still be required to "review" (whatever that ends up meaning) at least some code, then readable code is going to be advantageous. Even if LLMs can produce readable code we still need human judgment, but for me judgment skills will come from doing, and not just reviewing. In other words, there'll still be an economic case for "developing by hand". If I'm wrong, and external validation does become sufficient for judging code, then all bets are off. But in that situation I don't think the LLMs will end up writing code as we know it anyway - why would they? They will write whatever uses the least tokens and gets to a valid result most cheaply. Which could be in assembler.

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Mar 13, 2026

Replying to @beep@follow.ethanmarcotte.com

@beep@follow.ethanmarcotte.com He's just a regular human announcer, he's going to do the best he can do. 🦇

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Nov 21, 2025

Replying to @lambdasierra@hachyderm.io

@lambdasierra@hachyderm.io To me this is why I'm increasingly seeing LLMs (for coding) as a super-powered IDE - with all the benefits and limitations that come with that. As an absurdly simple example I know how to write an "import" statement, but with Jetbrains tools I've let them manage all of my imports for literally decades. And for a very related example, I recently changed the module style of a couple of Javascript projects, which required updating all of the imports across the projects. This was beyond just the IDE, but an LLM did it in no time (and my sed / awk skills aren't sufficient to do it myself in an automated fashion, so it would have taken me maybe an hour) What I'm trying to do now is find where LLMs are useful, and learn what I can do to make them more likely to succeed. A big place they're different from an IDE is there's no list of keyboard shortcuts and menu commands. Thankfully I think everything I’ve learned over the last 30 years about testing and frequent iterations (thanks, XP) is a huge help. Ironically, and to loop back to the beginning of your thread, I think programmers who are better at writing are also going to get more out of LLMs when it comes to writing software.

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Jul 09, 2025

Replying to @warren@masto.nyc

@warren Hi Masto.NYC folk - I'm going to try to make it tonight . I'll look out for people with stickers, but if there's an easier way for me to tell who you please let me know! :)

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Apr 05, 2025

Replying to @deobald@fantastic.earth

@deobald@fantastic.earth aha! Hi @scottjenson@social.coop - yep, I / we are early days on something which will be very UX and consumer oriented, but also open source. If we get somewhere in the next few months I suspect your help would be most valuable!

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Mar 11, 2024

Replying to @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io

Self-follow-up : Even Emma Stone knows we're doing it wrong. In the middle of her Oscars speech last night for best actress (possibly the peak example of celebrating individual achievement) she said "It's not about me; it's about a team that came together to make something greater than the sum of its parts" . I wish we made software a bit more like Oscar winners make movies. https://youtu.be/Q8urFpWdi9c?si=I1Lk7SRVyBFsgD9V&t=110

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Mar 07, 2024

Replying to @shiftingedges@hachyderm.io

@shiftingedges@hachyderm.io I agree, I think remote is often an excuse. I think the bigger reason is most management / leadership can’t or don’t want to get involved in the “messy” work of managing groups of humans.

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Mike Roberts @mikebroberts@hachyderm.io · Mar 07, 2024

There was a movement 10+ years ago in industrial software development to embrace groups of engineers and product people as more than the sum of their parts - to work as true teams. But today the de facto has become async acrimonious PRs, individual assignment, and individual assessment. “More than the sum of parts” has been discarded in the name of an easier and more measurable, but far less effective, mediocre standard of engineering leadership, based on isolation. I find it very disappointing.

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