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John Turner

@while1malloc0@hachyderm.io

mastodon 4.6.6

Software engineer, musician, and cooking enthusiast. 
Slightly obsessed with developer experience.
 Staff Engineer at Squarespace building internal developer tools.

216 Followers

371 Following

7 Posts

Joined November 06, 2022

website:

https://breaking.computer

pronouns:

he/him/his

Posts

John Turner @while1malloc0@hachyderm.io · Aug 01, 2025

@vkc@linuxmom.net I can appreciate services not wanting to be an identity provider and offloading authn that way, but I agree, the ergonomics really suck, especially if you don’t keep your email open all the time.

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John Turner @while1malloc0@hachyderm.io · Jul 24, 2025

Replying to @while1malloc0@hachyderm.io

Next we moved to the other laptop. This one wouldn’t even display a login screen. The error modal just said Authentication Failed. I figured something was stuck in a weird state so I restarted the machine, which got us to a login page. My uncle asked how I knew to do that, and I had nothing to tell him besides “over a decade of experience in an industry where that works far more often than it should for no discernible reason.”

John Turner @while1malloc0@hachyderm.io · Jul 24, 2025

Replying to @while1malloc0@hachyderm.io

All of his devices are running pretty old software, and he’s got two laptops, a tablet, and a phone to sync. We start with the only device that’s displaying a button to start a login, one of the two laptops. He has to go through the permissions flow, one of which says “macOS can delete all of your emails.” He had no idea what macOS was, just that he didn’t want to lose his emails and was weary of agreeing to something with that language in it. After that, we had one machine re-authed.

John Turner @while1malloc0@hachyderm.io · Jul 24, 2025

Replying to @while1malloc0@hachyderm.io

He explains that he got a security alert from Google telling him to change his password, which he did. Ok, cool, so he just needed to re-auth his devices. BUT, not one of them said “login,” they all said “authentication failed” with no other error. You know who uses the word authentication to mean logging in? Tech folks, and that’s about it.

John Turner @while1malloc0@hachyderm.io · Jul 24, 2025

Yesterday my uncle called me asking for help with his email. For some reason, his Gmail wasn’t syncing to any of his Apple devices. He came over for some tech support, and what followed was a master class in just how user hostile UX can be, especially for folks who aren’t steeped in technology.

John Turner @while1malloc0@hachyderm.io · Jul 07, 2025

@paulboeck@beige.party There’s some internals around linking to eg assembly defined code that might make that complicated to do at the language level, but if you’re using the golangcilint meta-linter, it’ll catch that for you.

John Turner @while1malloc0@hachyderm.io · Aug 31, 2023

Replying to @j3s@merveilles.town

@j3s@merveilles.town This is incredible. It feels like the web version of “if someone forgets what you told them: stop time, lay out the last 5 minutes of the timeline into a tesseract, destroy the current timeline, find when you told them the thing inside the tesseract and record what you said, then restart a new timeline at the point where you’re about to tell them a thing, at which point you can play them the recording”

John Turner

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