A common antipattern I’ve been both perpetrator of and victim to is what I describe as Framework Syndrome. This is the act of writing software that does not solve the inherent problem at hand, but provides a poorly designed scaffold in which one is expected to eventually “fill in the blanks.” That is, in the absence...

I’m exhausted. I’ve been guilted/peer pressured into participating in the AoC for at least 5 years. I’m tired, I’m defeated, I’m unable to meet its weird expectations consistently and still I remain a competent software engineer. I’m not participating in his year’s Advent of Code. Every year I try and get stymied by...

In my previous post I wanted to run a keepalive green thread on the wide while doing work to let the coordination framework (in this case just a plain old Postgres database) which workers were around and still processing work. Now, I have a long-running block of synchronous code. Herein lies the problem: synchronous...

At work I’m currently working on a fairly large system in which we have a pool of greedy workers, of unknown size, which can opt it at any time to the flow of work. A job is considered abandoned if it is marked as IN_PROGRESS but the worker who has claimed it hasn’t phoned home in sone amount of time. The project is...

I have a Gaming PC I bought from Costco when my wife told me “I should maybe get back into my old hobbies” in the summer of 2020. It came with Win10, which is fine and it’s probably good to have at least one Windows machine in the house at any given time. The thing is: Windows is annoying. Every time Windows ran an...

Wanting a small, pocketable handheld for bus rides, etc., I saw the Miyoo Mini and attempted to purchase one. They are incredibly hard to acquire. The Anbernic RG35XX presented itself as an alternative, and it was actually possible to buy one. I got one for about $60 on Amazon and was immediately in love. It had a...

I’m a weirdo: on my IDEs I prefer a light theme, having used light themed IDEs since time immemorial (still miss using Visual Studio regularly). But I prefer white on black for my terminal emulators, as I have used that since time immemorial and a black on white terminal window doesn’t feel like a serious thing. So...

I bought a Devterm a couple of years ago and it’s mostly been sitting in a drawer. The good The thermal printer is novel The form factor makes it super portable The bad OS support is not great, at one point I built my own Raspbian image because the official one had drifted so far out of date that the apt repos...

I bought a Steam Deck. I was on a waiting list that said I wouldn’t get it until this year (2023), but it arrived in October 2022. This thing is so versatile thanks to its Desktop Mode. For games like the boomer shooters I so love, I can dock the Deck and play with a mouse and keyboard and nicer monitor. I can...

I kickstarted the AOKZOE A1 when I was utterly convinced that I would never get a Steam Deck. Joke’s on me; the Deck arrived before the A1. I primarily use this system as my sole Win11 machine, so it does a lot of light desktop work. It is also my “travel” laptop; when I’m travelling I take this and not my Steam...

I’m not going into specs or specific details on this device. I was on an iPhone XS, which has slowly been degrading over time. Battery was slowly dying, replaced it at the Apple Store, the ribbon cable for the display was not adequately clipped back into place. It was easier to just order a new phone than to take...

One thing I love about Python’s practical approach to type annotations and enforcement is that it’s gradual: you can rapidly code a large ball of mud and get it working, then refine it to make it safer with typing later on. Chalk this up as another good idea (possibly by accident) for Python: you can do the same...