I don't know about you, but while I read about record heat everywhere, I find myself in the San Francisco Bay Area where the temperature has peaked at 70F and not really gotten past that all "Summer" so far.
"Summer" in air quotes.
Sure seems to me I should relocate and be working from a beach somewhere.
My official position - tools like ChatGPT fall into three buckets for me:
1. Factual generation is a complete fail. I ask for a list of "five things that happened on this day in history" and it just makes stuff up, but insists that it's factual. Nope.
2. Assistance with code and design. Moderately useful. It eliminates a lot of grunt work and is good at templates that I can then customize. Things that I would usually look up in a reference (and I know where to look) are now at my fingertips more easily. Properly used, even buggy code is easy to polish. But don't ask it for architecture. That's not ready for prime time yet. This is, more or less, at the function level. It's good at things like "give me a function implementing the best sort for this kind of data."
3. Creative assistance. This simply rocks. Given a good prompt, I've gotten multi-page creative articles that simply blew me away. Laugh-out-loud funny when I want humor. It actually feels like it understands comedy. It gives me writing prompts that my human friends don't come up with. This is where the technology really shines for me.
When I'm asked which modern (or in-use, or non-obsolete) programming languages I can code in, I sometimes feel like I'm playing an ego card when I say, "all of them."
Sure, I have operational experience (meaning I've written real, customer-facing projects) in C, C++, C#, Java, Go, Python, Scala, JS... and I've played around doing PoC in Rust, Dart and a few others.
More than that, though, I could pick up pretty-much any in-use language in a long weekend. So can any developer who has the years of experience in place. And then figuring out a platform for any given language is just a case of skimming the documentation so you know where to look. Nobody memorizes a whole platform any more (I think the last one I did was MFC? Maybe?).
A more accurate gauge of a developer, to me, would be to hear about their approach to design. What patterns did you use? Which did you consider and then eliminate, and why? What pivots did you make during development, and how did the final product compare to your initial vision. What got you up in the morning in terms of problems to be solved?
Once a certain threshold has been crossed, the keywords become irrelevant.
This thought process brought to you by the number of pitches I get for jobs that are based 100% on the keywords of which languages I've used in the past. These pitches pay zero attention to what I actually did. They just want to see the "[language]" or "[platform]" box checked (ticked, for you Europeans :-)).
It almost makes me want to take a week off, learn *every single modern language* in an "I've been exposed" way, and literally list them all.
Would anyone believe me?
Am I off base here? Or is this a legit position?
#programming #languages #platforms #development #experience #KaleIsNotAFood
Day 1 of the new job: Holy crap, I have Imposter Syndrome!
Day 5 of the new job: I’ve seen this all before and done this all before. Holy crap, I have Dunning/Kruger Syndrome!
To have an application autopost to Facebook requires that you give Facebook access to your web site and allow their "engineer" to log in and test your app. These are, without exception, clueless and underpaid non-technical people in third-world countries.
I've gotten all of my applications approved after much angst.
What I didn't do was turn off Facebook's access after. Now they are asking that access stay open and they pop in every month or so and post a test.
I'm beside myself with distain.
With billions of users, Facebook owns this market. There won't be a "MySpace Event" that unseats Facebook. Ever. The only way they'll lose their dominance is if we get decentralized social feeds, much like we have a decentralized web of HTML sites.
We need a social protocol like HTML and browsers that support it.
We then need unassailable identity verification (or proper anonymity) and a protocol for creating a social graph (think "your friends" or "your followers" and such).
At that point, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, et. al. become obsolete and the users take back their content and control.
It'll be another 3-5 years.
Protip - before you cancel that meeting because you're just so busy, ask yourself if anyone else is likely to be in the same boat. Is that meeting really going to happen? Especially during the holiday time, odds are that someone else will be the person to cancel or postpone it and you'll get the time back without being "that person."
Or maybe it's just my experience ;)
I'd like to see a contest to see who can design the best web site using only HTML 1.0 and no more than 40k in graphics, GIF and JPG only. That's right, what's the best 1994-era web site that someone with today's skills could design, if they were sent back in time.
This should be sponsored by TechCrunch with a suitably cool prize.
Today I revisited some code I'd written about a month ago and reduced the time it takes to run a data loading job from 52 minutes down to sub-10 minutes by replacing a relatively slow API call with a direct call to local code. This is something that was "good enough" until now, but was on my radar as being eligible for improvement. Since I had a new data loading job that would take over 10 hours using the API call, I had to write the new job a better way. Copying this better code back where it could make a difference meant that all of my data loading jobs were now refactored and much faster.
The takeaway here for developers is to periodically revisit your code and refactor it. Find new efficiencies. Examine how your code has been working and consider what you might have learned since the last time you worked on it. You may notice something now that you didn't notice the last time you were in the code.
A small amount of time doing this can pay off in huge improvements.
My friends over at Media Temple have promoted a fantastic guide to DPI, and so much more. This article really covers it all and in an outstanding way. I can't recommend it enough. Thanks to Media Temple for pointing it out, and thanks to Sebastien for writing this. Bravo!
I tend to peruse the job openings posted to LinkedIn and other such sites. There is some value in keeping up with who is doing what by watching hiring needs (don't worry, GoDaddy, I'm not on the market). Something I've noticed lately, though, is that a lot of companies are starting to add statements like this to their listings:
"Anyone with 'Ninja' in their title need not apply."
Now I get the sentiment - companies aren't interested in people with inflated egos or a disproportionate assessment of their abilities and worth. But that said, lighten up, Francis.
If you check my LinkedIn profile, you'll see that I list "Powerful Internet Ninja" as my title when I worked at Demand Media. As I said in my profile, there are those who look down at using "Ninja" in a job title. To those people, I say lighten up. I did some pretty cool things at Demand Media, many of which were, while completely moral and ethical, somewhat sneaky in terms of strategy and competition. "Ninja" describes what I did sometimes, and it just sounds cool. If you think that detracts from my skills or makes me somehow pretentious, I will politely smile and disagree.
In other words, it's pretty clear I don't take titles seriously. Anyone who is disqualified from consideration based on the fact that they get a little humor out of their self-claimed title (along with, let's be honest, self-claimed experience) probably doesn't want to work at such a company, anyway. That's a pity, because some of the best technologists I know have senses of humor that make mine look absolutely pedestrian.
Then again, maybe such a line in the sand is a good gating function for everyone.
My latest article is now up at the GoDaddy Garage. It's an overview of image optimization for web sites aimed at small business owners who are comfortable doing their own web work. Not advanced by any means.
https://garage.godaddy.com/webpro/design/best-practices-optimizing-images-websites/
Some of you (okay, two of you) may have noticed that this blog is now 100% on SSL. If you try to get to any page here normally, you will find that you're redirected to the HTTPS version of the page.
No, this doesn't mean I'll be adding e-commerce any time soon (well, if the logo that my incredibly talented friend Shawn is working on for me is a hit, maybe I'll offer t-shirts :-)). What it means is that web sites being secure simply as a matter of course resonates with me. There's no compelling reason for this site to be SSL, but there's no reason not to.
And with Google's announcement that SSL sites will get more search engine love, there's a benefit. Google's plan is clear - offer some value for web site owners to go SSL and it will become more comfortable for everyone. Enacting social and technical change through positive reinforcement. I can get behind that.
Changing to HTTPS means a lot of the previous likes and shares won't track, but that's okay. With good change sometimes comes a little pain.
It happens every year about this time - the holiday slowdown. Lots of days off around holidays, people in the office taking time off meaning that projects seem to slide into January, comments like, "Yeah, let's just push that off until after the holidays..."
Same here, I suppose. I'm taking advantage of a lot of this time to catch up on loose ends, get a lot of reading done, and create planning specifications for things that, as I noted, won't really get started until after the holidays.
I hope you have a great holiday season and I look forward to more insightful (well, at least to me!) blog posts.
After the holidays ;)
Optimizing your mobile site is more than just search engine optimization (SEO) or making sure your content looks acceptable on mobile devices. There are a number of specific areas in which a little attention to how your website’s mobile counterpart is created can go a long way towards improving performance as well as ranking. From the common sense to the not-so-obvious, these seven tips cover a cross-section of areas where you can make measurable gains.
When I was in high school, in the 80s, I was part of a group that hacked into corporate voicemail systems so that we young hackers could communicate. Voicemail was pretty obscure then. You could find me, around lunchtime, at the payphone on campus, picking up and leaving messages. (Note for the young, look up "payphone" if you need to).
Points for elasticsearch.
I got a V-day card from them, which was nice. Included is ANOTHER v-day card, which got a chuckle. It's blank, with envelope and the first card says that since we're all busy people, here's a v-day card ready to go. Give it to someone.
Classy, funny, and memorable.
