mablopoule

27 days agodiscuss

I agree with your take, most of it boils down to ego, I believe.

27 days agodiscuss

Lot of it was bad, sure, but there was so much games and animation done by literal kids back then, because of how easy it was to create something with the tooling. Nothing even come close today, unfortunately.

mablopoule

last monthdiscuss

This will greatly increase developer velocity (by making them run far away).

mablopoule

last monthdiscuss

Same, I'm currently working more in React project, and I miss Angular so much that I actually use it in my personal project, it can be a genuine pleasure to use if you avoid over-engineering the rest.

React shines when it comes to the composability of components, eg. for data-table with customizable rows. It's still possible in Angular, but it's heavier.

For the rest (syntax, the ecosystem, routing, data-handling, DI), Angular is so much more straightforward. Services with dependency-injection is 99% of the time way simpler to reason about than React hooks, especially when you start to need cascading changes between hooks after user interaction.

mablopoule

last monthdiscuss

Agree. RxJS is a beast to approach at first but it's a genuinely cool library, as long as you don't spread observable around when you don't actually need them. I used the same approach for a few years (pushing my http calls behind domain-specific api services that only return promise), and it's way simpler to handle.

I still use RxJS, but mostly in the top-level component and/or service who orchestrate between data, url state and api responses. Those top-level page usually keep the default change detection instead of the 'on-push' strategy).

mablopoule

3 months agodiscuss

As someone who feels stressed about not feeling able to finish the side projects I have (that is, working on my music player, learn Arabic, and learning to draw), this is a very refreshing take. Thank you for this.

mablopoule

4 months agodiscuss

I think the implication is that even though the technological landscape is evolving, it's not as if people born in the 60's couldn't foray into computer science because they arrived too late to study the ENIAC first.

mablopoule

4 months agodiscuss

I'm not sure why you're downvoted, but this is the right take IMO. I hate cheating and lying in general, but in any job posting you have to separate what are the actual requirement in term of knowledge versus what can be realistically learned on the job / doing a prototype in a weekend.

Of course don't fraud by like pretending you're a statistician when you have absolutely no mathematical background, but also don't take at face value the "Must have {x} years of experience in {y} tech" requirement when you know you have the necessary work experience to have a good grasp on it in a few weekend prototypes, and you also know that the job doesn't actually require deep expertise of that particular tech.

I did the same for my first React.js job, and I didn't feel bad because 1) I was honest about it and did not sold myself as a React expert, and 2) I had 10 years of front-end development, and I understood web dev enough to not be baffled by hooks and the difference between shallow copy vs. deep copy of a data structure, so passing technical test was good enough for it.

mablopoule

4 months agodiscuss

A few years ago there was a thread about "How complex systems fail" here on HN[1], and one aspect of it (rule 9) is about how individuals have to balance between security and productivity, and being judged differently depending on the context (especially being judged after-the-fact for the security aspect, while being judged before the accident for the productivity aspect).

The linked page in the thread is short and quite enlightening, but here is the relevant passage:

  > Rule 9: Human operators have dual roles: as producers & as defenders against failure.

  > The system practitioners operate the system in order to produce its desired product and also work to forestall accidents. This dynamic quality of system operation, the balancing of demands for production against the possibility of incipient failure is unavoidable. Outsiders rarely acknowledge the duality of this role. In non-accident filled times, the production role is emphasized. After accidents, the defense against failure role is emphasized. At either time, the outsider’s view misapprehends the operator’s constant, simultaneous engagement with both roles.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32895812

mablopoule

5 months agodiscuss

I would agree, but the question feels less spiteful than playful in nature.

mablopoule

7 months agodiscuss

> Why die on a hill that it "is" something it says it isn't?

There's plenty of guru who say that they are the reincarnation of Jesus and/or Buddha, doesn't mean that we have to take their word for it.

In the same vein, North Korea is officially the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea", even though it's obviously not a democracy.

mablopoule

7 months agodiscuss

100% this. To this day the official website still describe itself as a library, and I'm convinced it's completely for marketing reasons, since 'framework' feels heavy and bloated, like Angular or Java Spring, while 'library' feels fast and lightweight, putting you in control.

Framework can be more or less modular, Angular or Ember choose to be 'battery included', while React choose to be more modular, which is simply choosing the other end of the spectrum on the convenience-versus-flexibility tradeoff.

React ostensibly only care about rendering, but in a way that force you to structure your whole data flow and routing according to its rules (lifecycle events or the 'rules of hooks', avoiding mutating data structures); No matter what they say on the official website, that's 100% framework territory.

Lodash or Moment.js, those are actual bona fide libraries, and nobody ever asked whether to use Vue, Angular or Moment.js, or what version of moment-js-router they should use.

mablopoule

7 months agodiscuss

In his "Power of Simplicity"[1] talk, Alan Kay had a great illustration of this specific phenomenon using astronomy:

Before Johannes Kepler had the insight of describing the orbits of the planets with ellipsis, peoples were using the (conceptually simpler) circles which didn't completely match the observed movement of celestial body such as Mars, thus resulted in complicated circle-within-circles orbits to try to model reality. By introducing a more complex basic shape (ellipsis instead of circle) which happened to match the underlying reality more, the overall description of orbits got greatly simplified.

It's a phenomenon I've seen a few time in my career so far: that while often there's complex code because there are actually complex hedge case to handle (essential complexity), sometime it's really because the data structure used to model the thing you're handling is slightly missing the mark, making things fit almost-but-not-quite, and many operation done around to handle data can be greatly simplified (if not avoided altogether) by changing the underlying data-structure.

(Also, Alan Kay apparently did another talk called "Is it really complex, or did we just make it complicated"[2] that seems pertinent to the thread, though I haven't watch it yet)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY

mablopoule

9 months agodiscuss

> Maybe we're just calling all forms of automation and computer vision "AI" these days because it's sexy.

Funny thing is, at first it was the other way around! 'Computer Vision' has always been a sub-field of AI, but the term was more widely used by academics during a previous AI winter as a way to avoid the tainted 'AI' label.

mablopoule

10 months agodiscuss

Passion, drive, and existential fulfillment can take many form, and "professional joy" can absolutely be one of them.

It's not about drinking the corporate kool-aid, but about taking pride in what you've put in the world (even potentially as a hobby), having a sense of craftsmanship, or even maintaining a certain work ethic.

Even the "making money" part can be tied to a very deep sense of providing for your loved ones, and a sense of personal responsibility.

mablopoule

10 months agodiscuss

I'm a bit surprised at reading that. I've tried both, Next left a bad taste in my mouth, but Nest was kinda neat. Didn't used it for anything too complicated though, so I'm curious about what sort of grievances people have against Nest.

mablopoule

3 years agodiscuss

On his book "The Secrets of Consulting", Gerald Weinberg advise against improving more than 10% of performance, and if so, of hoping to have any credit.

Just like the article, his reasoning is that if you improve performance too much, it makes management/the team look bad for not doing it before, while a smaller improvement in performance make management looks good.

mablopoule

3 years agodiscuss

I work in front-end development, and am very frustrated each time I encounter a front-end framework with auto-refresh without an easy way to disable it (looking at you, Next.js).

As a result, I wrote a (Chrome only) Web extension[1], which monkey-patch the WebSocket object, so I could 'plug' or 'unplug' them by simply clicking the extension's icon. So far I'm very happy with it [2], and can finally have multiple tabs of the same page without my 'reference' tab refreshing itself while I'm working on CSS.

[1] https://github.com/MarcMonchablon/toggle-hmr

[2] It gets the job done, even if in some case (such as the Zola static site generator), where I had to put the link to the plugin's code in the index.html, otherwise the code would be injected too late.

mablopoule

3 years agodiscuss

Blaming foreign influence is not the same as blaming foreigners. Foreign influence is more about pushing the most convenient angle (to them) by means of propaganda, astroturfing or information laundering.

On a similar note, you can absolutely point to America for using the international monetary system in its favor, and that wouldn't be the same a blaming regular americans.

mablopoule

3 years agodiscuss

"The pragmatic Programmer" is one I would recommend.

That, and "Team Geek", in term of relationship with codes and teammates.

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