SoyViking [he/him]

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  • 31 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: November 4th, 2020

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  • So breaking things up aggressively into small components you can reason about in isolation tends to be the best way to write reliable code you can maintain over time.

    This is so true. Something that has really improved my coding has been having a linter that whines to me about assignment branch condition size. Compared with learning how to properly stub methods in tests it has helped me break tasks down into simple manageable chunks with little room for error.



  • This has been my entire last week. Our client has a tight deadline for this feature I’m working on, in part due to their own indecisiveness and in part due to an external API developed by a big corporation being late and buggy. This means we’re doing testing and bug fixing simultaneously with doing new development and even with speccing and estimating new subtasks. And with this client, this close to the deadline, every little bug is critical and needs to be fixed right away. Meanwhile, a junior developer is being onboarded to the project and another developer is working on a different feature derived from an architecture I made. There’s always a fire I need to put out, a question I need to answer or a feature I need to describe. I’m writing more emails than code these days.


  • I normally go “what the fuck did I even do yesterday?” five minutes before daily standup and look at my git commits and calendar for the day before to piece together a plausible version of my workday (I do my timesheets the same way as well btw). Very little serious information gets passed on but somehow it makes my boss happy and he has told me that he likes the way I do standups.

    I work at a small company where most projects only have one or two developers so standup meetings are usually a lot of completely irrelevant information. It’s very boring. “Yesterday I worked on the thing on the project you barely know what does.”



  • The closest I can come is blackletter or fraktur scripts that were once used for generic languages. As far as letters go they are silly and overcomplicated, with Latin scripts being far easier to read and more adaptable to different visual styles.

    With that being said, they do have their own old-timey charm and there is something satisfying in being able to pick up a old book in blackletter and read it when you know that most people can not.

    Fun fact: Blackletter was only used for Germanic languages. If a text contained non-Germanic passages it was normal to set those in Latin letters while the rest was set in blackletter.




  • Someone I knew was living in an old building with old-timey fuse boxes placed outside the apartments. When she got tired of her idiot neighbours partying on a weekday night for the millionth time despite being asked to dial it down she finally had enough and went to the fuse box and took away all the fuses to the neighbour’s apartment.

    She never had trouble with noise again.



  • I’ve received checks three or four times in my life. I’ve never written one. As a kid I had a physical paper booklet for the savings account I put my birthday money into. The only way I can get to own a house is by winning the lottery. I remember when small shops had manual credit card machines that would transfer your account details to a slip of paper. I also remember when local stores would give credit to people from the community. I get low-key annoyed when I have to use cash instead of digital payments. My retirement plan is not to retire.



  • Tides of History is a very well-produced history podcast that deals with ancient history. It tells history in an engaging way and is founded in recent scholarship.

    Podcasting is Praxis, a funny politics podcast made by British communists.

    Blowback, all the praise heaped upon it is absolutely justified. Listen to it.

    We Are Not So Different, an entertaining podcast about medieval history. It has a leftist outlook on things and treats medieval people like people and avoids romanticising as well as looking down on them.

    A People’s History of Ideas. An amazingly detailed history of the Chinese revolution with offshoots into international Maoism. If you want to listen to an episode about how CPC safehouses worked in Shanghai in the early 1930’s, this is a podcast for you.