J.C. Holder @jcholder@toot.thoughtworks.com

Thinking about how much "tech debt" can be better understood as "leveraged tech."

It's created with the assumption that future returns will exceed the inevitable costs.

This may sound essentially the same as consumer debt but businesspeople could (ostensibly) hold a greater appreciation for how leverage could destroy the business much more readily than debt.

Sorely tempted to pick up a PineTab.

Presenting an introductory talk on #Rust today. Wish me luck!

Nerd-sniped myself by going deeper into WebAssembly and now I want to do even more with it.

Been reading a scientific paper today! Good times.

Spontaneously paired with a co-worker on their own #Rust project. That was fun!

"Easily create custom 3D environments:" https://github.com/mozilla/Spoke.

Imagine using this for a Fediverse client.

I think I agree with this entire article, especially in the context of platforms meant to provide income or other crucial services: https://paulosman.me/2019/12/30/production-oriented-development.html.

Going "cloud native" can help, if implemented correctly, but avoid repeating the past (and present) mistakes of overly aggressive offshoring or outsourcing.

If you cut all the domain expertise out of your organization then what value of substance is left, really?

Code freezes would make more sense if they came with a *complete* freeze on code, including a freeze on developers working on their individual computers.

Otherwise you get a nasty blockage of untested changes.

Just give devs time off to study up on tech.

Every code freeze should also come with a reset, rebuilding, and re-prioritizing of all backlogs and feature requests. That's where the clog originated, after all.

Continuous integration and deployment is essential.

Even if you choose to release only every so often, you still need a proven, hardened ability to deploy right away when you *don't* want to, i.e. for emergency fixes.

Refactoring complete! I removed the one external dependency! New runtime is down to 78.6% of the previous one. Woot.

Making progress on this slow but steady refactoring!

"A common urban legend states that [...] NASA spent a large amount of money to develop a pen that would write in the conditions experienced during spaceflight (the result purportedly being the Fisher Space Pen), while the Soviet Union took the simpler and cheaper route of just using pencils. In truth, the Fisher Space Pen was developed independently by a private organization in the 1960s."

And Russians cosmonauts have used it, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_in_space

What are _your_ org's urban legends?

"Companies are groups of people being compensated for having to spend some of their finite lifetimes not being with their partners, children, pets, or super weird hobbies. They deserve to be members of organizations which honor that time by ensuring that their work has value and meaning. There is no mathematical model to guide us to that goal."

https://codahale.com/work-is-work/

"Construction" and "architecture" were suitable metaphors to describe systems-level software development (e.g. compiler design).

They fail as metaphors to describe user-level software. You'd have more luck with "navigation" and "cartography."

Alternatively, ask what it would be like to "live" in your software. Having a toilet in the kitchen would save on pipes and water but would you want to live in such a house? UX matters.

I just made my ray tracer 6x faster. Heck yeah.

(I replaced an expensive initialization process with some bare arithmetic.)

Even better.

Behold my progress on the raytracer challenge! #Rust

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