After working with thousands of smart engineers for more than a decade, I can very confidently say: People hate reading log output, and so they don't. Well-formatted logs, structured logs, nice highlighting; it all barely does anything to convince people to read.

I swear I'm not intentionally trying to poke fun at my French colleagues for being too stereotypically French, but-

A week of my career was just spent fixing an crash that only happened after my code ran for >24h. Turned out to be a directory existence check that's O(n) time and O(n) memory for a directory with n files in it. And people wonder why I don't trust widely-used libraries.

As of today, my age is no longer a nice round power of 2. 🥲

Every holiday, I’m reminded that all of the engineers working on FaceTime audio quality at Apple are no match for that one family member’s blown iPhone speaker.

I have been thoroughly nerd-sniped by USB-C PD. If any devices in my house take 9V or 12V, they will soon be taking USB-C. I didn’t say it would look pretty, though.

People ask me "what guide can I read to get started with machine learning?" There's actually a great guide for this now; it's free, comprehensive, interactive, and even built with some of the ML techniques you might want to learn about. Find it at: chatgpt.com

Seeing so much A.I.-generated text online has changed how I read all text online. I now seem to notice the “shape” of A.I. text and skip large chunks if it looks like slop, even if it’s not. I definitely did not have this on my bingo card.

I miss Canada, am proud to be Canadian, visit regularly, etc etc. But oof, am I ever glad I moved to the US.

Me: “man I’m excited to be able to see my entire work team again in person, it’s been so long” Also me: “wow why is the entire team out sick after a full week of jet lag, meetings, and dinners????”

U.S. CBP missed a co-branding opportunity with Apple for Global Entry: “Face ID® for the U.S. Border”

My team was discussing our code review practice and I offered to talk about the post I wrote for a previous team (tdhopper.com/blog/code-re...). I dropped the markdown for the post from GitHub into chatgpt and asked it to generate Marp (marp.app) slides for me.

Another day, another reminder that "mastery of one's tools" is the most reliable signal of competency that I've ever seen. If you've worked with a piece of software every day for years but have never bothered to learn things like its keyboard shortcuts, stop what you're doing and learn those now.

There are few things more stressful than trying to write an email about two things to someone who doesn’t read past the first sentence.

tired: USB-C is great because I can charge my phone and laptop with the same cable wired: USB-C is great because I can now use $15 USB-C PD bricks and $5 barrel jack adapters to power nearly all home electronics that need between 5V and 20V t.co/AeGd6IhtJ5

So happy to have more great people to work with. Welcome, @tdhopper.com!

The Worst Programmer I Know dannorth.net/2023/09/02/t...

For the past couple of years, I've felt like I've been drowning in notifications and emails. I just tallied the numbers: I got 1,855 notifications last week, 380 work emails, and 99 personal emails. That's about one interruption about every 3 waking minutes. Is this normal?

Last night, I picked up a 32-pound laser printer from a coworker who lived a mile away. I decided to carry it home instead of taking a taxi. I'm now googling "how to get started lifting weights" "is lifting weights good" "what does it mean if your arms hurt but you like it"

Oppenheimer was great. I especially loved Nolan’s choice to just use William Onyeabor’s “Atomic Bomb” as the only music.

Friends, how many notifications is too many notifications? I apparently get about 380 per day. That seems like too many.

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever get caught in the middle of a fight between two Manhattan real estate agents. Ask me how I know.

“Oh you’re from Canada too? Where? Oh, Toronto too? Oh, also went to Waterloo? Yeah, we do all end up in the US, don’t we. Yeah, San Francisco is kind of over, agreed, that’s why everybody’s moving to NYC. Oh, you just moved from SF? Yeah. So much better here in NYC right?” 🫠

tfw you realize that the reason your library is getting so many support tickets from beginner programmers is that they’re learning to code literally because of what your library allows them to do 😳

Python friends: what's the appropriate way (if any) to get attention on a PyPI support ticket? I understand the support GitHub is largely staffed by underappreciated and overworked volunteers, whom I would prefer not to bother. (Is there someone I can deliver cookies to?)

way too many sub tweets on the bird site today

From a bird app to a sky app. 🐣