Viewing profile — alexdowad

There's obviously some nuance here, but the fact is that much modern software is riddled with bugs, and this is sub-optimal for everyone (both software users and software builders)…

> Quite impressive... Yes, quite! Monsieur Bellard is a legend of computer programming. It would be hard to think of another programmer whose body of public work is more impressive…

Lua isn't my primary programming language now, but it was for a while. My personal experience on the library ecosystem was: It's definitely smaller than many languages, and this is…

Agree. It always seemed like a strange and poorly conceived technology to me.

ivanjermakov, I don't know if you are an open source maintainer or not (I am, for several projects). If you are, and you follow the policy that "I will never reject PRs because of …

Be tactful and kind, but straightforward about what you can't/don't want to spend time reviewing. "Thanks for the effort, but my time and energy is limited and I can't practically …

My belief is that whatever technology can be invented by humans (under the constraints of the laws of physics, etc) will eventually be invented. I don't have a strong argument for …

Afraid that I can't apply for this (because it's on-site), but what you are doing looks awesome. Hope that you succeed!

Wholeheartedly agree.

There are absolutely times when one can get LLMs to "say something valuable". I am still learning how to put them to good use, but here are some areas where I have found clear wins…

If your firm has been around for long enough, then it will almost certainly have long-standing clients who repeatedly come back for changes, additions, and general maintenance to e…

Hi! It's strange for me to see one of my posts get some love on HN, years after I wrote it (and not one of my best pieces, by my own estimation). Thanks to everyone who took the ti…

I'm together with sethammons in that "rounding error". I actually go further and explicitly list things which I'm not good at on my resumé.

I've worked on numerous Rails projects since 2010, and it has lots of strengths, but I would really hesitate to base a new project on Rails. The benefits of using a big framework (…

Ah, that must have been it. Thanks for the link!

Great article. It reminds me of another anecdote, regarding a university professor who told his students that he would deliberately include one falsehood in each lecture, and the s…

One small tip: Senior candidates may be discouraged from applying if you don't mention up front what your compensation range is.

I'm not an AI expert, but feel free to ping me on other CS-related topics. See https://alexdowad.github.io/cv for a rundown of which topics I am 'expert' (or at least semi-expert) …

> Start the team from hiring senior talent... This is very important! Once you hire the first couple members of a development team, subsequent hires will almost certainly be at the…

Although it doesn't help with your current problem: for future projects, consider demanding payment in installments, linked to project milestones. When the final invoice is small, …

Sure. I've done similar things myself, though the "advanced languages" which I'm expert in do not include Scala. This is a good example of what I'm talking about in the last paragr…

There are lots of interesting ideas to be found in the Lisp/Scheme family. A Lisp can be an excellent choice of primary dev language, especially for a dev shop which puts enough in…

From your description of your current level, reading Patterson's "Computer Architecture: a Quantitative Approach" would be a next good step.

"Recently" (~5 years ago) I got very interested in mathematics, and decided to self-study up to an undergrad degree-equivalent level. I researched what topics are typically include…

Aside from what has already been suggested, you could consider reading selected chapters of Intel's programmer manual. I personally read through the whole thing once (well, skimmed…