Viewing profile — mmartinson

The problem is that it frequently detours from interesting discussions points to do things like dump on Greenpeace. Not interesting. Being elsewhere on the political spectrum doesn…

Y'all should enjoy drawing pictures and making mediocre music without worrying about how that relates to success or money. Your career is important, but it's only one part of a goo…

> Humanities specialists argue that these majors open up higher-earning opportunities later in life because they don’t lock students into a narrow programming language, certificati…

> But chances are that a NodeJS back-end and one written in, say, Elixir, won't feel much different after the honeymoon is passed. This is very, very far from my experience, having…

> Best strategy for becoming a high paying/good software engineer would be to think of yourselves as problem solver and language as just one of the tool for problem solving. I'm no…

It's valuable to consider the opportunity cost of this compared to a deepened knowledge of an already productive tool

Out of curiosity for someone who is Canadian, what’s the assumed pull? Historically it would be income and career opportunities, but the tide has turned on that quite significantly…

Nothing makes me long for boilerplate as much as seeing Ruby code with heavy use of metaprogramming.

fprof, recon trace, observer have proved to be the holy trifecta for me for debugging challenging production issues. I miss these deeply when working in other languages.

Having worked with both ActiveRecord and Ecto, Ecto is consistently easier to reason about and change than AR. It feels closer to the DB without compromising composability, and bet…

Recon trace is a worthwhile addition. I've used it for some hairy production bugs that don't reproduce locally. Allows you to unobtrusively instrument a running system and echo bac…

More or less. Greater Vancouver suburbs largely unaffected. Farther out peripherals (Abbotsford, Hope) badly flooded. All regional towns and cities beyond those cut off.

I interview a lot of candidates over zoom for remote positions. For me, few to none of the specific details matter. What's important is if the candidate demonstrates that they've h…

I’ve always found exercise to be a motivator for getting diet under control. Periods of low exercise correlates with bad eating. Building back the routine makes shifting diet much …

Ecto is a real unsung here of the Elixir ecosystem. It's a joy to build queries and changesets through composable data structures, and to know exactly when they're going to be exec…

The sort of crash looping that took down their nodes is one of the parts of OTP that I’ve found to be both quite unintuitive and dangerous, for exactly the reasons described. There…

For anyone not from Ontario, "4 L bag of 1%" must sound pretty funny.

Which island is it?

I find this looks goofy, but other than the lack of physical buttons inside, this is a dream vehicle for me. Most weekends I want to drive 4 people + 4 mountain bikes a 120 mile ro…

Around where I live the preferred term is "cidiot". I find it to be refreshingly creative.

What are they checking for?

There are two pretty interesting things going on here. Firstly, if this goes through, it's going to force a bunch of people in Vancouver to reconcile some of their values in a way …

I can take a stab at this. For context, my background is in Ruby, NodeJS, a bit of Golang and Java. I've been doing work with Elixir full time for the last 3 years. I could probabl…

I haven't looked at it since 2014, but this + codecademy took me from pedestrian interest in programming to writing prototypes