Viewing profile — nickm12

Ok, not execs, but director and senior-director-level positions.

I remember Snow Leopard as a particularly stable release, but it's been so long this could easily be misremembering. One other thing that was notable about Snow Leopard, though, wa…

Glad that the ebay execs who did this got prison sentences. I really wonder what kind of environment could make six high-ranking people think this was acceptable.

I believe both that code should be self-documenting but also that comments and documentation are a critical part of the code. Comments and documentation explain the functional cont…

Yes, I've seen this a bunch too and agree completely. Sometimes I've also see Claude comments reference details about the calling or even code in completely different modules. Ther…

During the rise of agentic assistance, I've gotten the advice that "If the generated code isn't what you want, fix the steering, not the code". I've also been advised to not change…

I'm with you in not wanting to see these types of comments in my code. I aim for each revision of the code to stand on its own, and not reference its past or future. There are exce…

It's strange that he shows the graphs with the age of vulnerabilities going up without any real commentary on it (except to say that it's an argument that the number of bugs is not…

It's been a while since I taught anyone to juggle, but I generally disrecommended scarf juggling. It's fine if you want some quick validation, but the hand movements are so differe…

1) I would generally use BBSes daily. Probably for an hour in the evening or however long I could tie up the family phone line. I would log into two or three, read and respond to m…

Team CLI. I generally think we should build tools that are usable by humans and agents alike. An anti-pattern is having to use an agent to do something because you didn't build a h…

This is a really nice take and matches my experiences as well. It also calls out one of the biggest incongruity of this current age: the sudden desire from management to have good …

This is such a strange take. The definition of "magic" in this post is apparently "other people's code" and it even admits that that no practical program can avoid depending on oth…

Python crossed the chasm in the early 2000s with scripting, web applications, and teaching. Yes, it's riding an ML rocket, but it didn't become popular because it was used for ML, …

Because you generally cannot test every possible input, output pair.

Yes, because no one conflates an engineer with a compiler. But there are people making the argument that we should treat natural language specs/prompts as the new source and comput…

No, for the reasons given in the sibling comments: you won't want to be locked into a single model for the rest of time and, even if you did, floating point execution order will st…

I'm not sure what the high-level point of the article is, but I agree with the observation that we (programmers) should generally prefer using AI agents to write correct, efficient…

Thank you. I had to scroll way down to find anyone defending using SI prefixes to mean what they mean everywhere else. A decade ago, I decided to alias "du" to "du --si" and not lo…

I use the phrase "drive-by review" frequently too. As a senior engineer, I worry about doing drive-bys myself. Sometimes my gut tells me something is not quite right about the proj…

This article resonates with me a lot, but as a senior engineer I would not share it in a big team setting. Even though it's correct, it's too cynical for big team morale. I think i…

Two random anecdotes: when the concept drawing were first shown to the graduate students, someone asked what the swooping walkways above the main corridor were for. The answer they…

Yes, I think this is what seems to be missed by everything I've read about Gehry in the mainstream. As I said in another post, I worked in the Stata Center at MIT for five years. I…

I worked in the Stata Center for the first five years and it was just a very poor office building to work in. Even setting aside the leaks and other construction defects, individua…

This is yet another very good critique, but it's long past time that we stop paying attention to Uncle Bob. Not only are his ideas about how to write software patently bad, but he …