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Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

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Re: Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

#101
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try pairing tmux with mosh, it's how I've been working for years whenever I'm forced to admin through a brittle straw. Mosh combats lag pretty well and doesn't care if your connection drops intermittently. https://mosh.org/

I tried Mosh but it didn't fit my taste. It tries to "predict" the state of the screen before being acknowledged by the server, but sometimes the prediction is wrong and Mosh reverts the cursor movement and redraws the affected area of the terminal. For example, when I'm using split windows in Vim or tmux, Mosh allows typed characters to overflow beyond the separator, briefly, until being told "no" by the server. Per…

I can see how that's off-putting, but I've learned to ignore the occasional cosmetic hiccup and just trust that it will sync up correctly. I use it with --predict=experimental (largely undocumented), which seems to be even more aggressive, but it works great for me.

Re: Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

#102
I been writing programs for over 50 years and I shuddered at the thought of doing it on a phone. My first thought, he must be a masochist. Then I thought he might not had anything better to work on. I'm a touch typist who doesn't need to look at the keyboard why typing. Given my cataracts and tiny screen and tiny keyboard, it is torture to type on my phone.

Re: Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

#103

I been writing programs for over 50 years and I shuddered at the thought of doing it on a phone. My first thought, he must be a masochist. Then I thought he might not had anything better to work on. I'm a touch typist who doesn't need to look at the keyboard why typing. Given my cataracts and tiny screen and tiny keyboard, it is torture to type on my phone.

People are already organizing a gofundme page for the author.

Most computer hobbyists hate seeing talent hobbled by circumstance. Our local telecom has a nonprofit up-cycling program for these kids. =3

Re: Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

#104

Back in the 90's, I created something like a mortgage calculator on my HP48gx. It was about 1500 "lines" (a line being maybe at most 30 chars) , all keyed in using only the calculator. The mind is capable of many things.

Nice, I too wrote my first real game in RPL.

The HP48 series lives on as a free android app, for all the RPN fans. =3

Re: Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

#105
post #6

The Painted Man is a novel that was mostly written on the author's Blackberry while riding the train to work. https://www.geeknative.com/6955/the-painted-man-written-on-a...

I had a Nokia qwerty phone, and, man, it was such a superior way to type portably. I wish they still sell those kinds of phone... Like computer keyboards, it also had a ctrl key. That means that I can ctrl+c and ctrl+v to copy paste.

This is irrelevant to coding, but boy I miss what it felt like (as a child) to type on a T9 predictive keypad. Once you get used to it it's easy to 'know' by muscle memory when the desired word is the second or third choice, so you end up typing with basically the same number of keystrokes as qwerty but with only 10 keys.

Then again maybe this is only possible with the superpower of childhood cognition. I recently witnessed a friends 9yo playing with a 1940s typewriter I'd restored. Having basically never used a full sized keyboard before, within about 2 minutes she'd familiarized herself with the qwerty layout, figured out how to turn the shift lock on and off, deduced the correct key action to bounce the hammers off the platten without them clashing, and figured out how to change colours. All this took me at least 20 minutes.

Re: Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

#106
post #55

I also write code using my phone when I'm on a bus or the subway. It requires some patience but after getting used to it, the experience is surprisingly pleasant especially if you're familiar with terminal-based tools. My environment consists of: - Galaxy S24 Ultra - Termius: I think it is the best terminal emulator and SSH client on Android. The sad thing is that the paid version is a bit too expensive. ($10 per mon…

Try pairing tmux with mosh, it's how I've been working for years whenever I'm forced to admin through a brittle straw. Mosh combats lag pretty well and doesn't care if your connection drops intermittently. https://mosh.org/

mosh has saved some hair pulling, especially when on a train journey with at best spotty 3G and you get pinged about an outage.

Re: Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

#107

I been writing programs for over 50 years and I shuddered at the thought of doing it on a phone. My first thought, he must be a masochist. Then I thought he might not had anything better to work on. I'm a touch typist who doesn't need to look at the keyboard why typing. Given my cataracts and tiny screen and tiny keyboard, it is torture to type on my phone.

Someone made a comment that millennials are the first and last generation who grew up with desktop PCs, discussion forums on the raw internet. Kids these days are mostly using smartphones, tablets and apps.

We are used to think that younger people know more about computers, but in the case of desktop computers this might not be the case.

Re: Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

#108

His parents still want to send him to medical school, because he's Asian, so he needs to be a doctor. (I'm directly quoting him!) That's ... something.

I see several big issues with SWE roles - it's hard to have a complete career only coding (assuming that you'll still enjoy it at 40-50-60). Ageism is a thing. - you're extremely dependent on economy. Sure, you can earn $500K+ at FAANG, but you can also get laid off and earn much less. You probably won't earn such high salary for your whole life (see above point) - SWE not a respected profession. What do you do for a…

> But I feel it's more future proof than SWE

In turns of future proofing it's not even comparable. SWEs have negative protection. Mostly not unionized. You don't even need a license to write code.

If the government says we're going to launch 100 programming schools and flood the market with 100,000 coders in next 4 years, no one bats an eye. If it's for doctors you can see what happened in Korea[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_South_Korean_medical_cris...

Re: Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

#109
post #85
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you get a job like that? Sounds pretty good

Word of mouth. The point is to realize that almost every non-IT company of certain size (lets say 50-100 employees+) that started before SAP&similiar became popular in your country has large body of custom software and that the guy who built it is probably thinking about retiring. Minus is of course that most custom software is pretty horrible from code quality standpoint, so you need to have a high tolerance for deb…

Even if the company has been sold on some SAP or Oracle solution, they always need someone how can customize and take ownership of that stuff.

Re: Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

#110
This is actually a surprisingly depressing post.

It makes me question all the assumptions I have about dev UX. If my dev tooling was taken away, the saas products I depend on shut down, slack replaced by email, keyboard with phone, etc. would I eventually adapt to such a situation? Would my productivity cut be only marginal?

I sure hope the case is that this developer is just a genius, as I'd like to think we as devs (and maybe as a society at large) are not just deluding ourselves thinking that software is innovating.

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