Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: BDGNRYU Wordo: UDDER

  • Re. Meat space vs. meet space

    My personal experience has been that my patience and tolerance to things I find annoying diminish when I'm not talking face to face with the other person. Getting interrupted from work by a colleague walking up to my desk: it's fine, I'll likely be glad to help. Getting interrupted from work by a chat message: instant anger and “Why didn't they search online for this before pestering me?” thoughts. And it's not just chats that cause this, although they do so more often to me. I've noticed the same thing even with video calls, which one could argue shouldn't be an issue since you're seeing and talking to the other person live. So for me it's not just about views and opinions, it extends to human interactions in general.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Telnet Debugging

    A connection is closed! And nobody knows why! There are many reasons this may be the case. Obtaining a packet trace (with tcpdump, or equivalent) ideally on both sides of the connection is a good thing to do.

  • Programming

    • Felienne Hermans — _The Programmer’s Brain_

      One of the things I’ve been tasked with at the day job is to work on features in a codebase. The implementation language is all JavaScript, but it uses a lot of once-trendy libraries and frameworks. These libraries and frameworks increase the complexity of the entire codebase in ways that are good for companies that devote multiple teams to a codebase like this. However, these architectural decisions make the whole thing needlessly complicated for our needs. No more than two people have ever worked on this pile of code at the same time.

      At any rate, once I became the lead programmer on it, a number of problems cropped up. It took me for-fucking-ever to get what seemed like even basic things changed. I was able to explain that 90% of the effort was in navigating the codebase and understanding it and figuring out where to apply fixes, but it wasn’t obvious to me how to get better, or at least faster, at this. I intuited that I was being overwhelmed by everything that I was trying to keep in memory and it felt like I needed to hold like 20 things in my head at once when I could only hold 5–7. My bigger problem was that it wasn’t super obvious how to fix, or at least ameliorate, this.