Welcome to Scott Takes

1. Be kind.
2. Make with others for others.
3. Strong body, strong mind.
4. Eat right, sleep well.

What is this? Where am I?

A collection of flim-flam and riff-raff entitled with a pun I couldn’t resist.

Who are you?

Scott Robinson.

Classics 📜

Technical writing I don’t believe will ever get old.

REQUIRED

• The Practice of Programming
• Recurse Center Social Rules
• Systemantics

RECOMMENDED

• A Career Cold Start Algorithm
• Collective Code Construction Contract (C4) and hintjens’ annotations
• Fallacies of distributed computing
• The Heilmeier Catechism
• Lumpers and splitters, I am a lumper.
• Network protocols, sans I/O
• The Pragmatic Programmer
• Release It!
• Software Aging and Software Rejuvenation
  • I once tried to pithily sell this in a presentation entitled “Just Die Already”

SHOULD NOT

• How Fucked Is My Database
• really bad attitude

RFCs 🤞

Evergreen content of prurient interest to the general public

Accepted

• Modular Errors with Rust’s thiserror
  Upon further research, Alex Fedoseev in thiserror, anyhow, or How I Handle Errors in Rust Apps said everyting I just did, but better.
• The Little Stranger
  A tutorial on the use of feature flags to stage a rollout

Informational

…

In Review

• Manual programming

Draft

• Interceptors Are Functions Too
  As is often the case, I believe a complicated object-oriented pattern obscures the simple functional gem within it.

Abandoned

• The wildly misunderstood reconsider (some) pre-commit checks in an era of cheap automation

Manual programming

(⚠️ Poe’s Law Warning: the following is satire of antirez’s Automatic programming.)

In my keynote speeches, for some time now I started to refer to the process of writing software using junior engineer assistance (soon to become just “the process of writing software”, I believe) with the term “Managed Programming”.

In case you didn’t notice, managed programming produces vastly different results with the same programmers depending on the person that is guiding the process with their intuition, design, continuous steering and idea of software.

Please, stop saying “my report coded this software for me”. Hands-off management is the process of generating software using a programmer without being part of the process at all. You describe what you want in very general terms, and the programmer will produce whatever happens to be the first idea/design/code they would spontaneously, given their background, habits, the specific fads that happened to dominate in that year’s conferences, and so forth. The hands-off manager will, at most, report things not working or not in line with what they expected.

When the process is actual software production where you know what is going on, remember: it is the software you are producing. Moreover remember that the education and past experience, while not the only part where the programmer learns (on-the-job learning has its big weight) was produced by people, so we are not appropriating something else. We can pretend employee-written code is “ours”, we have the right to do so. Education is, actually, our collective gift that allows many individuals to do things they could otherwise never do, like if we are now linked in a collective mind, in a certain way.

That said, if hands-off management is the process of producing software without much understanding of what is going on (which has a place, and democratizes software production, so it is totally ok with me), managed programming is the process of producing software that attempts to be high quality and strictly following the producer’s vision of the software (this vision is multi-level: can go from how to do, exactly, certain things, at a higher level, to stepping in and tell the programmer how to write a certain function), with the help of junior engineer assistance. Also a fundamental part of the process is, of course, what to do.

I’m a manager, and I use managed programming. The code I generate in this way is mine. My code, my output, my production. I, and you, can be proud.

If you are not completely convinced, think to Redis. In Redis there is not much technical novelty, especially at its start it was just a sum of basic data structures and networking code that every competent system programmer could write. So, why it became a very useful piece of software? Because of the ideas and visions it contained.

Programming is now managed, vision is not (yet).

Hacks 🙈

It could be that the purpose of my life is only to serve as a warning to others.

• update
  Any sufficiently complicated shell script contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of nix.