Posts by colby@mastodon.radio
(DIR) Post #9zgtgCCuPDJefGVnaS by colby@mastodon.radio
2020-09-30T12:38:44Z
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@sakurina @m455 no doubt that certain ecosystems aren't exactly friendly to the best ways to get work done:https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/programming/write-code-top-down.html"For the individual programmer, modern tools also encourage bottom-up programming. In IDEs [...] writing code is easier if the types and methods you’re calling are already defined. [...] Writing top-down code in an IDE causes it to bleed red until you can get around to implementing those methods. There’s persistent pressure to write the called function first."
(DIR) Post #9zgtgCsNv0UcjtuvEe by colby@mastodon.radio
2020-09-30T14:48:51Z
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@m455 @sakurina "top-down" has some other pejorative use, too. It's not uncommon for people to say that another non-teacher kind of person in a position of authority is "dictating things from top-down", usually implying that they're not really grounded/down-to-earth and don't have a good handle on what makes everything work.In programming, though, top-down is the bees knees, even if (unfortunately) it's so rarely applied.
(DIR) Post #9zhQyudfFJCyANYioK by colby@mastodon.radio
2020-09-30T23:25:33Z
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@aseem re ResearchGatehttps://linkedresearch.org/
(DIR) Post #9zo4EUwnazv8HQgvcu by colby@mastodon.radio
2020-10-04T04:12:48Z
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@ChrisWere I see you're an anti-skub man. Me? I'm pro-skub. I think we might have a problem here.
(DIR) Post #9zofUWuNljzfId4K3c by colby@mastodon.radio
2020-10-04T04:50:34Z
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@toast I think you meant to say "abhor". There's definitely an "abhor" in there somewhere.
(DIR) Post #A09v6brHiEdNsR2hLU by colby@mastodon.radio
2020-10-14T17:12:49Z
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@dthompson what about DRY and the Agile manifesto?
(DIR) Post #A0Zcx7faP1BNu0zWfw by colby@mastodon.radio
2020-10-25T14:09:30Z
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The world really lost something when the word "wiki" got hijacked and started being applied to very un-wiki things.https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wiki#Wikihttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_wiki_way
(DIR) Post #A0Zcx8KLxRnBwS45Dc by colby@mastodon.radio
2020-10-25T14:13:22Z
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As used today (thanks, GitHub) "wiki" most commonly means "a pile of Markdown/wikitext/whatever files that exist, somewhere; you might be able to figure where that is and which one corresponds to the page you want to change and then submit it for approval to decide whether those changes will be accepted".Applying the word "wiki" to that paradigm flies in the face of the very etymology of the word.
(DIR) Post #A0Zf0xHXANQwkehEae by colby@mastodon.radio
2020-10-22T17:40:24Z
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@sir the problems of modern day Mozilla are evident in the first sentence of this piece: "Mozilla, a company that was best known for creating the Firefox web browser".Firefox was created by mozilla.org—a cooperative effort by multiple companies to make "THE reference implementation web browser" (https://www.jwz.org/blog/2020/09/this-is-a-pretty-dire-assessment-of-mozilla/).What you belatedly mourn is a bogart and a trademark. The *name* Mozilla as most often used today (and in 2016) refers to a corporation that cannibalized mozilla.org.
(DIR) Post #A0dNlmXHuqa0UX5GIy by colby@mastodon.radio
2020-10-28T22:17:22Z
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@lain_os fake quotes and other strawmen are cheap and easy.Besides, why choose such a bad starting position to skewer someone when so many good alternatives are readily available?
(DIR) Post #A1065r3gsi4JxKBmOe by colby@mastodon.radio
2020-11-08T07:13:13Z
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Every time you direct somebody to GitHub and ask them to file an issue or use it for some other kind of work (esp. without even stopping to consider whether they even have an account), imagine you have a Facebook group instead, and you're telling them to post in it. Stop and think about why you feel that doing the same thing with GitHub is any different.Being a GitHub user should not be a prerequisite for public participation.https://mastodon.radio/@colby/105147120551988198
(DIR) Post #A16CMAqAnLr9wQ7qcK by colby@mastodon.radio
2020-11-10T10:59:39Z
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@vu3rdd @mikegerwitz @civodul Absolutely this. Last year I wrote "Free software is not enough" <https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/05/15/may-integration.html#free-software-is-not-enough>.Related: "one of the cornerstones of the FSF/GNU philosophy is that it focuses on maximizing benefit to the user. What could be more beneficial to a user of free software than ensuring that its codebase is clean and comprehensible for study and modification?" <https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/05/15/may-integration.html#software-finishing>
(DIR) Post #A16CMBc1vQ8aKqW4DA by colby@mastodon.radio
2020-11-10T11:08:36Z
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@vu3rdd @mikegerwitz @civodul when I search for other instances, I also find @jfred's post from a few months ago on the same topic, using the same phrasing. <https://jfred.dreamwidth.org/479.html>A key to pushing for solutions is to make it easy for allusions to the problem they solve to live as memes. Slogans and slogan-like turns of phrase are a form of such memes.It would be beneficial and convenient if "Free software is not enough" (or "FOSS...") became the shorthand for referencing this problem.
(DIR) Post #A1AEWOwOPWvwiwFqZE by colby@mastodon.radio
2020-11-12T03:00:06Z
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@cwebber @civodul @mikegerwitz @ArneBab npm-the-tool + npm-the-software-collection really do need to be reworked. (And Yarn is not that thing; Facebook is one of the most egregious offenders of package bloat.)Some Haxe folks at least have begun making an attempt to do package management differently, which can address some of the problems for the Haxe ecosystem. (The rest comes down to culture, though.)https://github.com/lix-pm/lix.client
(DIR) Post #A1AEWPI178ENo0N7Gy by colby@mastodon.radio
2020-11-12T03:03:43Z
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@cwebber @civodul @mikegerwitz @ArneBab if source code hosting platforms made repo size as prominent as number of forks, it would lead to a form of social pressure all its own. I know that @codeberg and other platforms that use Gitea (and Gogs?) display this for every repo.
(DIR) Post #A1vUVgT7S7iLjoGEhU by colby@mastodon.radio
2020-12-05T16:57:50Z
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@aral thoughts on this piece and its applicabliity to your current efforts?:https://withblue.ink/2020/11/12/maybe-we-shouldnt-want-a-fully-decentralized-web.html