After working with thousands of smart engineers for more than a decade, I can very confidently say:

People hate reading log output, and so they don't. Well-formatted logs, structured logs, nice highlighting; it all barely does anything to convince people to read.

screenshot of a Slack message saying "You left a baguette at your desk again"

I swear I'm not intentionally trying to poke fun at my French colleagues for being too stereotypically French, but-

I now distrust nearly all open-source libraries.

“But it’s widely used!” Nope, it’ll fall over at scale.

“But <big ML or data project> uses it!” Run even faster; hype and attention do not correlate with good software engineering practices.

It was, but it should be O(1) to check if a directory exists, regardless of if it has one file or a million files in it.

In this case, the code would only crash after running for a long time and writing a lot of files; this O(n) check effectively made it O(n^2) in time and memory.

A week of my career was just spent fixing an crash that only happened after my code ran for >24h.

Turned out to be a directory existence check that's O(n) time and O(n) memory for a directory with n files in it.

And people wonder why I don't trust widely-used libraries.

As of today, my age is no longer a nice round power of 2. 🥲

Every holiday, I’m reminded that all of the engineers working on FaceTime audio quality at Apple are no match for that one family member’s blown iPhone speaker.

www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTHXKM9...

taking this as the world’s highest compliment

The only remaining to-do: toss all of the old USB-C PD power supplies that don’t support all of the required voltages

Bespoke power supplies are now obsolete. GaN power supplies are a quarter of the size and weight of custom transformers; and are mostly interchangeable with each other.

I will finally be able to ditch a full Rubbermaid bin of transformers. 🤩

I have been thoroughly nerd-sniped by USB-C PD. If any devices in my house take 9V or 12V, they will soon be taking USB-C.

I didn’t say it would look pretty, though.

People ask me "what guide can I read to get started with machine learning?"

There's actually a great guide for this now; it's free, comprehensive, interactive, and even built with some of the ML techniques you might want to learn about.

Find it at: chatgpt.com

Seeing so much A.I.-generated text online has changed how I read all text online.

I now seem to notice the “shape” of A.I. text and skip large chunks if it looks like slop, even if it’s not.

I definitely did not have this on my bingo card.

That was the dream before I got engaged to an American and bought a house in Brooklyn 😅

a graph showing CAD/USD and how CAD is at a 20-year low against the USD

I miss Canada, am proud to be Canadian, visit regularly, etc etc.

But oof, am I ever glad I moved to the US.

Me: “man I’m excited to be able to see my entire work team again in person, it’s been so long”

Also me: “wow why is the entire team out sick after a full week of jet lag, meetings, and dinners????”

U.S. CBP missed a co-branding opportunity with Apple for Global Entry:

“Face ID® for the U.S. Border”

Code Review Guidelines for Data Science Teams A proposed code review guideline for data science teams, emphasizing the benefits of code reviews, what they are not intended for, and offering advice for both submitting and reviewing pull requests.

My team was discussing our code review practice and I offered to talk about the post I wrote for a previous team (tdhopper.com/blog/code-re...).

I dropped the markdown for the post from GitHub into chatgpt and asked it to generate Marp (marp.app) slides for me.

a cartoon of a man drinking from a glass Alt: a cartoon of a man trying to drink water from a glass but doing everything except actually drinking the water normally, from the show Gravity Falls

when you reach for the mouse to copy some text in your code editor by right-clicking

Another day, another reminder that "mastery of one's tools" is the most reliable signal of competency that I've ever seen.

If you've worked with a piece of software every day for years but have never bothered to learn things like its keyboard shortcuts, stop what you're doing and learn those now.

There are few things more stressful than trying to write an email about two things to someone who doesn’t read past the first sentence.

tired: USB-C is great because I can charge my phone and laptop with the same cable

wired: USB-C is great because I can now use $15 USB-C PD bricks and $5 barrel jack adapters to power nearly all home electronics that need between 5V and 20V

t.co/AeGd6IhtJ5

So happy to have more great people to work with. Welcome, @tdhopper.com!

The Worst Programmer I Know dannorth.net/2023/09/02/t...

For the past couple of years, I've felt like I've been drowning in notifications and emails.

I just tallied the numbers: I got 1,855 notifications last week, 380 work emails, and 99 personal emails.

That's about one interruption about every 3 waking minutes. Is this normal?

Last night, I picked up a 32-pound laser printer from a coworker who lived a mile away. I decided to carry it home instead of taking a taxi.

I'm now googling "how to get started lifting weights" "is lifting weights good" "what does it mean if your arms hurt but you like it"

Oppenheimer was great. I especially loved Nolan’s choice to just use William Onyeabor’s “Atomic Bomb” as the only music.

Assuming each notification is roughly equally spaced out, that means I’m getting interrupted once every 150 seconds, all day, every weekday.

It’s a wonder that modern humans have time to get anything done at all.