Adam Keys

I think with my mouth. Often that means I start talking with some idea, realize that the idea isn’t as hefty as I originally thought, and end up talking until I reach a moment of mild truth. Which often ends up being a platitude. Shutting up: it’s a thing I’m working on.

In the world where data-privacy and GDPR compliance matter, owned/onsite analytics stacks like this seem promising bostata.com/post/clie…

Technologies which I am 🤔 about adding to a product but 🤷‍♂️ if someone has already gone through the process of setting them up and getting the developer experience right: React, Docker, ELK, (probably others)

A thing people don’t like is hearing that a foundational component of their project is mathematically impossible. Corollary: never tell people about the halting problem.

Programming languages > frameworks > libraries > domain languages > domain modeling (Things on the left are higher leverage than things on the right. Things on the right are easier to build than things on the left.) In the brief moment when I start a new application, I work from left to right. The rest of the time, I’m working right to left. It’s easy to learn languages, frameworks, and libraries in the abstract. It’s harder, for me, to find domains to model and build languages for outside of teamwork/professional contexts. I continue to suspect that developers are undervaluing the ratio of leverage to development effort of frameworks.

Markets Are Eating The World. A non-obnoxious meditation on how blockchains could reduce coordination costs and makes large, corporate-like entities less necessary in the same way division of labor and technology have in the past.

I’m attempting to learn Rust. And really make it stick this time around. A lot of the “making it stick” part is making lists and having the discipline to stick with crossing items off them! A smaller part is figuring out how I can notch very small victories no matter how much progress I make. This is crucial because I’ve got about a half an hour each morning to work on this! My current favorite sort of small victory is to write up what I’ve learned if it doesn’t seem like I’m going to get far enough to commit new code behavior. This happens a fair bit when you’re working with a type checker after years of using a very implicit language. So far I’ve written up what I’ve learned about the web frameworks Nickel and Actix so far. The motivation for these little chunks of progress are the learning journals Brent Simmons has published over the years.

Was way more into this playlist when I thought it was “Eels!”

I’m trying a few things while I learn how ray-tracers work: learning Rust and graphics programming collecting my thoughts and discoveries in the repo, aka blogging doing it all in public, rather than a private repo tackling very math-y programming and domain problems, despite my lack of acumen in the area Brought to you by: more folks should do blogging-like things, even if it’s not entirely on their own platform or using blog-software and more veteran programmers should be naive and not know everything in public.

It’s true that Twitter took some air out of blogging. I suspect it’s also true that they formed a positive feedback loop when they overlapped. Longer-form writing informed tweets, tweets responded to or inspired longer-form writing. We can have our tweets and eat blogs too!

Listening to a DJ live set and it opens with the whitest, most English version of a 90’s hip-hop sketch I’ve ever heard. This person learned the exactly wrong lesson of possibly every album after 3 Feet High and Rising.

Gil! Scott! Heron! man crush on LCD Soundsystem intensifies itunes.apple.com/us/album/…

Why blogs are still lovely, part fourteen: shawnblanc.net/2019/01/s…

Corollaries to “new languages won’t achieve career-sustaining critical mass”: 1) frameworks become the important point of leverage 2) framework/language harmony or outright integration ala Elm or Erlang become even more important.

Long bet: Java, PHP, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and C# will be the last languages that achieve a critical mass such that they can sustain developers through their whole career. From here on out, it’s a melting pot of framework and technology choices.

Increasingly convinced houses only exist in two states: brand new and invisibly needing repair, lived in and visibly needing multiple repairs. This adage may apply to societies too.

Who has two thumbs and is pretty excited for Enumerable#to_h and the proc composition/chaining stuff in Ruby 2.6! 👍👍 anamaria.martinezgomez.name/2018/12/2…

Which came first: the theory of productivity or the Singularly Great Work? Point: GTD and XP are both based on what worked Really Well for One Singularly Productrive person. Counterpoint: we all need our own theory of what might work for us personally before we get started.

In honor of Ms. Jackson’s imminent induction into the Rock Hall of Fame: is Rhythm Nation 1814 a concept album? 🤔 ✋🖐️✋

Fortnite Creative looks like a combination of private servers and exposing most of the map building tools through a clever game item. Seeing as how nothing in Fortnite should work, on paper, I’m excited to see what folks do with it!

In lieu of coffee, I took a five minute walk yesterday when I hit the mid-afternoon groginess. This was at least as effective, if not more than a coffee. 100% success rate, would recommend! 😉

I like how the module systems in ES6 and Clojure solve the “where the heck did this function come from?” problem. I’m optimistic that adding some kind of module system to Ruby can make working with Rails and large apps even more pleasant! github.com/ciconia/m…

The New Yorker’s “Touchstones” essays on classic albums are quite good. The inline samples of Missy Elliott’s musical references and supercuts of other artists borrowing Janet Jackson’s chair dance are a great evolution of online music writing. (There’s also one on Nirvana 🤷‍♂️)