Everything about fixing something broken is so appealing. Better for the environment, often better for your wallet, and better for the soul.
I think this applies to software too! Writing good software allows it to be maintained well and it being open source helps promote that. Publishing good documentation is another huge win for maintainability.
If you have a habit like me of only partly fixing things, because a unforseen problem came up and deciding to get back later on it, you will just pile up electronic garbage and run out of space. (It was really good for my soul getting rid of most of it recently)
We have Slack Connect channels with all of our customers (we're a small company), and I've since grown to hate it. At first, it seems like a quick way to have comms with customers, but then you realize it's a quick way to have comms with customers...
Because Slack is so frictionless, there was no barrier asking anything, including questions that were answered the day prior in the main channel or questions that are right in our searchable API docs. It also allows anyone to message, which also seems nice on the surface, but again, it ends up being awful.
Another example is that one of our customer's CS folks Slacks us their questions about their internal system, which we obviously have nothing to do with. This has been consistently like once a month for 2.5 years...
Email adds friction. Even though it's not much, I've found that customers of ours that used to be very bad signal to noise ratio who we've transitioned to email support have since reached out less with more valid support requests.
Customers that always preferred email over Slack were always like that. I assume that's actually because they're bigger companies that are waiting on five internal meetings before doing anything.
I really like Slack of internal communication, but email for external all the way.
PHP is a fine language. It started my career. That said, it has a lot of baggage that can let you shoot yourself in the foot. Modern PHP is pretty awesome though.
Yeah of course PHP isn't the only programming language you can write bugs in. I don't think you can make it impossible to shoot yourself in the foot, but PHP gives you more opportunities than some other languages, especially with older PHP standard library functions.
One thing I particularly hate is when functions require calling another function afterwards to get any errors that happened, like `json_decode`. C has that problem too.
Problems don't make it a _bad_ programming language. All languages have problems. PHP just has more than some other languages.
I agree, but nothing about LLM assisted coding is by neccessity "technical debt". Tons of developers will use it to spit out shitty code they don't even review themselves, but the concept at it's core doesn't always mean a lower quality end product.
I like Simon Willison's take on this: "Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work". If someone is spitting out LLM trash and shipping it, that means the job isn't being done properly. That can be done with and without an LLM.
Definitely. If you're doing regular queries with filters on jsonb columns, having the index directly on the JSON paths is really powerful. If I have a jsonb filter in the codebase at all, it probably needs an index, unless I know the result set is already very small.
Yeah, the other problem is I've really struggled to have postgres use multiple threads/cores on one query. Often maxes out one CPU thread while dozens go unused. I constantly have to fight loads of defaults to get this to change and even then I never feel like I can get it working quite right (probably operator error to some extent).
This compares to clickhouse where it constantly uses the whole hardware. Obviously it's easier to do that on a columnar database but it seems that postgres is actively designed to _not_ saturate multiple cores, which may be a good assumption in the past but definitely isn't a good one now IMO.
> I continue to be surprised that so many developers and other tech nerds - the type who post on HN - chose and continue to choose the iPhone over Android when Apple dictates what apps they can install and locks third-party accessories out of certain features.
I ran Android since the beginning because I wanted to write my own software when I was in high school. I was on Android for something like 14 years. The other software I ran was never as good as my iOS compatriots. My software would crash, it looked worse, and it was generally lower quality.
Of course, there were exceptions, but not enough.
I switch to an iPhone a bit over a year ago and, while still having issues (especially recently), it's just such a better experience.
My computer is where I do my fun software development. I just want my phone to work, which my Android phones weren't. Whether the hardware, the OS, or the applications were at fault doesn't matter to me, because I just wanted it to work.
reply