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Well, Rust has a lot of string flavors, and I like utf-8 being the norm, but there are a bunch of cases where enforcing utf-8 is a nuisance, so getting string features without the aggro enforcement is nice.

There’s probably some fruity way to make this a security issue, but I care about ascii printables and not caring about anything else. This is a nice trade off: the technical parts are en-US utf-8, the rest is very liberal.

Rust implementation of the Meta-II meta compiler. I used bstr, which was interesting.

Backstage has become quite misaligned to what we were originally trying to do. Originally, we were trying to inventory and map the service eco-system, to deal with a few concrete problems. For example, when developing new things, you had to go through the village elders and the grape vine to find out what everyone else was doing. Another serious problem was not knowing / forgetting that we had some tool that would’ve been very useful when the on-call pager went off at fuck you dark thirty.

A reason we could build that map in System-Z (the predecessor of Backstage) is that our (sort of) HTTP/2 had a feature to tell us who had called methods on a service. (you could get the same from munging access logs, if you have them)

Anyway, the key features were that you could see what services your service was calling, who was calling you, and how those other systems were doing, and that you could see all the tools (e.g. build, logs, monitoring) your service was connected to. (for the ops / on-call use case)

A lot of those tool integrations were just links to “blahchat/#team”, “themonitoring/theservice?alerts=all” or whatever, to hotlink directly into the right place.

It was built on an opt-in philosophy, where “blahchat/#team” was the default, but if (you’re John-John and) you insist that the channel for ALF has to be #melmac, you can have that, but you have to add it yourself.

More recently, I’ve seen swagger/openapi used to great effect. I still want the map of who’s calling who and I strongly recommend mechanicanizing how that’s made. (extract it from logs or something, don’t rely on hand-drawn maps) I want to like C4, but I haven’t managed to get any use out of it. Just throw it in graphviz dot-file.

Oh, one trick that’s useful there: local maps. For each service S, get the list of everything that connects to it. Make a subset graph of those services, but make sure to include the other connections between those, the ones that don’t involve S. (“oh, so that’s why…”)

Ok, so it’s to hear from people building stuff, but isn’t it maybe a little light on details? I feel the consultancy contact details to profound insights ratio is a bit underwhelming.

Ok, TIL there’s a thing called Required, but otherwise, one way to do this is to rename the other part/field/key(s), so that old code reveals itself in much the same way as using a deleted field (because it does, actually)

Another way is explicitly have a separate type for records with/without the feature. (if one is a strict subset, you can have a downgrade/slice method on the more capable class.

Lastly, I would say that you need static typing, testing, both. People from static-land get vertigo without types, and it does give good night sleep, but it’s no substitute for testing. Testing can be a substitute for static typing in combination with coverage requirements, but at that point you’re doing so much more work that the static typing straight jacket seems pretty chill.

Well, there’s some timeless advice on these topics, right? The simplest is: be likeable. The reason is that since you can’t accomplish the task on your own, you need people to take your side, and to do that you need them to want you win, whatever the arguments. (“that’s dumb, my argument is better”. Yeah, maybe, but if people don’t like you, that won’t matter)

Another, more focused on societal change is: Move the middle. The middle of the bell curve is where most of everything is, and moving it, even slightly, can have dramatic effects. Also, if you want get anywhere, getting going at all is probably a good move, right? I’m thinking specifically of sorting recycling: it’s mostly bullshit, but the bizdev bros would murder for that kind of ‘engagement’. It’s easier to sell everyone on next step when they’re already on board…

Or, you know, rant about revolution. It’s not going to change anything, but it might make you feel better.

What part of 25% below market makes you compare him to the food oligopoly? He likes trouble-free tenants, and I’m pretty sure his tenants like this arrangement too. By contast, you come off as very tiresome. Do you have any skin in the game? What are you doing to help make housing affordable? Do you do anything besides exemplify why having revolutionaries in charge would be terrifying?

“Appendable” seems like a positive spin on the “truncated YAML-file is frighteningly often valid” problem…

It was harder to explain why picking on Python for this is dumb, before gotofail… (Not saying that’s what you’re doing, but it feels close, so this is relevant.)

For whitespace, my rule is this: If any level of indentation depends on the length of any word or name, you’re doing it wrong. If using a more descriptive name causes indentation where previously there was none, that’s fine, but if moving the opening parens causes the interior to be indented more, less so. (Yes, Golang’s structs)

Well, with the newer optional typing, it became def foo(name: Optional[str]) -> Optional[str]: ... and now def foo(name: str | None) -> str | None: ... (No need to import Optional) It’s quite nice.

As for Rust, recall that Result is also a very similar union type. I think a lot of the aversions people have had to static typing have mostly just been about poor expressiveness in clunky type systems.