/Thought Piece

The Developer Experience Gap

- Stephen O'Grady tl;dr: There are an abundance of tools to create systems that "shepherd code from its earliest juvenile days in version control through to its adult stage in production." These systems are not cohesive but fragmented, pieced together. The system is an afterthought. Stephan outlines five adjectives describing the next generation of the developer experience.

featured in #217

Identity Beyond Usernames

tl;dr: Usernames are hard. "Slack and Discord show us the main problem — plain text editing forces us to conflate our model of identity with our model for labels."

featured in #192

It's Probably Time To Stop Recommending Clean Code

tl;dr: Clean Code mixes "a disarming combination of strong, timeless advice and advice which is highly questionable or dated or both." It focuses on "object-oriented code and exhorts the virtues of SOLID, to the exclusion of other programming paradigms."

featured in #189

Where Did Software Go Wrong?

- Jesse Li tl;dr: "Software cannot be divorced from the human structures that create it, and for us, that structure is capitalism" prompting the profound question - "what are the aims and ends we should direct our software towards?" 

featured in #184

US Government Wages War On Encryption

- Lily Hay Newman tl;dr: Despite being meant to combat child exploitation, this bill would put tech companies in a position they would have to add "a backdoor for law enforcement access, or avoid end-to-end encryption altogether."

featured in #179

The "No Code" Delusion

- Alex Hudson tl;dr: Alex considers the "no code" discussions a "pipe dream," not seeing any tangible evidence. Certain tools have replaced software e.g. Zapier. With software, the "devil is in the details" and that cannot be replicated.

featured in #169

The Modern Web  Is Becoming An Unusable, User-hostile Wasteland

- Abid Omar tl;dr: In unnoticeable increments, ad by ad, paywall by paywall, companies trade user experience for revenue. This is not surprising but begs the question, where is the breaking point?

featured in #167

Open Source Migrates With Emotional Distress

- Armin Ronacher tl;dr: Armin wants a post-mortem on how the transition to Python 3 has been handled. There's a lack of transparency as to why the transition is needed. He feels like he's being "sold" and forced into migrating when, in fact, there are other reasons this migration is needed. 

featured in #167

Good Times Create Weak Men

- Nikita Prokopov tl;dr: Minor bugs in both Apple and Amazon's products highlight a systemic organizational problem. New generations of programmers in larger institutions aren't transferred relevant information about previous projects that are the basis of current ones. 

featured in #167

Don't Use Booleans

- Steven Luu tl;dr: The overhead of enums is comparatively low and comes with several practical benefits.

featured in #166