Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
This week was mostly calm at work. The team I’m on is coming to the end of transferring our work to our client. It’s a time to document our process and a time of reflection. This particular project was a great deal of fun and was one of our longer running projects. This is also my last project as an Engineering Director.
Monday I start a new project as a developer 50% of my time while continuing 50% of my time as Director on my current project. Believe it or not I’m pretty excited about the new project and my new role. This particular project is tvOS based! Super fun! 📺
Om Malik
This rapid growth seems to have gotten under Elon Musk’s skin. No wonder he is calling Zuck a cuck — giving the rest of us even further proof that money doesn’t buy you class or brains. In reality, the more Threads grows, the more it takes ad dollars away from Twitter, and the $44 billion mistake starts to look bigger and bigger.
It really looks like Elon is such a thin skinned egomaniac he can’t deal with the heat of competition. Threads isn’t perfect — what is — but it’s just a baby and it has 100 million users, if reports from Facebook are accurate. That’s a significant user base in a very short period of days. They’re already a quarter to a third of the size of Twitter. By contrast Elon has just run Twitter into the ground and has proven he’s not the genius everyone thought he was.
Andrea Bergia
I am very happy with what I have learned, about Rust and about how to implement a virtual machine. In particular, I am super happy about having implemented a real, working, garbage collector. It’s quite mediocre, but it’s mine and I love it. 💘
I’m always super impressed by folks who follow their passions, knuckle down, and create something that gives them joy. Not only did Andrea build something joyful, he’s built something useful as a learning exercise. 👍🏼
Tumblr Staff Blog
Today, we’re abnormally jazzed to announce that we’re open-sourcing the custom framework we built to power your dashboard on Tumblr. We call it StreamBuilder, and we’ve been using it for many years.
We know Matt Mullenweg is an open source proponent and built one of the most beloved blogging tools turned CMS in the world. It’s no surprise to see Tumblr open up some of its code.
When companies do this I always wonder how many hacks are in the code and how many curse words folks will find. 😀
Nish Tahir
A Schema is essentially a metadata document that describes an API. It defines the inputs and outputs of a system while eliminating ambiguity. When used correctly, it creates the foundation for a contract between an API and its consumers. Here’s an example of an OpenAPI[1] schema describing a health check endpoint for a RESTful API.
I have the honor of working with Nish. He’s a very rare talent, kind, and empathetic.
I love this piece. It’s pragmatic. If you provide a scheme for your API folks using it can diff the changes, generate new client side code to use it, and at a glance know what’s expected. It’s just a contract like any protocol or interface in your programming language of choice would establish, only this is for the web.
Being in an agency we see lots of web APIs and having a clear picture of the API is extremely helpful. Being able to generate “boiler plate” code to communicate with an API is also extremely helpful. Why write it when you could generate it? 🧠
Corina Knoll • The New York Times
A Hollywood Diner Becomes a Writers’ Room of a Different Sort
I love this story of community and solidarity. These folks are fighting for their livelihoods and managing to experience a little joy during a very stressful time.
Now that the Screen Actors Guild has joined in Hollywood has screeched to a halt, but will all this effort make a difference? I think so. I think it’ll spawn some smaller, more nimble, studios and perhaps writers will find a way to have ownership of their work?
Paul Hudson
SE-0304 introduced a whole range of approaches to execute, cancel, and monitor concurrent operations in Swift, and builds upon the work introduced by async/await and async sequences.
Oh boy. More stuff to learn. Time marches on and coding practices continue at a frenetic pace. My aging brain is screaming at me. I’m slow. A slow learner. A slow coder. Slow. Keeping up is a challenge but I’ll figure this stuff out. Probably not as deeply as I’d like but enough to get myself in trouble. 🐌
John Scalzi
The Kaiju Preservation Society is a 2023 Hugo Award Best Novel Finalist
I really like John Scalzi. I’ve only read Old Man’s War and I really enjoyed it. I’ve started The Ghost Brigades and need to get back to it but I appreciate Mr. Scalzi for more than his books. He’s super fun to read on social networks and he maintains a fairly active blog! Follow his RSS feed for a bit and see if you like it. 📚
Majid Jabrayilov
This week I will talk about the state management approach I have used in my apps for years. We will cover building a predictable, testable, debuggable, and modular state management system in Swift.
A post about a small chunk of code described in detail. A simple, powerful, concept.
Between Majid, Paul Hudson, and John Sundell we have more than enough authorities on the Swift Programming Language. I can’t keep up. 🤣
Justin T. Westbrook • Jalopnik
You may not remember the rumors that Aston Martin was going to shove a V12 into its infamous Cygnet city car, but you’re never going to forget that they went ahead and shoved a naturally aspirated V8 in there instead despite the car being dead for over five years.
Talk about overkill! I love it! I’m all about moving toward EVs, bicycles, and mass transit as our future of transportation but there’s something special about a well built, powerful, engine I appreciate. The combination of little car and V8 is just so ridiculous I love it. I’d love to take one for a spin.
My Dad is a car guy. He’s built numerous cars over his lifetime including; a Ford Anglia, ‘37 Chevy Coup street rod, a Baja bug, and a Chevy S10 with a V8.
That S10 was a Frankenstein of a truck. Not beautiful and polished with power and grace like his Anglia or Chevy Coup. It was hideous with way too much power under the hood, but boy was it fun.
The motor was so large and sat so high in the engine compartment Dad had to cut a hole in the hood and add a scoop so the carburetor and filter could stick out. 🤣
Political Wire • Taegan Goddard
Trump Wants Trial Delayed Until After Election
Cartoon by Ed Hall
And, there it is. Everyone knew this was coming. TFG is trying to delay the process until after the election in hopes he becomes our next President. These motions have no merit and I hope they’re quashed soon.
He needs his day in court to prove himself innocent or face the consequences if found guilty. The President of the United States should be held to the highest standards of integrity. TFG just wants unlimited power. Why? I can’t say because my brain doesn’t work that way. I’ve never understood it.
Here’s hoping he’s convicted and eliminated from the Presidential race. They’d better hurry. The clock is ticking.
Steven Monacelli • Texas Onserver
“This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on [Facebook(https://www.facebook.com/texasobserver/)
and Twitter.”
Dozens of members of the neo-fascist, white nationalist group Patriot Front marched through the streets of Austin Saturday. The group did not announce the demonstration in advance, leaving no time for opposition groups to mount a counter-protest. It was the largest public gathering of the group’s members since they held a similar march in Washington, D.C., on May 13.
Our country’s slide into White Christian Nationalism continues and it’s extremely troubling. I keep expecting a Civil War to break out but in modern day America it’s difficult for me to fathom what that might look like.
I still feel like a major kerfuffle is coming. I’d imagine it’ll center around TFG and how his many trials and investigations conclude. At least two could result in Federal convictions. If that happens he should be tossed from running for or holding The Office of the President.
Julio Merino
To summarize, the Twitter thread shows two videos: one of an old computer running Windows NT 3.51 and one of a new computer running Windows 11. In each video, I opened and closed a command prompt, File Explorer, Notepad, and Paint. You can clearly see how apps on the old computer open up instantly whereas apps on the new computer show significant lag as they load.
I spent a bit of time at Microsoft in 1994-95 working on the Windows NT file stress testing team as a contractor. I was part of the IBM team working on the port of NT 3.51 to PowerPC. The 3.51 version of NT was a rock and at the time my favorite OS. It didn’t have fancy hardware accelerated graphics and rendering was still very fast.
At that time device drivers didn’t have kernel access, they ran at ring 1. When NT 4 was being worked on drivers were moved into kernel space, ring 0, for performance reasons. I wasn’t a fan of that move but it gave them the performance they were after (gaming) and with that came more blue screens of death, which is the kernel’s way of saying “Uh, excuse me, you can’t write to that memory.” 😵
Michael Ponsor • The New York Times
I joined the federal bench in 1984, some years before any of the justices currently on the Supreme Court. Throughout my career, I have been bound and guided by a written code of conduct, backed by a committee of colleagues I can call on for advice. In fact, I checked with a member of that committee before writing this essay.
Bring on a code of conduct for the Supreme Court. Once again power corrupts and it shouldn’t be this way for folks in a position of power like these folks are. They’re the highest court in the land and should be held to the highest standards. It’s time to do something about it, but how? I haven’t the slightest clue. ⚖️
Jordan Bianchi • The Athletic
Corey LaJoie is working on finalizing a multiyear contract extension with Spire Motorsports to continue driving its No. 7 Chevrolet in the NASCAR Cup Series, NASCAR industry sources told The Athletic. The deal is expected to be completed in the coming weeks.
I love me some Cory LeJoie. He’s a very likable character and while he struggles to run in the top-15 he’s a joy to watch and listen to. His podcast, Stacking Pennies, is a nice look inside the race of the last weekend and NASCAR in general.
I keep hoping this fella will win a race and become a consistent top-10 finisher. Go underdogs! 🐶
I thought I’d share some early influences who got me into blogging and helped me model my blogging style, if you will.
Back when 
I was reading this nodding my head in agreement because I see the usefulness of it. As I was wondering what current massive services like AWS, Azure, and Google Compute could be used to creat something like this it dawned on me that perhaps GitHub already fulfills all these needs?
My time as a pinch hitter on my current project comes to an end next Wednesday but I’ve enjoyed the ride.
Wow. This is a nightmare. We work really hard to make sure our code isn’t exploitable and here you have a company who intentionally made their software just that, exploitable. If you have a back door it’s an invite to every bad actor to walk right on in. 🫣
Vicon Industries also makes a lot of sense because I worked for Pelco and I’m very familiar with video encoding and decoding and generally how our digital solution was architected and built. Vicon is looking for C# / .Net devs for their new cloud solution. Again, honored to show up in that list.
I’m getting more and more excited about writing code full time at work. I’m sure that won’t last but I’m going to enjoy every minute of it while I can. 😃
It’s been a strange week for me. I started on a new project, 50% of my time, as a developer while transferring my work as a Director the other 50% of my time. That is some strange hat swapping. 😃
I haven’t written production code in a year-and-a-half. In that time a lot has changed in the iOS Development community. Namely SwiftUI and async / await have become the preferred way to do UI and asynchronous programming respectively.
That is a really good question. My answer is, I don’t know. My amazing wife — whose put up with me for over 36 years — would say something like ”Because you’re smart and know what you’re doing.” She’s always been my biggest supporter and I love her dearly for it. Anywho, I’ve always been my biggest critic and I can get down on myself, especially as I’ve aged.
Sorry for the lateness in publishing today. We had a deployment of some services for a project at work and duty calls! I did have my fair share of coffee to get the old noggin going this morning.
