Tag Archives: bottle of beer

Gimme Swift

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As a computer programmer, I live in a familiar cycle: Write some code, then run it repeatedly to work out all the kinks. There is a moment when you hit “run” for the first time, already anticipating what the errors might be, thinking about next steps when the error inevitably presents itself.

It’s been weird writing server-side Swift. I do my hacking, adding a feature or refactoring or whatever, I make the compiler happy, then it’s time to get to the nitty-gritty. I roll up my sleeves, start the program… and it works. Just like that. I run the tests against the other systems. It works.

It’s like you’re all ready for a fight and the other guy doesn’t show up. NOW what are you going to do?

Swift can be annoying with how hard-assed it is about certain things, but that picky compiler that sometimes forces long-winded syntax is like that really picky English teacher who you realize after the fact gave you a command of words you didn’t have before. If you have a null pointer in Swift, you went out of your way to create it.

Programming languages exist for the convenience of humans, not machines. So if you can make a language that makes it harder for humans to make a mistake, why wouldn’t you?

Man I enjoy writing code in Swift. Of the four languages I use regularly, Swift is hands-down the one I’m most productive with, even though I’ve been using the others for far longer. And just today I remembered that functions could return tuples, and I was like, “Damn!” all over again, thinking how I can shrink my interfaces.

That and a performance profile comparable to C (each is better for certain sorts of operations), and you have a language with some mojo. This ain’t JavaScript, homey.

Most of my days are consumed writing code in other languages (at least for now), and what strikes me every day is that the mistakes I make would not have been possible in Swift. Think of that!

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What You Pay to Google

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I do it too. I use Google’s “free” services. But they’re not free. Google makes a shit-ton of money off me. Consider this list of things The Goog knows about me:

name, age, blah blah blah – tragically that is already forfeit
thousands of web sites I’ve visited
thousands of searches I’ve done (yeah, those searches)
the full content of thousands of emails I’ve sent or received. I don’t use my gmail account, but any time I send a letter to a gmail address my words are duly noted. Every word that goes through gmail is archived.
Almost every purchase I’ve made online
Every purchase I’ve made in stores using Google wallet (which are none, because that is my pathetic line in the sand.)

Google, along with all tech companies, has to reveal what they collect about you if they want to do business in Europe. But here’s the thing: While I can get a full accounting of activity on my Google account, I can find no way to see, and delete, the data collected about me while I’m not actively logged into g-whatever. Which is most of my life.

I use Duck-Duck-Go for searching now, which is better anyway if you want to refine your search with + or -. I have not put a full embargo on gmail addresses, but it’s tempting. Somehow they have the right to read the communications of someone who has never entered into any sort of agreement with them. (I am not such a person, but they must exist.)

Google must hate Facebook for getting caught harvesting shit that is none of their business so often. If it weren’t for Facebook’s ineptitude, Google might still live in an unregulated world. As it is, they are doing their damndest to obey the letter of the law while still collecting “anonymous” data they are not responsible for revealing. It is not anonymous. If it were, it would have no value.

Screw those guys.

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Facebook, Continuous Integration, and Fucking Up

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If you ask the engineers at Facebook (I have), they are experts at continuously evolving their platform almost invisibly to the users. If you ask the users, Facebook is really fucking annoying because shit is breaking all the time and the button that was there yesterday is nowhere to be found.

Continuous Integration is a development practice that means that each little tweak to the software goes through the tests and then goes live. It’s a powerful idea, and can massively decrease the risk of publishing updates — rather than push out the work of several geek-years all at once, with all the risk of something going terribly wrong, you push out the result of a couple of geek-weeks of effort on a regular basis, taking baby-steps to the promised land. Tick, tick, tick, with an army of robots making sure no old bugs sneak back in again.

I fully embrace this idea.

Never has a company been more proud of accomplishing this than Facebook. They crow about it around here. Also, never has a company been so bad at actually doing it. What Facebook has managed to do is annoy users with endless changes that affect how people work, while still publishing bugs.

The key is that a continuous, minor set of tweaks to software is good, but endless tweaks to how people experience the software is bad. People don’t want to be constantly adjusting to improvements. So in continuous integration, you can enhance the user experience, but you can’t lightly take away something that was there before. You can’t move things around every couple of weeks.

Back in the day when I went on Facebook more frequently, I was constantly bemused by a user interface that felt like quicksand. Meanwhile, frequent users reported a never-ending stream of bugs.

Facebook, you are the champion of Continuous Integration, and the poster child for CI Gone Wrong.

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What Have We Become?

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Today on the radio I heard an ad from McDonalds. It went like this: slow down from your hectic life and take a few minutes to wolf down a breakfast at our fast food chain.

To emphasize, we have the flag bearer of food with speed realizing that people aren’t slowing down enough to eat their breakfasts. So now they’re saying, “Hey, slow down, bud! Cut twelve minutes out of your day to have a McGriddle!”

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51 Bottles of Beer on the Wall

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I was poking around in the musty, poorly-lit tunnels beneath the smooth and glitzy blog you are reading, and I discovered a rather unsettling fact: I have 51 episodes I started but didn’t finish, yet still haven’t deleted. For the next week or three, I’ll be pulling up the ones that deserve to see the blinding light of the public eye.

So if you see some references that are clearly dated, welp, that’s why. If you see episodes that start to develop but then suddenly stop, it’s because I liked the episode, but at this stage I’m not gong to finish it (in all likelihood because I can’t remember the incidents described any longer). Some episodes might still have cobwebs, or spots of rust. Some might be full zombie now, shambling out of the past, hoping to find relevance by eating your brain.

We will start with a marketing campaign by McDonalds that ended a while back. I had meant to explore the idea a little more, but I stopped mid-sentence. Probably scrabbling for the right word. Or just distracted by something shiny.

I will mark the episodes from the archives with the tag “bottle of beer”.

Note that actual current episodes might appear as well, like the one that just landed in the Jury Life series. Crazy times at MR&HBI!

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