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Reflections on 10k Hours of Programming
I'm certainly not a world-class expert, but I have put my 10,000 hours of deliberate practice into programming. Here are 31 of my reflections on programming.
Matt Rickard
About Matt Rickard.
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Visit matt-rickard.com → On Hacker News Aug 2021 – Aug 2023
Software Engineering 8Infrastructure & DevOps 8Tech Industry & Business 6Tools & Productivity 5Web & Frontend 3Career & Management 3
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Google search's death by a thousand cuts
Reddit communities are still private in protest of new API rules. Twitter moved beyond a login wall and is rate-limiting users. Users are frustrated but still using these sites.
3
Don't use Kubernetes yet
Early-stage startups shouldn't run on Kubernetes yet.
4
S3 isn't getting cheaper
Clayton Christensen famously demonstrated the Innovator's Dilemma by using data from the hard drive industry in the 1980s. At every point, companies failed to make the switch from 8-inch drives, to 5-inch drives, to 3...
5
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Makefiles
Few tools walk the right line between declarative and imperative like make.
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I miss the programmable web (2021)
In some ways, we've taken a few steps back from a programmable web—two things I miss: bookmarklets and user scripts. Imagine having a bookmarked shortcut to do complex things like taking screenshots or saving a PDF. O...
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What comes after Git
Git was born from the collaboration problems in the Linux kernel. Nearly a decade later, new problems arose when Kubernetes (the operating system of the cloud) brought open-source collaboration to a new level.
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Why did Heroku fail?
Fifteen years later, developers are still trying to recreate the developer experience of Heroku. Yet, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Why did Heroku fail? Was it just incompetent managemen...
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Non-Obvious Docker Uses
Many developers use Docker the old-fashioned way -- a docker build and a docker run. Some non-obvious ways to use Docker.
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SQLite Doesn't Use Git
Instead, it uses Fossil as a version control system. Some thoughts.
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Why Tailwind CSS Won
Tailwind CSS is the new ubiquitous frontend framework. It replaces a generation of sites built with Twitter Bootstrap. However, Tailwind CSS is not a UI framework itself but has become synonymous to some degree with t...
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The End of CI
Today, Continuous Integration (CI) is something that nearly every engineering organization does. However, I predict that in the future, nobody will do it.
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An Overview of Docker Desktop Alternatives
It's been a few years since I was a maintainer of minikube, but after the news that Docker Desktop will no longer be free for enterprises and some of the misconceptions of how the technology works, I thought I'd write...
14
Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
Forget about the y-intercept; slope is the only thing that matters in the long run.
15
AWS is not a dumb pipe
In 1997, David Isenberg wrote an article called the Rise of the Stupid Network. Isenberg worked at Bell Labs, the R&D lab of AT&T, and was responsible for some significant breakthroughs during the PC and the early int...
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The Lost Art of System Administration
I spent a good chunk of my adolescence learning Linux systems administration. I attribute some of my success as a software engineer to the scripting and systems knowledge I picked up while installing, maintaining, and...
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Screenshots as the Universal API
With advancements in machine learning, screenshots are quickly becoming a universal data format. It's now (relatively) easy to extract meaning (image-to-text), layout information (object recognition), text (optical ch...
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Nvidia's CUDA Monopoly
CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a closed-source low-level API that interfaces software with NVIDIA GPUs.
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Against Pair Programming
Pair programming is where two programmers work together on a single computer. One writes the code, while the other observes and offers suggestions. I'm not talking about debugging or brainstorming together, but this p...