Lars Wirzenius @liw@toot.liw.fi

What is this feeling I'm feeling. It's almost like an impending dread has vanished.

As a programmer, when you call a function (or procedure or method or other piece of code), you should always check that it succeeded and if not, handle the error.

This is easy to get wrong.

A quality of a programming language is how easy it is to overlook handling of an error.

Good: Rust Result values; Python exceptions.

Bad: Unix system call integer codes; C functions that return NULL for error; shell scripts that invoke commands that can fail.

(Any command can fail.)

Today I measured: our kettle for heating water for making tea takes three minutes to heat one litre of water from 18 °C to 100 °C.

That's not the fastest, but it's a pleasant pace as part of the tea making ritual. I don't think the meditative trance-like state I can enter after pressing the button to start the process would be better if it took one or two minutes shorter.

The steeping phase can't be sped up anyway. One waits, and contemplates the universe, and calms down.

I've started the process of thinking about how to make #obnam backups be encrypted. Very early days. It will take a number of iterations to make it impressive.

If you'd like to help, please comment on the issue for this:
https://gitlab.com/larswirzenius/obnam/-/issues/52

New #obnam iteration planning meeting: https://obnam.org/blog/2021/01/16/iteration/

Goal of this iteration: I can start suggesting to others that they might try Obnam as a secondary backup solution for personal use.

English language #Wikipedia is 20 years old today. It's had a billion edits.

My latest business venture is a general purpose consultancy. It's called "Dunning-Kruger Consultants, Inc".

If you're interacting with someone in a more-or-less real-time manner, such as a text chat, video meeting, or similar, and you start doing something that takes more than about 30 seconds, tell them. Otherwise they wait for something to happen, get frustrated, get worried, and might do something that's not wanted. Like call your boss to ask if you're still alive.

Important programming truths from 1995.

https://liw.fi/programming-truths/

I wonder how bad Microsoft leadership are feeling that their company is not included in the FAANG acronym.

Re previous boost:

The important part is to remind us or me) that there's work to be done to make sure the kinds of things that led to Aaron Swartz's demise don't happen again to someone else.

Slow edit-build-test cycles are super-frustrating.

Even more so if there's little I can do to speed them up, for a particular project.