Youtube comments of (@brownhorsesoftware3605).

  1. It started with Reagan blaming poverty on poor people and when companies switched from treating employees as an investment to as an expense. That is my life experience, at least.
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  2. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
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  3. Get the billionaires out of elections!!! CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM
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  4. There is no safety in employment. No matter how well you perform or how successful your product is, you will get laid off on the whim of some suit. They will offer you a huge retention bonus and then lay off your entire division the next day. Speaking from 47 years experience, the only path to safety is to form your own company.
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  5. This reminds me of the MBA at the bank data center who decided he would write the code to generate a business account summary report himself in APL. It brought the mainframe to its knees and ran for hours. I took pity on the auditor tasked with running the report. It took me 10 minutes to rewrite it in the data retrieval scripting language and submit to operations where it ran in just minutes. The MBA was furious but everyone else couldn't thank me enough.
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  6. The great thing about a distributed monolith is that you are always talking to yourself.
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  7. Excellent stuff!! I learned to code by refactoring all the systems I was put in charge of. Operations loved me as everything I took over stopped having problems.
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  8. The ability to ask the right question has earned me the title of "ATM goddess" as well as "the girl who writes code faster than you can sign your name". How did I develop that ability? Majored in English literature. Working on software is like working on any text: research, draft, refinement, repeat. Not to mention: know your audience - both human and machine.
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  9. Something I noticed already very early in my career when I worked on a mainframe ATM system was a reluctance to interact with folks in other parts of the business. This astonished me. Rather than consult with the people in their banks, they wanted to ask other data processing centers how things should be implemented. And the answers they got back were insane. So I ignored them and bonded with the people in the banks instead. The gm backed me up and the implementation was a roaring success: first banks to go live by weeks. Since then I have seen this pattern repeated ad infinitum. Perhaps software would be better off if engineers paired with users instead of other engineers.
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  10. I was fascinated by how, after your discussion about how software is not a physical product, all of your design examples were physical products. My hesitation at the title of engineer is solely in deference to real engineers because I don't have an engineering degree. It also struck me that the things you mentioned regarding software design are also true of writing. They are both all about organizing information. Thanks for your thoughts.
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  11. ❤ Complexity is something that software engineers, scientists, and artists all wrestle with. All of them work by experimentation. It is the nature of creativity in any field. Lovely and very interesting video!
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  12. Excellent! Only one thing to add: read lots of code. You can learn piles from both good and bad code and you will get some insight into what it means for code to be readable.
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  13. Thanks for another super video. I'm beginning to think that the most important thing to learn as a programmer is how your brain works. My brain does not go to solutions when someone describes a problem, instead it goes into a kind of absorb mode that generates questions. Later, when I pick up a pen, it goes into thinking on paper (graph preferred) to describe, organize, and begin having ideas about the problem. That generates a list of things to explore and research. It is only as this stage progresses that I begin to formulate possible solutions. I always do the easiest things first. Start with something that runs and build from there so you implement what is needed as you need it. Make notes on what is needed as you go. Things you learn on the easy stuff will probably make the hard stuff simpler. Through the entire process I think on paper so I can check things off and remember where I am. I don't think in code, I think on paper - probably due to decades of working in assembler. I do, however, dream in code and rely on sleep to find complicated bugs. When I type code my brain goes into an edit/organize mode quite distinct from the writing with a pen creative mode. Some academic study discovered better exam outcomes for students when taking hand-written notes vs typing on a laptop.
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  14. Thanks very much for this exceptional video! It resonates in so many ways. The principles behind agile go back much further than the 20 years. It explains how I as a single person could compete with entire dev departments when I had PC app business in the 80's by working directly with the people in the user department every step of the way. I think the first thing that determines whether an org is truly agile is trust. The second is a sense of humor
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  15. ❤ I call my system of working just-in-time development where you only implement what you need right now: start with running code and keep it running. Why just-in-time? Because JIT happens...
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  16. Five stars for this video. Excellent discussion on several topics close to my heart. Great to hear backend folks emphasizing user experience and supporting async architecture.
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  17. Yes! Yes! I worked for a feature phone platform company that put all of its competitors out of business (before being acquired) by using a similar approach. We cut the development time for a feature phone from a year to 3 months. For the most part, we communicated through code - both locally and remotely.
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  18. I've always heard this called regression testing. We had an interesting case at Realia COBOL because the compiler itself was written in COBOL. So you couldn't simply compare outputs, you had to compare the output of the output. I myself worked on the debugger and the compiler frontend person was my best user. When she had a problem I'd be debugging the debugger debugging the compiler compiling the compiler.
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  19. Boy was I lucky to learn programming for 3 months as a trainee at an engineering company. Everyone else had taken that route so getting integrated into a team went smooth like baby's feet. Questions were encouraged and everyone was extremely patient helping folks just out of training learn the ropes.
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  20. Some of the most beautiful code I've ever seen was uncommented assembler. It was an x86 linker I took over from the author. You could read it like a book, it was so well organized and named. I was the first other person see it and he asked me what I thought. So I quoted a little Keats: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty..."
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  21. Notably, Kennedy said "what you can do for your country" not "... for America". We have also lost any sense of ownership and responsibility for our country, our government.
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  22. I scared the sh*t out of people by simply being competent. I would never try to convince anyone because I was always just lucky to survive the sabotage. Until I found a company with highly competent people who were already there. Then I lived happily ever after until msft acquired us.
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  23. @heydudedolfan13  Yes. Campaign finance reform == get money out of elections
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  24.  @BrunoCodeman  In software development the means of production is the developer. Therefore going to work for yourself is equivalent to seizing the means of production.
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  25. Based on the comments, men appear to believe they know more about gender bias than women. Why even bother commenting at all if everything is so wonderfully gender-balanced in the IT community? In my 45 years working as a programmer bias against women has gone from bad to worse. Of course now I also have age working against me. I mostly had better luck with colleagues from other continents than Americans. There is a wide range based on culture. Thank you for raising this topic.
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  26. I am all for collaborations of any size. Serial collaboration across time zones can also be highly productive. Mob programming makes lots of sense because it's just like the way they write comedy for TV. What does writing comedy and software have in common? The better and more immediate the feedback is, the better and quicker it's written.
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  27. The difference between functional and oo programming is point of view. In functional programming code is data. In oo programming data is code. This from the point of view of someone who's native language is assembler. All points of view are useful in the right context. Arguing that one is better than the other simply misses the point. Thanks for another great thought-provoking video!!
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  28. It all about having a culture of trust, respect, and honesty. That is my life experience. Success is a product of cooperation through practice.
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  29. You might be interested to know that the deployment technique described is similar to how they deployed the switch running the ATMs on the systems I worked on in the very early 1980s. The switch ran on a mini, I don't remember which, and they would deploy to a second mini and then point the network to it. The company running the switch was Boeing Computer Services in Seattle. So yes, engineering - that was the old Boeing. Cloud computing in 1981: ATMs in Chicago, switch in Seattle.
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  30. Constantly changing user requirements are life. Software is automation. The difference between now and history is not that now we are done, but that we are automating different things. The focus of software development has also shifted with hardware capacity constraints going from limited to seemingly limitless. Software development should be about user collaboration. In the same way you need to test the logic of your sw, you need to test the usefulness of the sw. As long ago as the early eighties I have had end-users test my sw. I learned very early in my career that it can be much more productive to be a developer on a team of users than on a team of developers.
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  31. For me, software is like Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings, with two faces: one looks to the machine, the other looks to the person. The face looking to the machine is an engineer. The face looking to the person is a writer. (Looking to (not at) as in 'in service of'.) The material of software engineering is logic.
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  32.  @johnsmith-ro2tw  The MBA left the company. I was never in danger. Sometimes performance can beat politics.
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  33. Excellent video! Since early in my career, when people asked about my process, I would just say: "Make something that runs. Keep it running."
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  34. ❤❤❤❤❤ I just found out I've been doing BDD for over 40 years. Complexity can also be the product of confusion. I cannot count the number of times I have turned confusion complexity into simple robust code with excellent results. I've spent a large amount of time fixing other people's code: my title was architect but my role was software cleaning lady.
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  35. In this case you simply implement an event that is generated when the state is as A is interested in. Then A just registers a listener for that event. NO POLLING! Polling is the opposite of event driven.
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  36. The environmental cost of AI crowds out any possible benefit. It is a massive waste of time and resources. This in addition to all the shortcomings mentioned in the video.
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  37. Extra great video! If you want to teach your brain to understand concurrency learn to play the pedal harp. Like the piano your hands are playing multiple lines of melody while your feet are supplying the accidentals with pedal changes. I failed as a performer but went on to optimize JVM monitors in the early days of Java when I worked on the Symantec JIT compiler. I wound up having to fix everyones deadly embraces for them. Most programming belongs on a single thread. When I moved from the X86 PC space to embedded at the turn of the century I discovered green threading which is loads easier to deal with than preemptive. You don't need to sync the hardware. Multiple threads are unavoidable in a phone app but can be minimized. In retrospect I think most of the people I've worked with who really understood concurrency were also musicians. Another good way to get comfortable with asynchronous behavior is to write a debugger or two.
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  38. I had the incredible luck to learn programming in a shop that practiced something very close to what you describe as Continuous Delivery down to having a group devoted to what is now called DevOps. A decade before I started in the 70s, they worked with IBM to create CICS and maintained an in-house version called Pronto. I learned to write code for distributed systems by fixing production bugs and rewriting parts that suffered from the entropy of earlier misguided fixes. The data was distributed over time, not space. We were the electric utility for Chicago and surrounding suburbs. The customer dataset was so large that it took a week of nightly runs to process the entire thing and everything happened in cycles of various lengths. Anyway, I just wanted to point out that CD is a great but not necessarily new idea.
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  39. On the subject of shiny things: back in the early 80's when I was working in banking writing ATM networks an MBA decided to program a weekly business accounts summary in APL. He showed the auditor how to run the program which took hours to run and brought the mainframe to its knees. I could not watch this so I wrote the report in a scripting language and gave it to operations to run every week. The auditor was eternally grateful. The MBA took me across the hall into the bank vault and balled me out for being unprofessional.
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  40. I am against ignoring "flakey" tests. I can tell you a horror story about what it is like to have 3 days to fix a timing problem that people had ignored for 3 months. A "flakey" test can be a harbinger. I always investigate them. But I am also against a backlog with more than zero items. So there's that.
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  41.  @BrunoCodeman  All of those things have nothing to do with controlling the safety of my employment. If I could own Dell Computers to the point of controlling my employer, I would not require employment. My assets are in my skillset not my bank account.
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  42. Wow! Too many things to chime in on. Great talk! Count me in as a grumpy old gal who also agrees with everything. I was an English major lucky enough to start programming in the 70's when an interview consisted of the IBM programmer aptitude test. Then you had to pass all the exams during the first three months of working through the IBM self-taught assembler course. I remember asking a colleague during training about this language called assembler. I had heard of COBOL and Fortran but not assembler. Will it be useful to learn? Don't worry about that, he replied. It will definitely be useful.
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  43. AI is Automated IP theft combined with end-of-the-world hype not seen since Y2K. What do I know? I've only been writing software since 1977.
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  44. When I first heard the term test driven development my initial thought was OK but then don't I also need to write a test to test the test code? In other words,, why would the test be more trustworthy than the code I'm writing? Then I saw one of your videos and realized that the important part is not the test but the ability to test immediately - that is, having a way to test the code before you write it. So your test is not so much a test to prove correctness as a running context to providest immediate feedback. I cannot imagine writing code before you have a way to run/test it. I have spent most of my time on platform internals and prefer to find a test rather than write one both to avoid programmer bias and exercise other people's code. Now that I have returned to app development (UX and everything) implementation order by design takes care of providing the test context for coding. Then I let Google do their automated approval testing on my Android app for me: less code to maintain. I already do a lot of thinking and organizing on paper before coding - maybe because I started and have done lots of work in assembler. Maybe because I was an English major.
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  45. Back in the early days of Java as a member of the orginally 3 person and eventually 4 person Symantec JIT compiler team, a big part of my role was optimizing JVM monitors and garbage collection to shame Sun into improving their PC x86 implementation. The interpreter worked fine on Solaris so why bother with how it runs on PCs? Symantec had pivoted their IDE from C++ to Java and needed the performance to get people on board with Java. C++ was made impossible by Microsoft making it a moving target with library releases. The huge improvement the JVM promised for us was not only write once run on any but also eliminating Microsoft from the picture. The JIT compiler became the standard for the Classic JVM. The eventual 4th member of the JIT team is now Director of SW Development at Oracle.
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  46.  @rd264  He wasn't dead when he blamed poverty on poor people. He was POTUS.
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  47. 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🤩
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  48. ​   I was the first person to see their code. It was not the first code I had seen. Apologies for the confusion.
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  49. Welcome! Meetings are an art that few ever master. At the job of my dreams we had a weekly meeting where any topic requiring more than 90 seconds was addressed in another meeting that you used your 90 seconds to organize. There were no managers in that company and everyone managed just fine.
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  50. My immediate reaction was that you should get rid of that product guy and talk to actual users. In my experience they don't want lots of features as much as they want features that work well and the more direct your contact is with that user the better your feedback and chance of success. An additional thought is that I have always found success by treating operations as another set of users. In fact, it has made for not only a project's salvation but also for a huge success even in the face of sabotage from people above me in the development hierarchy.
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  51. I should also mention that my way-of-working has always been what has become known as agile. It is because my approach to writing software is the same as any writing assignment: Do research: analyze the audience, topic, and context to come up with an approach. Then revise until done. Writing is revision. Going back to research as needed- this is a recursive process.
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  52. You cannot compare software of the 90's and 2000's without a single mention of the differences in hardware. At the beginning of the 90's everyone was running 8 bit software on 16 bit machines. So we converted to 16 bit segmented architecture from 8 bit real mode and by the time we had done that the chips had moved to 32 bit and back to real mode where it has stayed. Not to mention the rise of the web and the jvm mid-decade with the rise of the internet. Is it ironic that the facility invented to distribute data for safety is nearly entirely used to centralize data? And that centralization being responsible for so many of the woes associated with the internet. I would not say things were easier or harder - just different.
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  53. The most important and completely impossible to test for components of excellent software are curiosity, imagination, and creativity.
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  54. It's interesting to know how you would use AI for software development but I have far more interest in discussing whether we should use AI. Cui bono? Are the broligarchs not rich enough yet? Is data processing on steroids really worth the explosion in carbon footprint? Just because you can do something, does that mean you should do it?
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  55. Thanks for this excellent and dry conversation. Looking forward to those future contributions! After 46 years I can safely say that the most important and valuable skill I've learned as a software engineer is asking questions.
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  56. I have been thinking about the edges of design Dave has mentioned in several videos and how they are to be avoided. My experience is the opposite: that the surest way to create value is to embrace the edges and make that your starting point. Because that is where the user is so you can constantly test for value as well as function. I think the examples in this video illustrate my point.
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  57. Thanks for yet another interesting, informative, and thought-provoking video. It made me think about my experience with teams and experts. The best and most successful teams I've worked on were small and everyone was an expert. If there was something outside our expertise we learned it or added another person as needed. I've also been an expert passed around to other teams. My experience with that was no good deed goes unpunished. It was also a path to burnout: the product would ship and everyone goes on vacation except the expert who is needed for some other project. I usually felt more like a software cleaning lady than an expert.
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  58.  @andreaszetterstrom7418  Event structure requires thought like anything else. You need to create a rational model to have a comprehensible result.
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  59. A user story is a description of the problem in the context of the user. A specification is a description of a proposed solution in the context of the dev. It is the developer story. They are dependent but separate different things. The better the dev's understanding of the user context the better (== faster) the result. In my way-of-working the developer story is a general outline of the solution app or feature expressed as narrative (no implementation details). The most important skill I have developed as a dev is the user interview. Another important skill is the ability to look things up. Both skills are simply the ability to ask the right question. You ask the right question by understanding the context.
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  60. Also, I am not a freelancer. I am a software house with a product. I work for myself, not clients.
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  61. Bernie Sanders
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  62. 🌟 🤩 ⭐ 🌠 💫 ✡ 🌟 Dave squared equals violent agreement! I had to watch twice so I could look up abbreviations. Excellent and enjoyable. Note from a harpist: the conductor is waiting for the orchestra's attention.
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  63. My synopsis of yet another very fine video: Strive to write code that is both readable and robust.
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  64. Excellent topic choice! Efficiency is the basis for the experiment that is Brown Horse Software. My app is based on a simple network of asynchronous phone networks with data distributed on ranked nodes. The constraints are that it can be both written and maintained by one person and run for pennies. The app itself is a niche app designed for mutability. My Google App Engine cloud footprint is about 500 lines of message switch and network admin code. My monthly cloud bill in development has been .01 usd. Phones are probably the greenest platform around.
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  65. Excellent video! What you call froth, I call noise as in signal-to-noise ratio. Most of the differences between languages today is just sugar. I worked on both COBOL and Java internals in the 90's. X86 assembler. (I never wrote a single line of COBOL.) I saw the dawn of both JVMs and .dlls... 😮
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  66.  @iamhereblossom1588  Using matrix manipulation in APL to produce a simple summary report required more memory than was available on a small mainframe in the early 1980s. Most of the time was probably spent swapping things in and out of memory. Even COBOL would have been overkill - Easytrieve was sufficient.
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  67. Thanks for another very enjoyable video! I prefer to think in terms of code base stability. The term technical debt reminds me of the IBM mainframe term for program crash: abend. As in abnormal end. Your program has abended they would say. It is not wrong but also not very descriptive of the situation: you have confused the processor, it has given up, dumped its memory, and continued on its way. Technical debt just does not describe the escalation of problems that can happen in an unstable system. I have made a career of refactoring code bases into stability. That is most of the task on the 'system' side: programs that run other programs. Most of the effort is in coming to understand what is there and how and where it can be improved.
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  68. Very excellent video! Makes me want to work for Spotify.
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  69. I think you might be using craft in a very specific way rather than in its more general use to describe something one practices to get better at. Such as 'writing is a craft'. I find the comparison to childhood creations off the point. Software is so ephemeral that it works like a mirror- descriptions of it often illuminate the describer more than the described. So, since my my major was literature, I have always treated software development like any other writing assignment. And that has worked very well.
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  70. Internet of things...
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  71. ​ @giorgos-4515  Yes, it's true that one can read well-written code like a book but I think the connection goes deeper. Programs consist of executable and data parts: narrative and description, operator and operand. A thread of execution is like a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I could go on...
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  72. Working on microservices sounds a lot like working on platform software. But I have an address-related story from when I started my second job at a bank services shop.. It was 1980, ATMs had just become legal in Chicago, and my first assignment was to generate an input tape for an outside firm to print address labels. I was given a format to generate with separate fields for number, street name, direction, town, etc. I had to write a parser to produce this from free form 2 line addresses. It was a nightmare. Everyone started panicking because the labels were unusable. So, while I wrote a little label generator for the free form input, the ops manager went out and got some labels. Less than hour later, voila - here are your labels. They had never bothered to ask if we could just print the labels ourselves.
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  73. My solution is to avoid complexity by designing for high network latency on the computer that fits in your pocket. I use an App Engine Standard headless web app to pipe async messages to other phones via Firebase. The app runs on simple local file system xml. I use the cloud as a message switch and Google does all the heavy work for pennies a month.
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  74. What drives development if not verification? There is a Dijkstra quote about having logically proven that some code is correct, one cannot verify that it works until it is run. The most useful test tool I've used in my career was an in-house record compare program called C12RC that could compare two complicated sequential inputs in amazing ways: late 70s at the Chicago electric utility where I learned programming. In the system and program utility context where I've spent most of my time it is more often the case that you find a test rather than write one. For a Java platform on a device there are conformance test suites for every api. But those tests are just the baseline. You also need to test real applications. But this work was more about optimisation, extending apis, and refactoring out the confusion that manifests itself as fragility or resistance to change than about generating new functionality.
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  75.  @berkes  You have just reinforced my point, not its opposite. Interviewing users is a developer's most important skill, not taking instruction from some great product guy. The problem with isolating developers from users is exactly that it focuses the developer's attention on the solution instead of the user's problem.
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  76. ​ @ContinuousDelivery  In a browser your UI is in service to your backend. On a phone your backend is in service to your UI. On my phone app this makes everything transparent to the user. Run == test. Instead of swapping out the UI to test, I swapped out the backend from network to file system. Startup time including deployment from the IDE is seconds. The cheapest cpu is on phones.
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  77. When did enterprise devs stop being responsible for their work? When I started and worked on mainframes EVERYTHING ran in the middle of the night. If the job that was your responsibility crashed, you got in your car and drove in to fix it because other jobs were waiting and operations had to get all the output printed before a certain time. I became famous among the ops folk for refactoring away problems in programs that crashed. It was a tricky environment because it took a week to process the entire customer base. And lots of things happened on cycles of different lengths. I worked for Chicago's (and suburbs) electric utility. Same thing when I worked for a banking data center. I left that in favor of writing custom PC applications in the mid-80s. So when did things change?
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  78.  @markapgar7437  At that point I was doing shrink wrap language and tools in SV... I was always the most productive working with not against operations so best of luck with your efforts!
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  79. Great vid! It sounds to me like people often use the word platform when they really mean tool. From someone who has spent a lot of time working on both. A platform is something you stand on that gives you wide access to functionality. A tool is something that customizes that access.
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  80. ​ @nijolas.wilson  'You' and 'yourself' is meant to refer to the software, not its author/authors.
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  81.  @nijolas.wilson The advantage of software talking to itself becomes very clear once you have visited dependency hell. I pray you remain ignorant of that dark and frightening place.
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  82.  @MK-lh3xd  Another astonishing thing about sw engineers is how quick they are to say another engineer's success is because of luck and special circumstances. In reality that is rarely the case.
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  83. 15:42 A bit flabbergasted to hear this view of how things were in the 70-90's. It is fantasy. Most businesses ran package software and hired people to maintain it. If you did get the chance to write something from scratch, it became your lifetime responsibility because management was frightened by it. The first question was always "what is everybody else doing?". Not "how can we solve this problem?". I am speaking from first hand experience. I wonder what books gave you such an impression. Open software was a response to package software.
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  84. If congressional action is required both to uphold and override section 3, what purpose does section 3 serve? Doesn't this ruling more or less remove it from the constitution?
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  85. In my experience this is agile vs waterfall or (since I learned programming at a large electric utility and then designed and implemented an ATM system at my next job) an engineering vs a bureaucratic approach.
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  86. Stream of consciousness blather is not a speech.
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  87. Thank you so much. My 2 cents: Stop investing in CEOs and start investing in education and labor. Education is the bulwark against lies. All hate is based on lies.
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  88. Thanks for another excellent video! You are singing my tune. The basis of good design is making no assumptions. Always testing for and handling failure is the key to robust code. That is what queues are for...
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  89. Gender bias in the software industry, at least in the US, is clearly expressed by the discrepancy in pay as well as expectation.
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  90. Why are we struggling to automate tasks that people already struggle to learn? To me AI just seems like a huge waste of resource that spells disaster on more levels than I can count.
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  91. Excellent AND mind-blowing! Your explanation skills are unsurpassed. My programmer brain understood it as there being 1 of 2 possible states in a binary digital computer and any number of n possible states in a quantum computer. That is why you need another dimension (matrix) to describe it.
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  92.  @BrunoCodeman  Not if you work for yourself.
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  93.  @BrunoCodeman  You already defined that term, not me. This is the age of information and the internet where infrastructure is available for pennies. The "means of production" no longer has the same relevance as it did in the industrial age. I am not arguing about means of production. I am talking about employment safety where, yes, workers are not only involved but more highly relevant than means of production. Software is not made in a factory.
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  94. One of my Norwegian friends refers to Musk as 'Space Karen'.
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  95. My experience with hierarchy: No good deed goes unpunished. I have worked on several good projects. All based on cooperation sans hierarchy.
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  96. The suits will never understand that software development is a recursive process. Why would managers support their own elimination?
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  97. ​ @FudgeYeahLinusLAN  Hey, I feel you. I experienced the heaven of working for an actual agile software company which turned into complete hell when we were acquired by a large waterfall company.
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  98. I started programming in 1977 in assembler on IBM 360/MVS. When I left 3 years later they replaced me with 4 people. I was hired because I got a very high score on the IBM programmer's aptitude test. They taught me assembler in 3 months. It was the last place I worked where there was more than one other woman developer until 2011 when the Norwegian feature phone platform I did the Java integration for was acquired by Nokia. I really enjoyed the interview. I was rather surprised to read the comments, however, which are remarkably unenlightened. The question at hand is how does one attract women to the field, not whether women can do software. As one of those few women who does, I recommend simply pointing out that even though you will probably be paid a good deal less than your white male counterparts, it will still be enough money to pay your horse's board.
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  99. Great video! 🌟 🤩 ⭐ 🌠 💫 ✡ 🌟 The sync vs async question dates back at least to my mainframe days in the late 70's/early 80's when IBM was sync and everyone else was async. At least in the land of ATM (banking) networks. Device software is perhaps more obviously event-driven. Nokia had a message-based OS. Rather than going from the abstract to the specific work should proceed from the specific to the abstract. That is how simplicity and optimization is achieved because the architecture will be designed for specific constraints.
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  100. I was advised to abandon my first attempt at a career as a harp major at a music conservatory by my top tier teacher (and first female member of The Cleveland Orchestra) not for lack of ability but because I "was interested in too many things".
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  101. Count me in. I'm in the choir, too. Your videos are excellent in every way and I get a kind of moral support from how closely your ideas mesh with mine.
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  102.  @qj0n  I am only speaking from decades of experience working on compiler, jvm, and platform internals. Perhaps the wikipedia author had a different experience. Please note the first words of my original reply were "I've always heard".
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  103.  @ContinuousDelivery  My reference was the Wikipedia article on simula. The reference origin was my Oslo colleagues, not my actual knowledge of the history of software development which is sparse at best. So there may be some national bias at play here. Are you making point that OOP developed over time while FP was created in one go? Is that the fuzzy part?
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  104. The future is now. I've implemented an entirely message-based logistics phone app using Firebase messaging. No database just distributed JSON graphs. My data tool is a text editor. It is totally flexible and ridiculously easy to debug. The time it took to implement was due to the complexity and bugs in the Android life cycle, not the data architecture. The only bit in the cloud is an endpoint to pipe the messages to Firebase.
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  105.  @robertprice9052  Do you understand what life experience means?
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  106. Campaign finance reform. Render Elon powerless. Regain control of congress. Save democracy.
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  107. Did the whole concept of command line/runtime flags just get lost at some point? Or have I been working on platforms and tools for too long? By ownership did you mean responsibility? Or possibly silo?
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  108. Also - btw - Trump is insane from rapidly progressive dementia.
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  109.  @Solaar_Punk  Not to mention fixing other people's code.
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  110. I love seeing those words come back to bite him!
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  111.  @aaronbono4688  I've never had a programming class in my life. My major was English Lit. Even the training course for 370 assembler was an IBM self-directed course. At one point I contemplated getting a degree until a colleague who was going for his Masters (or was it PHD?) in CS told me not to bother. "You already know way more than they do." So I cannot comment on how universities teach CS...
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  112.  @aaronbono4688  I think the most important thing for success writing software is the ability and tendency to dive head first into a topic at the drop of a hat and continue diving until you have a grasp of it. I don't know how to teach that.
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  113.  @aaronbono4688  Learning how to write for a silicon audience sounds a lot like learning how to write for people.
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  114.  @stengrafflarsen  You can define a listener that receives any or all or n of any set of events you wish to implement. There is no limit to how the interactions behave. It depends on the use case. A push client can handle any number of events.
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  115. Anyone who has spent time closer to the metal knows that computers are event-driven beasts. Heck, msdos was invoked as an x86 interrupt. And it goes way farther back and deeper than that. XEROX PARC etc.
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  116. Excellent video. I wish I had had it to show to all the managers who ignored my warnings about these very things and gave me major flack when I pushed back.
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  117. Thank you for a super excellent video. I had the incredible luck to learn programming in assembler on mainframes where the complexity is not as hidden as in higher level languages. So my "normal" is probably more comfortable with asynchronous programming than most. Then I went on to write program debuggers which is all about asynchronous event handling. So when I wrote a phone app with an async messaging interface, I was not surprised at how well it performs - what had not occurred to me was how easy it is to debug. Since every interaction is encapsulated into a message, all you need to do is save a copy of the message stream and you have an excellent map to guide your bug hunt. Hours upon hours saved because the need to go back and try to reproduce a problem is eliminated. I have spent dozens of years fixing bugs in other people's code and usually the hardest most time-consuming bit is figuring out how to reproduce the problem and narrowing down the culprit code. I handled the shared data modification complexity by having all updates handled on a single device. Also important to make each message atomic and delivery order agnostic because Firebase messaging does not guarantee ordering. In the few cases where there was too much data for a single message, the incoming queue is used to sort that out. Long story short- I've gone from being tolerant of async interfaces to becoming a full blown fan.
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  118.  @mecanuktutorials6476  I totally disagree. Building incrementally creates robust code because it is constantly run and tested. The software grows organically. There is never a need for tape of any kind.
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  119. Why would anyone choose a waterfall as the metaphor for project management? You start on a smooth river then things get dangerous when you hit the rapids until suddenly you are flung over the edge and smashed to pieces.
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  120. @CarolBass-e5r  Why do you ask? How old are you?
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  121. Did you contact them and report the bug?
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  122. My learning points are continuous. You could say I practice Continuous Learning. Even when learning that something is not new!
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  123. Excellent video! Make haste with deliberation.
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  124. You might like to know the rest of this quote. It is "A good rider is never in a hurry. Make haste with deliberation. " The source is my riding mentor and the advice is on how to jump a stadium course. It's a timed event but if you go too fast the horse will jump flat and knock down rails and you won't make tight turns. So you walk the course, plan your route, and then try to convince your horse to execute the plan. Not so different from writing software.
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  125. On this topic https://youtu.be/jAHRbFetqII
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  126. Couldn't we start pronouncing it 'doggy'?
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  127. Programs are one or more plot lines. Data is organization. Code is focus and plot. Software exists in time like music - it is serial. Speaking for myself, being an English lit major who is wicked good at math and music from a family of engineers is an excellent background for a software engineer. 😉
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  128. 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🤩
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  129. Use a queue.
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  130. Tools and languages don't write buggy code, people do.
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  131. Thank you for another great thought-provoking video! My career has been defined by the great team or two I have managed to be a part of. Something even more important than sharing top skills within a team is how they have your back. That is what transforms a group into a team. Also, I'd like to point out that people who work on mobile phone software have a term for a phone that does not connect to anything: it is called a brick. I have (mostly) worked remotely since 1991 when I was told to do so after an acquisition landed me in a cubicle in a huge open sales office where phonecalls were announced over the intercom and the colleague seated next to me spent all day talking on the phone to his mother in Russian. Every few minutes a plaintive "Ma-ma!" My productivity went through the roof. After that, except for a few years after an employer was destroyed in the twin towers, I worked for companies with an office on the other side of a continent or an ocean or the planet. One makes adjustments for the time difference but most of the time we simply communicated through code. The occasional email as needed and a weekly stand-up where everyone has 90 second max to give an update. But this can only work when there is a high level of both trust and safety.
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  132. I'd say the myth is just another artifact of testosterone poisoning. I am convinced that my success in software is based on listening skills. That is all you need to frame a good question. Some people do like to work on their own but for me the joy comes from the effect my software has on people. Knocking around ideas would come in second. The small iteration, reponse, and variation method is how you train a horse - and also how they train you.
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  133. I always start with the UI which keeps you on a track of making the fewest assumptions as well as additional insight into the functional design. The initial design is the simplest list of the tasks the software needs to accomplish which grows as you work on (code and run) the software. You always build on what works so writing test code is superfluous. The backend can evolve independently and your backend bugs are immediately visible. I don't know if my process has a name. 😀 Your video has inspired me to formulate something I just took for granted.
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  134.  @mx-hx  I did not say that testing is superfluous, I said writing test code is superfluous. That is because the production code IS the test code. On the contrary, the code gets more testing because you always run the final code, not a generated test based on a possibly false assumption.
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  135. Why are we wasting a huge amount of energy and effort to evolve a car into the thing it replaced? How about putting these resources into humanity instead of burning the planet in order to evolve a dog and a pony? Why not put some thought into our actions. That this decision lies in so few hands is my greatest concern.
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  136. Everything on a phone is event-driven. I think that fact and the complete absence of msft are why I like to work in that space so much. This comes up against a strong bias amongst developers favoring the command model. My experience on Android is their urge to 'simplify' things by hiding event interaction in the platform. All that does is add cycles and create thread production mayhem. I don't know this because I use these features, I know this by observing what gets deprecated. By taking advantage of the event architecture, I have never had a performance problem.
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  137. Writing is revision.
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  138.  @pluto7562  How does one woman's observation make other women invisible?
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  139. ChatGPT is not a trusted source. It has no concept of truth. It is simply the most likely next word.
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  140.  @MK-lh3xd  Actually, after implementing a second next generation of the ATM system, I had five years of a successful PC software business doing the projects that in-house departments turned away. I developed an excellent phone manner and found physical proximity not to be an issue. It all went well until the economy tanked and project funding dried up. In those 5 years I did 30 projects with only one failure (my single attempt at RPG III).
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  141.  @MK-lh3xd  I cannot help but wonder whether you would be astonished to learn that a more appropriate response would have been "You go girl!"
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  142. The purpose of a manager is to attend meetings on your behalf. Your purpose is to fix the problems you find, not report them. Save the report for after it's been fixed.
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  143. ​ @ContinuousDelivery  I would characterize it as a con on top of being hype. I have seen too much fraud in the industry to think any other way. And whatever you consider the consensus it is pretty clear that the climate does not care. Between AI and crypto the consequences will only become more dire.
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  144. I would call it pathology at this stage: maga pathology. As in mental illness.
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  145. When the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When your only software tool is a browser, everything looks like a website. I was around in the early Netscape days when I worked on the Symantec JIT. They were one of our customers and once sent me the browser source for testing on a jaz drive. Too big to transmit in the 90's. But that was real Java...
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  146.  @edgeeffect  Thanks, you prove my point.
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  147.  @EtienneSavardz  Thanks for the info! I have a BA in English so there is no gray area for me. :)
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  148. Does Trump even know who won WWII ?
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  149. Only djt would put Canada and abusive in the same sentence.
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  150.  @markhathaway9456  The story of my life.
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  151.  @Gwen2010ish  yes yes YES!!!
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  152. Please stop leaving out the COST of AI while you are trying so hard to make it useful for something, anything. The inputs to AI are not just prompts - the energy it uses is massive not to mention the human toll in job loss.
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  153. As Maxwell Smart said, "Give a man an inch and he thinks he's a ruler."
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  154.  @microcolonel  ha ha ha 😂 🤣 😆 😄 😅 😜 😂 🤣
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  155.  @metalalive2006  Loyalty can still exist in small companies. But corporate management and loyalty are like fish and bicycles - they don't operate in the same space.
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  156. Where you say "positive" I'd say "delusional". The very first thing I learned on this job is that defensive code/design is robust and therefore both resilient and reliable. Error handling is job one. I have too many stories of stupid, easily foreseen disasters to recount.
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  157. I liked this video even before you began speaking based solely on your t shirt. Otherwise excellent video as well.
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  158. ❤ 😍 💖 ❣ 💕 💘 ❤ 🌟 🤩 ⭐ 🌠 💫 🌃 🌟 Best video so far.
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  159. 1875 is the birth year value used by the system to indicate that the birth year is unknown. Why? Because it is a valid yet impossible date. Musk is an idiot.
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  160. Our feature phone platform had an installable component service-based architecture in order to cover a wide range of target phone capabilities. Before iPhone.
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  161. Jasmine Crockett is outstanding!!!
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  162.  @RicardoSilvaTripcall  I think it is an illustration of one difference between what is required for success as a harpist vs what is required for success as a programmer.
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  163.  @niuniuch  But you must write the test before you write what you are testing. And if you write the production code before the test it is no longer TDD...
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  164. Coding is not accounting.
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  165. ​ @qj0n  Regression tests test only for regressions, not correctness. Compliance or conformance tests test for correctness.
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  166.  @qj0n  Your memory is quite different from mine. In my experience CS has had a different standing in the industry: "Those who cannot do, teach".
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  167. 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟
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  168. Elon Musk is an idiot. He thinks government is a corporation. He lies about government projects. Yet another narcissist.
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  169. Excellent video! Getting in trouble for taking a different, simpler and ultimately wildly successful approach is the story of my career. Dogma is the enemy of innovation. One question: where does the concept that ideas are equal arise from agility? It isn't something I came across when I worked for an actual agile company.
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  170.  @ContinuousDelivery  First OOP is generally believed to be Simula in the 60's in Oslo. O.J. Dahl and Kristen Nygaard
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  171.  @ContinuousDelivery  What is the fuzzy part of the origin?
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  172.  @ContinuousDelivery  My history bias is mostly ignorance- I am a programmer of vast experience but little computer science education and rely on my university educated colleagues for historical questions. So I probably have a Norwegian bias after a decade as the only American developer in an Oslo based company. 😀 As far as the first computer - I'd say it was older and fuzzy with origins in programmable looms. Why do you think most of the earliest people doing programming were women? Concept-wise it would go back to Ada Lovelace.
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  173.  @Eurydice870  Reagan destroyed LBJ's programs.
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  174.  @silkwoodart  What's your point? That LBJ is responsible for Reagan? That's more than a bit far-fetched.
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  175.  @silkwoodart  But I never mentioned LBJ. My point was about Reagan. Your point is irrelevant.
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  176.  @silkwoodart  Reagan stood against everything LBJ tried to accomplish by declaring a war on poverty. Reagan instead waged a war against poor people. That is nothing less than destruction.
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  177.  @silkwoodart  LBJ had The Great Society. Reagan had Trickle-Down Economics.
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  178. Perhaps we should tax AI vendors for work (as we humans are taxed) at a rate based on the magnitude at which they accelerate human work or, better yet, carbon footprint. Tax income will provide a universal basic income for displaced workers.
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  179. Hey Elon, if you want American engineers invest in educating engineers instead of living off other countries' education infrastructure.
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  180. I did the Java MIDP implementation on a feature phone platform where the UX was FP (an in-house Scheme variant) and the backend was OOP (C++).
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