Werd I/O

“So I did a bit of drawing just to make it clearer (for myself) what kind of data can be shipped around in the Fediverse. To be clear, this is only a small part of the overall stack, but an important one.” Useful work! #Coding

“I’ve long been on the “spaces” side of the tabs vs. spaces preference debate. I think there is just something that feels sturdy and reliable about spaces. I’m wrong though. Despite not having swapped over most of my projects, I think that, objectively, tabs are the better choice.” Compelling! #Coding

“What I built isn’t an ActivityPub system as much as a Mastodon-compatible one. I think this is the key contradiction of the ActivityPub system: it’s a specification broad enough to encompass many different services, but ends up being too general to be useful by itself.” Interesting - I’m not far enough along in my own journey to see if I agree. But it sounds like there’s scope for a lot more standardization here. #Coding

“More importantly, like making visible all attribution statements for open licensed images, it makes the practice of doing so public. And it enables a chance to help others see, analyze, and learn from the alt text practices for others.” I like this a lot. #Coding

“I’ve set up a new git scraper to track the number of users on known Mastodon instances over time.” Great little tutorial on gathering data and building a really interesting graph out of it. #Coding

“The commit is our principle unit of work. It deserves to be treated thoughtfully and with care.” As always, a thoughtful approach to technical work from Simon. #Coding

“What I mean is that we’re at the start of another wave of change in our industry, where old trends and best practices give way to something new.” #Coding

“Copi­lot’s whizzy code-retrieval meth­ods are a smoke­screen intended to con­ceal a grubby truth: Copi­lot is merely a con­ve­nient alter­na­tive inter­face to a large cor­pus of open-source code. There­fore, Copi­lot users may incur licens­ing oblig­a­tions to the authors of the under­ly­ing code.” #Coding

“Guess which format is going to outlast all these proprietary syndication formats. I’d say RSS, which I believe to be true, but really, it’s HTML.” #Coding

“I'm not sure what the rationale is for maintaining the text mode FP IDE. It seems kinda quaint in 2022 to maintain a recreation of the old Turbo Pascal editor, but I'm so glad that it's there.” #Coding

I really like Simon’s summary of recommended software engineering practices. I agree with everything here, and this might encourage me to write my own additional list. #Coding