abrookins's comments

For the certification program at Redis University (https://university.redis.com/), we previously used ProctorU because that's what other folks were doing -- proctored exams for certification.

Buuut, after a while, we were like, why subject people to this? This is crazy. And why even charge for certs anyway? I'm happy we're done with proctoring!

Async Python has proven faster in my uses for IO and non-CPU-related stuff. But I think Python, either as a community or within the language, needs to solve the anti-pattern of maintaining separate sync and async versions of a library. I'm thinking specifically of aioredis and redis-py, both of which I've worked on.

Some people are looking at ways to solve this. I know urllib3, elasticsearch-py, and a few others use unasync (https://github.com/python-trio/unasync) to transform async code into sync code, leaving one codebase supporting both uses in different namespaces. This leaves you with some conditional logic (is_async_mode() -- https://github.com/python-trio/hip/blob/master/src/ahip/util...). I'm seriously considering this approach.

You can use Redis for full-text search and some more SQL-like queries, including aggregations, with RediSearch: https://oss.redislabs.com/redisearch/

This matches my experience of 24-hour on-call DBaaS shifts.

Super sad. I interviewed at Samasource early in my career. They had a cool mission, and Ms. Janah seemed really inspiring. Glad she got to do so much with the time she had.

Related: Parents of young children found to be completely dead inside

Very sad news. Most people I’ve met treat alcohol as a casual, mostly harmless substance. On the other hand, the world is filled with people dying quickly and slowly from alcohol addiction. This discrepancy can be very confusing, especially for young people, as it’s often not clear which camp you’ll fall into — until it’s too late.

Personally, I think alcohol is worth giving up. Why find out how bad things can get? In my case, I quit 10 years ago. In that time, I’ve built a career as a software developer, grown a marriage, and become a father. I have a great social life, deeper friendships than I ever had while drinking, and have replaced the access to creativity I used to feel by drinking alcohol with running and meditation. Sobriety is an extremely viable path.

You can start on the path right away. Before work every day, imagine your teammates and the things you like about them. Then ask, what would you need to know and do today to help keep the team safe and successful? What’s going on in the world of this particular team? What are the commitments, what are the threats (from inside and outside the team), etc.? Dwelling in that mindset every day is a good first step.

Ah, ha! I KNEW I had read about this, but couldn't find my notes on it, so I didn't include it. Thank you!

I own a Surface device, an iPad Pro, and a Macbook Pro. While I write code on all of them, macOS is still the king of development environments.

On macOS, you can just work. That's what the end goal should be in other platforms. I doubt iOS will ever get there. I mean, how are you supposed to copy and paste code from Vim running in tmux inside of Blink? With your finger? Hell's bells!

Windows is just too weird. If you compare them strictly from the perspective of using Vim, Windows is better than iOS. You can use Vim from WSL or a VM in a nice Linux terminal like Tilix running on a Windows-native X server. Boom, Vim is running right alongside your Python interpreter, $GOPATH, etc., and copy and paste works. (Let's set aside the fact that WSL is crawling with problems.) But if you use Windows, you'd kind of expect to be able to use more than Vim, right?

That ends up being a pit of snakes... multiple Windows-native X servers I've tried have problems rendering Intellij, and I've tried to get native Windows editors like VS Code to work smoothly with interpreters hosted in WSL or VMs. Only Intellij can really do it properly, and even then it depends on the language. It ends up being just another distraction.

Then there's running Linux desktop on a VM in Windows 10. I don't know how other people do this. Even with a beefy machine with two GPUs, no modern Linux window manager is performant enough to use. If you can find one like xfce that is fast enough, you end up having to manage the scaling on individual programs when you switch between high DPI and lower DPI displays. It's bananas!

So purely from the perspective of access to any tool you want to use and limiting distractions, macOS is still the best. I'm rooting for Windows, but only because I have a 2017 MBP and the new keyboards are painful to type on.

You know, I tried 16.04. 18.04 is worth a shot!

That's okay -- I'm sure they fixed something like that issue! The WSL team has been crazy busy, and their work so far is super impressive.

VirtualBox shared folders had their own problems. `npm` wants to create symlinks for commands provided by packages, but VirtualBox doesn't support symlinks by default on Windows shares. So you have to execute an arcane command to enable that feature -- every time you restart the computer.

Interesting to hear that performance is decent with the Samba share. I presumed it would be otherwise. In that case, Hyper-V with Samba may be my last shot at getting the machine to work for me... we'll see if I can muster any more enthusiasm.

Actually, it was as recently as this very week! Running with all the latest updates on a new Surface Book 2, I ran into a variation of this open issue: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/1982.

That was only the last and final blocking issue I ran into, after a series of minor (or at least, not serious) problems that I powered through during too many late nights.

Couple of things:

- Hyper-V. Was excited for this and tried it, since I had already set up Docker for Windows and pointed the CLI tools in WSL at it. However, Hyper-V didn't appear to have any support for the "shared folder" concept that VMWare and VirtualBox do. Is your only option here to set up Windows share and use Samba?

- I dislike running VMs generally, but would have gone that route if I could have gotten a setup I liked. However, after reconfiguring everything to use VirtualBox (including Docker) and creating a single VM there to do Docker and Linux stuff on, it seemed to tax the machine too much (i5 8GB SB2). With a beefy machine that would have worked better, but Windows 10 isn't that appealing if I have to buy the highest-spec machines and run VMs... that's exactly where it was 5-10 years ago.

I have a lot more to say about WSL and Windows 10, and it probably deserves a blog post. I haven't returned the Surface yet because I'm kinda in love with it, but also if I can't do all my work on it, then it's not something I need to own.

I've been hearing this about WSL for a while now. However, I just spent a ton of time (like weeks) actually trying Windows 10 and the Windows Subsystem for Linux (for those who don't know what WSL is), coming from a Mac, and I gotta say, WSL isn't there yet for the code I work with. Specifically, it worked fine for some Python stuff, it built some Go code decently, I figured something out for Docker, but then it blew up on the Rails apps I use (a missing syscall implementation breaks unicorn).

Aside from the potential to run into show-stopping problems like that, you may run into "big company" problems if you work for one, like I do. That is, VPN support within WSL only half-works, and because it's Windows you may be forced to follow domain policies that require Windows Defender to run, which slows down WSL, and blocks you from Insider builds that could fix WSL problems.

You can run a Linux VM on Windows instead of WSL. Which has its own set of problems and is overall a worse experience than developing on macOS, in my opinion.

So currently while, as a Mac user, I actually prefer the Windows 10 UI, the hardware competition, the keyboards, etc., I can't use WSL. Side-projects that you can adapt to WSL's limitations are one thing, but making it work as your development environment for a wide-range of professional projects is another. I saw all this with some actual sadness because I'm tired of investing in Apple when they've basically abandoned macOS and are making so many hardware choices I disagree with, that affect me (keyboard, touch bar).

Nothing I've found on the internet has yet replaced the sublime excitement I felt when dialing into a local BBS in a small town in California when I was a kid.

There were maybe 4-5 people on at a time, but I still remember the total thrill of chatting with them and imagining who they might be, where in town they lived, what they looked like. Oh, and how much money I could make in Tradewars that day.

My biggest question about this feeling of a long-lost treasure has always been, am I just getting older? Is it just nostalgia for those first experiences of connection through a network? Because if I liked local BBSes so much, you'd think I'd like Facebook or Nextdoor ... but no, I strongly don't. I can't even explain why I don't like them, but it certainly has something to do with anonymity and imagination. In dial-up BBSes, MUDs, IRC, AIM, ICQ, and Livejournal, I was always anonymous. I could be whoever I wanted to be, express myself freely, make friends, and only then choose to reveal my identity — to individuals. Today, so much of the internet is predicated on establishing my identity as quickly as possible, and then profiling me -- tracking my behavior, building a chronology of my behavior, showing my timeline, revealing what I liked or disliked, compiling that data, repackaging it into a derivative, mining the derivative for value. It's so far beyond fun that it's exhausting even to describe.

The one thing I am pretty sure about is that this feeling of "I used to do X, it was so simple and fun, what happened?" can be more than just nostalgia. That is, I felt this way about something else several years ago -- tabletop role-playing games. I kept thinking, damn, the guys and I used to have so much fun playing those games: face to face, low-tech, up all night with our D&D sheets, laughing and drawing, etc. It seemed like simple nostalgia for childhood, until I got together some grown-ups and ran some D&D games. And you know what? Three years later, I’ve made some great friends, deepened existing friendships, and had a blast.

So I wonder if, for me, what’s missing in my internet is that feeling of a small community — and local, maybe? — with anonymity at its core. I’m not really sure and more thought is needed.

Oh my god. This is incredible. The thing that brings me back to the 90s the most is the tiled background on the Links page. I remember agonizing over those textures so hard.

Indeed. If you add an unsigned plugin (that is, one lacking a .safariextz file) to Extension Builder and try to install it from there, and you do not already have a developer certificate, you will see the message, "Without a Safari Extensions Certificate, this extension will only be available until you quit Safari." And it will be so.

Indeed, it is good. And for non-trackpad-users, Shift-Command-\ is the keyboard shortcut for "Show All Tabs," which also makes the tabs searchable.

So far, I haven't found a way to stop Safari from uninstalling an unsigned extension when it restarts. Have you? Because that would be great! More conversation about this issue: https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/3675

Totally valid. If they were going to change one thing about Safari, though, for me it would be to drop the required $99/year payment for a developer program membership just to distribute a signed Safari plugin. You can't really distribute plugins without a developer certificate, as Safari uninstalls them automatically when the browser restarts. Probably the worst Safari-related decision Apple has made recently, much worse than favicons, though I completely agree that they should return.