There Is No Irrelephant
Mike Jackson wants the blind men and their elephant retired as a lesson in systems thinking, and his reasons are good. The parable's flaw is its narrator, who stands outside the world he describes and always has.
Read articleMike Jackson wants the blind men and their elephant retired as a lesson in systems thinking, and his reasons are good. The parable's flaw is its narrator, who stands outside the world he describes and always has.
Read articlePele, Obsidian's new Mermaid graph renderer, has no DOM dependency and no runtime dependencies, which means it runs on GraalJS on a stock JDK, as well as being a very nice drop-in replacement for client-side Mermaid.
Emergent design says architecture should flow from how something is used rather than from how it was dictated. Inside a codebase, that’s tests pulling the structure into shape. Across codebases it’s something older: a narrow substrate, a caller nobody expected, and a universe that stops exactly where the primitives do.
In "The Geometric Model of Maintenance," someone finally checked the “one month of code, ten days of maintenance” rule against real git history. The number holds up. What it’s made of is worth a look, and so is what you’d need to measure before it tells you anything about your own code.
Nate Meyvis takes up a question AI skeptics keep raising: if AI-assisted coding is so powerful, where is the wave of new, good software? Several of his answers hold up well, particularly that approval chains don’t speed up and that much new software is private. What he doesn’t address is the question itself.
Terence Eden paid strangers to follow his README and found a dozen things wrong with it. Most of them a disciplined authorial pass would have caught first. A few, nothing but a reader catches.
Psychologically, almost every listener decides what you mean before you finish saying it, and decades of writing advice can’t fix that, because that's an aspect of the listener and the advice is aimed at the speaker. A language model is the first listener that takes instructions... and that gives us a way to fix the way we interact with the models.
Testcontainers, a project that uses OCI to provide, well, containers for testing for modules, has a reuse feature that lets a multi-module Maven build share one Postgres container across all test JVMs. This requires creating a separate database per JVM to maintain isolation and avoid migration conflicts.
BCN now runs on three front ends, a new Primate landing page, animated mastheads, and a backend that is finally becoming the stream aggregator it was meant to be.
Andrew Oram asked why programming languages rise and fall, and quoted the answer without noticing. Programming is a vocation, an art, and a job. Make any of those harder than they need to be, and your language survives exactly as long as it can't be replaced.
Audio
Pele, Obsidian's new Mermaid graph renderer, has no DOM dependency and no runtime dependencies, which means it runs on GraalJS on a stock JDK, as well as being a very nice drop-in replacement for client-side Mermaid.
Midden is a single-binary heap dump analyzer for the JVM, written in Rust. Tested against two deliberate leaks and checked against MAT, it found both and got the sizes right, from a shell prompt rather than a workstation, and very quickly.