Better Programming

Two core links,

"Why software engineering performance is hard to measure" shows a sample of dimensions we might assess developers on. It has some sample of dimensions we might perhaps use, just a starting place really, but not bad: high standards, delivery speed, reliability, team/company focus, open minded, & critical thinking. Ask yourself how many of these are easy to find good clear clean cut objective metrics we can assess people on.
https://betterprogramming.pub/software-engineering-performance-is-a-problem-area-4e8536b36513

And my god, apennwarr's recent System designs 2: What we hope we know is such a wonderful lovely intimate post/ramble touching in a number of places around how we have to embrace real complexity. Science loves control & hard numbers, and in this quest it resists seeing things as they are, as an accrual of many factors: "scientists absolutely bloody despise emergent complexity → systems design → magical thinking."

Incredible post for a number of great reasons; this is just one. https://apenwarr.ca/log/20230415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35580776 (180 points, 9d, 27 comments)

Management like scientists wants nice neat objective tools to understand the world with, without ever having to deal with emergent complexity. Most performance metrics & OKRs end up being dehumanizing, shallow, low-context. (That said, I think they can be helpful for high-context folks to better understand situations near to them & how things change over…

Are you talking about just people in the CS program or all university programs? My first pass through college was in oceanography and I definitely didn't treat it as a bootcamp. I had no idea what my job prospects would be like after graduation. I just knew I liked the ocean.

In terms of CS, I'm sure most of them are going for a job. But the fact that those who aren't isn't 0%, it makes it difficult to compare.

Also, the reasons for people not graduating college and not graduating from a 3-6 month bootcamp will likely differ as well. 4 years is a long time. There are many reasons why someone might drop out. So again, comparing graduation rates and job placement rates between uni and bootcamp won't really tell you much useful data, especially if you're trying to compare which one prepares students better.

And just to be clear, I'm not saying Uni is better or defending it. I have my own with college [1]. But I see too many people trying to deflect criticism from bootcamps when those criticisms are very well justified.

[1] Is a Computer Science Degree Worth It?: https://betterprogramming.pub/is-a-computer-science-degree-worth-it-8afc94524fd8?source=friends_link&sk=7e7d5f13ffd946cade9f0fe84d79a143

From a design perspective this looks really good, I like the components, the typography, the generated pages from Figma etc. Also the documentation seems to be clean and user-friendly. It's way better than most of the docs.

From the development perspective and from other comments that are here, and also from many articles like: https://dev.to/jaredcwhite/why-tailwind-isn-t-for-me-5c90 or https://dev.to/neophen/tailwind-is-bad-because-i-don-t-like-it-24eh or https://betterprogramming.pub/tailwind-css-is-probably-overhyped-5272e5d58d4e you can see that there are still a lot of people who hate the way Tailwind work with classes. But in the same time you can see that they have a steady grow month over month since April 2019: https://www.similarweb.com/website/tailwindcss.com/ that means some people love the way Tailwind is working with utility classes.

So I think this is a really good extension that can speed up the development process of people who like Tailwind. For those who don't like Tailwind, there are many other alternatives. There is no such thing that can fit for everybody.

Some questions
1. What did you use to create the docs?
2. What are your next steps with this project?

The best guide to using Bash is to read the manual (https://linux.die.net/man/1/bash).

Nobody who has ever used Bash has read the whole manual. It is actually good and useful, please read it. Yes, it is very big. But you will be using this shell for the rest of your life (even if you use Zsh, you will end up using other people's Bash scripts). Consider it an investment in your future.

...and now that I say that - try to restrict shell scripts to POSIX semantics (https://betterprogramming.pub/24-bashism-to-avoid-for-posix-compliant-shell-scripts-8e7c09e0f49a). POSIX is very simple and most shells can run it. If you need a Bashism, try Bash v3 first so it works on a Mac without Homebrew. Simple is better/portabler than complex. If you need something Bash doesn't provide, use any language that the majority of your team knows well.

If you want to test a specific version of Bash, there's containers @ https://hub.docker.com/_/bash (Macs use v3.2.57). Test POSIX scripts with `bash --posix`. Definitely use Shellcheck.

You might want to consider how much Microsoft uses it in their own products before choosing to use it. This article describes the situation pretty well:

"not even Microsoft, literally the people who own Xamarin, use it in any of their big products like Teams, Outlook, and the list goes on. Instead, they reach for native development or Electron. So we can just tie a bow in it and have a minute's silence for another end-of-life cross-platform software development framework."

"None of These Problems Are Solved With MAUI. The poor developer experience, how apps look, XAML being a pain, and these other core issues won’t be resolved by MAUI. So, if you already know Xamarin Forms, and you’re waiting for MAUI to land, but you’re not 100% thrilled with the experience so far, then it’s a great opportunity to think about learning something else."

Source: https://betterprogramming.pub/xamarin-forms-is-dying-and-maui-may-not-be-future-f0395575ac5d

I feel as if the article is a bit of “tea leaf reading,” but it does make sense.

> A verifiable track record is overlooked, while CVs filled with adjectives top the stack.

This is not new, but I do believe it has reached a crisis point, in tech. I’ve often posted about my own travails with this.

The most annoying thing, to me, is, despite all the hoopla about “disruption,” companies hire for conformity. They always have, but the screeching about being “disruptive” is fairly recent.

Protip: you won’t “disrupt,” if you hire people that “won’t rock the boat.” Truly innovative workplaces aren’t necessarily comfortable (especially for management).

It’s like classic waterfall companies that claim to be “agile,” because they have daily meetings.

I thought this linked article was interesting: https://betterprogramming.pub/why-software-companies-often-reject-awesome-programmers-38bea2ca3cc7