Hillel Wayne

You're welcome!

You, and I, and the entire software industry, it turns out.

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/i-ing-hate-science/ is the best summary I've found on that.

> Are Late-Stage Bugs More Expensive?

> (...) While there's no smoking gun, I think the body of research so far tentatively points in that direction, depending on how you interpret "late-stage", "bugs", and "more expensive". This is a newsletter, not a research paper, so I'll keep it all handwavey. Here's the rough approach I took to reach that conclusion:

> Some bugs are more expensive than others. You can sort of imagine it being a Gaussian, or maybe a power law: most bugs are relatively cheap, a few are relatively expensive. We'd mine existing projects to create bug classifications, or we'd interview software developers to learn their experiences. Dewayne Perry did one of these analyses and found the bugs that took longest to fix (6 or more days) were things like feature interaction bugs and unacceptable global performance, in general stuff that's easier to catch in requirements and software modeling than in implementation.

> I've checked a few other papers and think I'm tentatively confident in this line of reasoning: certain bugs take more time to fix (and cause more damage) than others, and said bugs tend to be issues in the design.

As I see it, this is not so much about how long the bug has been in the system but about what kind of bug it is. Unacceptable global performance or…

When I first read the title, my reaction was: how dare they say my website isn't for me? Of course it is. It's my space to share thoughts, jot down notes from things I come across, publish small tools, and so on. That made me click through and see how the article could possibly argue otherwise.

Then I realised that the article talks about business websites, not personal websites. Quoting from the article:

> The website isn't for the founder, the marketing manager, or the board. It's for the person you've never met - the customer weighing up a purchase, the lead chasing a phone number, the visitor sizing up your credibility or the member signing up to access gated content.

Yes, I agree. While not really a business, I've always liked https://nhs.uk/ for its simplicity. I especially like the A-Z section where we can find details about a large number of medical conditions. Among actual businesses (small ones particularly) I like https://buttondown.com/ and https://kagi.com/ quite a bit.

That said (and this is off-topic for this article), the part of the web I enjoy most is where your website is indeed for you, the small web of personal websites. That part of the web was an important part of me growing up from my late teens into adulthood and it remains the part I enjoy most even now. I want this part of the web to remain healthy and vibrant for as long as possible.

As for JavaScript runtimes, having seen Lynx (and some of the internal work NativeScript is doing), I'd like to see more engine-agnostic runtimes rather than coupling each runtime to one engine.

As for writing, I'd like to stick to more manageable topics in future so that I can write as a hobby rather than as daunting work. My previous "Frontend predictions for 2024" (https://buttondown.com/whatever_jamie/archive/frontend-predictions-for-2024/) was similarly thorough and took an exhausting rush to write up. But simpler articles like "Staying productive with chronic pain" (https://buttondown.com/whatever_jamie/archive/staying-productive-with-chronic-pain/) were all possible to finish in a weekend.

There's probably a good story in Node-API, but I think I'd rather take on a research-light topic for a break first!

i am! oblomovka runs off a machine on my desk, which tends to crash whenever I walk out of my house, like today. However, this is an excellent notification that I'm now writing enough to maybe make it a bit more resilient.

(For real dannyobrien completists, I also write small more regular email newsletter at https://buttondown.com/dannyob of my work within the Filecoin Extended Cinematic Universe (which includes IPFS, libp2p, iroh, Bluesky, Spritely Institute, Guardian Project, Internet Archive, Prelinger Archive, DWeb Community, Foresight Institute, EFF, Muckrock, etc see https://ffdweb.org/projects , https://fil.org/ecosystem-explorer , https://directory.plnetwork.io/projects?focusAreas=Digital+Human+Rights%7CPublic+Goods%7CDevelop+Advanced+Technologies ). It's pretty lowkey though.

Author here, from another issue I sent about my definition of bad ads for this newsletter:

"tl;dr While I do exaggerate the “badness” of 80s tech ads to make things more fun, a nostalgic ad is not the same thing as an effective ad. What we see in advertising today is so depressing because it is often so bland AND more effective than its more playful predecessors."

They are fun to look at now. And soooo much more creative than marketing crap from today. But they're still 12-page long marketing gimmicks. I'd still take them over today's ads any day of the week, and that's why I spend dozens of hours every month tracking them down and learning their stories

https://buttondown.com/suchbadtechads/archive/bad-ads-defined/

It would be awesome to have a newsletter highlighting the top X articles (fully automated). You could start with a simple scoring system (page views) and maybe later add an upvote button so the most-voted articles get sent out each week.

Sending emails isn't cost-free, but AFAIK, Buttondown [1] has a free plan for up to 100 subscribers. It's dead simple: they provide an issue archive [2] and handle subscription for you [3].

With their 100-subscriber free plan, you could limit this feature to a close circle. Maybe later monetize the newsletter feature to cover the ESP costs.

[1] https://buttondown.com

[2] https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter/archive

[3] https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter