Dennis Forbes, a Toronto software developer, writes on Go, floating-point numbers, web performance, databases, and consulting.
A commenter calls his floating-point article the best explanation of floats; others cite his posts on SQL Server query plans and image formats.
I had your view - I just read a number of his posts. You can define 'mental illness' to be almost anything, and it would encompass a lot of folks, but most of his writings were pretty balanced.
What I did see (and others did too) was a post about need $600k - needing a lump sum, then working on something and paying it all back from the 'riches' of the project. Now.. the 'riches' part may have been somewhat tongue in cheek, perhaps, but he was really going for some "go big go home" sort of project, and that didn't work out.
Now's probably not quite the time to criticize (and I'm not criticizing him), but when is there a good time? Dennis seemed to get caught up in the belief in "big payout tech projects". This isn't to say they don't happen, but Dennis' isn't the first story I've read of people "shooting big", then ending up in deep debt, deep despair, considering suicide. We don't read about these much - we generally read about the continuing waves of billion-dollar unicorns fronted by people continually younger than ourselves. It's gotta wear some people down.
I just bumped in to some folks a few days ago who are (independently) "buckling down" on their big "game changing" projects. While I only know these folks socially, if the projects fail, and one ends up taking his life (or even considering it), I will not be overly surprised (saddened, yes). But there's little I can do.
People chasing web/tech/app riches then falling in to debt/despair has got to be the…
For the record: he's OK
> I’m okay.
> Months of incredible levels of stress, coupled with weeks of little sleep, yielded some deeply irrational, illogical thinking that I of course regret, but can’t erase from my timeline. And for any sort of intellectual exercise, like software development, no sleep+stress = a recursive loop of ineffectiveness that generates more stress and even less sleep.
> I apologize to those I distressed, from family to remote individuals who I’ve never met but who cared. This is my first opportunity to post anything on this, and the lack of communications wasn’t an intentional act of dramatic exercise.
https://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2017/02/02/update/
Location: Toronto (well, Burlington)
Remote: Only
Technologies: Full stack, C#, C++, Swift, most web techs.
CV: https://dennisforbes.ca/articles/about.html
Email: dforbes@yafla.com
I have my own products (iOS apps and a SAAS play) and only work on other people's stuff part-time time to maintain diversity and sharpness in my universe of technology, and importantly to keep engaged with other people when otherwise I could go months without talking to anyone professionally.
If it's planning, consulting, advising, implementation, laying groundwork, analysis, integration, data-focused, I'd love to help.
Several years ago I made a basic, interactive explanation of the same-
https://dennisforbes.ca/articles/understanding-floating-point-numbers.html
At the time it was to educate a group I was working with about why their concern that "every number in JavaScript is a double" doesn't mean that 1 is actually 1.000000001 (e.g. everyone knows that floating point numbers are potentially approximations, so there is a widespread belief that every integer so represented is the same).
It's years old, but I listened to the advice of-
https://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2013/08/07/ten-reasons-you-should-still-use-nginx/
-and in re-analysis it all holds completely true. Nginx gives my deploy flexibility, at essentially negligible cost. And no Go development should include a bunch of boilerplate code to do banal stuff like serving static content.
Instead of using a new PNG standard, I'd still rather use JPEG XL just because it has progressive decoding. And you know, whilst looking like png, being as small as webp, supporting HDR and animations, and having even faster decoding speed.
https://dennisforbes.ca/articles/jpegxl_just_won_the_image_wars.html