Aaron Viviano

To God be the glory! Christian. Individualist. Architect and Engineer. Explorer. Space and Sci-Fi enthusiast. Opinions and posts are my own.
🇺🇸 🇮🇱 🇮🇹 🇫🇮

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

@minimaxir It’s frustrating that candidates are asked #ComputerScience technical questions for #SoftwareEngineering positions. We should be asking about design, maintainability, team skills, testing communication ability, the basics of programming, etc... not algorithms or trick questions.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Sunday rant.

For software engineering, my sense is that the phrase “premature optimization is the root of all evil” has massively backfired. Its from a book on data structures and mainly tried to dissuade people from prematurely write things in assembler. But the point was to free you up to think harder about the data structures to use, not leave things comically inefficient. This context is always skipped when it’s uttered.

Not all fast software is world-class, but all world-class software is fast. Performance is _the_ killer feature.

If you are in engineering, here is a fantastic anecdote. I refer to this account often. It’s a bit subtile, but the implications are massive-

It’s an account of how SQLite became 50% faster, not by doing one specific thing but hundreds of small ones.

SQLite is everywhere today because of this work.

https://t.co/krLFFps2up

We need the engineers in all companies fight for this more. Product leads are not the right owners of the end performance of the software. This needs to be encoded in the professional pride of the software engineering discipline. Leaders in companies need to encourage it and hold engineering accountable. It’s simply not ok to fritter away the performance of the products for random reasons.

Every user of your products cares exactly as much about latency as engineers do when typing in their terminal. They just don’t have the words to describe what they don’t like about the experience and neither should they.

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

One could object to this by saying "Premature Optimization". Yet if given the choice of "refactoring" a cement truck to go 0-60 in 10 seconds or designing a vehicle upfront to meet that acceleration curve and I know which I'd pick.

#programming

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

One can make it work, one can make it right, but if one doesn't plan for performance up front, it will be very difficult if not impossible to be fast.

#programming

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

One can make it work, one can make it right, but if one doesn't plan for performance up front, it will be very difficult if not impossible to be fast.

#programming

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

I think #Github should add bookmarking for repos. Most of my "stars" are just a way for me to remember to look at a repo for possible use in the future. I suspect a significant percentage of stars on repos are for similar purposes especially popular repos.

#programming

[Marco Foco @marcofoco]

10 Balls https://t.co/KtCWI1DoQW

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

Or perhaps just use the borrow checker for performance / security sensitive portions of the code?

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

I wonder if a language could combine garbage collection and a borrower checker? Use garbage collection for complex relational designs, such as UIs and then use the borrow checker for the underlying logic of the system?

#rustlang #programming

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

@KarlisZauers @ToughSf It also depends on the ease of automated construction. It might be super cheap to make such a space in the future and a selling point being the very "open" space. Plus it does make it easy to store large amounts of breathable air, which one probably wants anyway.

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

@KarlisZauers @ToughSf Still that's with me really trying to justify the design after a few minutes of thought. Probably much better to just use a space craft outside, but aircraft could be cheaper to make and not need rails. If anything fails at least the passengers are still in air vs vacuum.

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

Poor Skynet. It was so confused.

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

Since most users of social media just lurk, one could conceivably make a social media network of just fake accounts taking to each other in an interesting enough way for people to be entertained by. Maybe allow humans to like or dislike the fake posts for intractability?

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

It would be incredibly unexpected and strange if the thing that #AI is best at is creative works, but humans are best at logic. Wildly the reverse of #ScienceFiction predictions.

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

If #AI is the software version of nuclear physics, I don't think the industry has had its "Chicago Pile" moment yet and is probably decades and maybe centuries away from such an achievement.

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

🤔Not quite there, but interesting data.
https://t.co/Nn5CJSbePF

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

#JWST prediction 1: We'll find astronomical bodies (stars / galaxies / misc / undiscovered objects) older than the proposed ~13.5 billion year age of the universe.

#space

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

Python is the scales, C is the snake.

#programming

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

If I every make another programming language I think I would use ternary "tri"s instead of bools: False(0), True (1), and None (2) with the Tri defaulted to None. If one needed to FFI into C/C++ you could just use an u8 for a boolean.

#programming

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

@Sauain I would respectfully disagree. C or C++ contains many important concepts that a professional programmer should know prior to graduation: pointers, memory allocation, static typing, true multi-threading, building with compilers, etc.

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

@madskristensen This is excellent! Thank you.

[Aaron Viviano @AaronViviano]

Modern Software Development: