Pieter Herroelen

Hi, I'm Pieter. I write code for a living. Opinions are my employer's. he/him

[Pieter Herroelen @piether]

@TechnologyTulip @conflatedauto Too bad I don’t build systems only containing software. I manage systems containing software running on infrastructure, using the internet, used by humans. And unfortunately the software is built by a team of humans too :/

[Pieter Herroelen @piether]

@TechnologyTulip @conflatedauto Predictable by who? Some imaginary quantum computer?

[Pieter Herroelen @piether]

Bertrand Russell on large code refactors:

[Yan Cui @theburningmonk]

I was convinced the next breakthrough in developer productivity was going to happen with a new programming language or paradigm.

I spent a few years learning lots of different languages - Erlang, F#, Haskel, Clojure, Golang and Rust, to name a few.

But the leap for developer productivity actually happened in the infrastructure layer instead 😅 So I was off by a few abstraction layers!

I don't use any of these languages anymore. But some of the best things about Erlang have made their way into the Lambda execution environment.

e.g. Lambda's worker instances don't share memory and can fail independently, similar to Erlang processes.

A Lambda worker handles one request at a time so you don't have to worry about concurrency in your code and dealing with concurrent updates to shared state.
This is similar to how Erlang processes work, with its message box concept.

If a fatal error happens, the Lambda worker automatically restarts the process and continues to serve the next request. Similar to the supervisor behaviour in Erlang.

Even if I don't get to use any of these languages, the learnings from them are still valuable.
I've taken something from each and they have helped make me a better software engineer than I would have been otherwise.

They help me recognize patterns, common problems and solutions. Many of which transcend abstraction layer boundaries.

So, don't feel bad about learning things that you don't get to use at work. Learning can be its own reward :-)

And with all the AI chatbots, it's easier to learn a new piece of technology than ever before.

[Pieter Herroelen @piether]

A pull request is never finished, only merged

[Internet Archive @internetarchive]

Welcome to the public domain, STEAMBOAT WILLIE (1928)! https://t.co/ELwRxlukIr

[Pieter Herroelen @piether]

@henkvaness @bpreneel1 @graylark My picture from the rooftop of Tour & taxis in Brussels was mistakenly recognised as taken from the rooftop of the MAS museum in Antwerp

[Pieter Herroelen @piether]

@AuschwitzMuseum Could it be “La Louvière” ? Never heard of Laliviere

[Visa is doing marketing consults (see pinned!) @visakanv]

One of the biggest tells that someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about: glossing over addressing resource constraints, or saying things that imply infinite resources. Effectively everything is resource-constrained, & seasoned practitioners are especially sensitive to this

[Pieter Herroelen @piether]

@jasoncwarner @QuinnyPig Bill Gates used to something like that. His famous email when he tried to download movie maker:
"I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in moviemaker. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing." https://t.co/K4zgPuUMoH

[Pieter Herroelen @piether]

Rest in peace, @stilkov

[Pieter Herroelen @piether]

@statto Is that not considered fair use? https://t.co/626VGD37SL

[Pieter Herroelen @piether]

Thus we’ve worked for 3 months to redesign the service, making sure it behaved as before. Making the behaviour change was … 3 days

[Pieter Herroelen @piether]

Make the change easy (change the structure)
then
Make the easy change (behaviour change)
@KentBeck at @ddd_eu

[Pieter Herroelen @piether]

For the past few months we’ve been working hard at implementing event sourcing. Why are doing that? Because the previous design had its limits and the next big feature would have exposed its flaws even harder

[Pieter Herroelen @piether]

@TechnologyTulip @trondhjort @barryoreilly @ddd_eu Oops sorry

[Pieter Herroelen @piether]

“The paradigm I’m fighting is structuralism.
We’ve been treating the world like there’s structured code behind it.” @barryoreilly at @ddd_eu #dddeu

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

@povgoggles Do I look like someone who codes?