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Jenn Turner of Fastly and Glitch shares her journey from journalism to open source, navigating a technical field as a non-technical contributor, and some tips on maintaining work-life balance.
![](https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-images-2024/podcasts/images/2/27729c65-f4a6-4496-8c86-820e7f13b285/episodes/f/fee7e186-c107-4c5e-9304-ed0b98244098/cover_medium.jpg?v=2)
Jenn Turner of Fastly and Glitch shares her journey from journalism to open source, navigating a technical field as a non-technical contributor, and some tips on maintaining work-life balance.
I have to say, the amount of frustration I have in day-to-day work didn't decrease when I switched from MacOS to Linux on my workstation, but I did gain the ability to fix those frustrations and move on.
Ohh gotcha I see what you mean - so it's actually that the map
isn't initialised (still one of the annoying things Go does, you have to make(map)
to initialise it), the key
being unused just stops us compiling.
I do agree it'd be useful to have a way to catch uninitialised map
s earlier!
@probablyfine the actual useful thing is for software developers to care about their writing skills, which is a vanishingly rare trait
Attached: 1 image
Start submitting your pull/merge requests, Hacktoberfest is here! If you haven't already, make sure you've registered for Hacktoberfest so that your PR/MRs created + accepted throughout October can be tracked. Get started: https://hacktoberfest.com/participation
I took a few days off, left the house (this part was a mistake), caught an illness and now I'm back at work feeling rubbish and just not very clever!! Please nobody ask me any hard questions ...
Variable key
isn't used?
Here's the current state of the tech industry: A week or so ago I went for a big group meal and at the end they brought the card reader machine for us to pay and it had an option for us to go through an itemised bill, check some options, and pay for just those options (plus an equivalent fraction of the service charge). It was amazing! This genuinely saved us about half an hour of talking at cross-purposes and poking numbers into our own phone calculators and hoping nobody did the sums wrong and accidentally stole someone else's tip. I genuinely would consider going back there for future group meals despite the fact that I'd finished my food before Alec's arrived and he'd finished his before Darren's came, so thoroughly do I dislike the traditional bill-splitting process. And yet in terms of technology, it was nothing but a low-end smartphone running an app built entirely from OS-standard UI components. No AI, no invasion of privacy, no adverts, and I have to assume no VC funding or elaborate toolchain. Just a good idea implemented well, and genuinely we all went away commenting about how clever and useful it was. And I don't remember the previous time I experienced that. We know what people want. They want you to use the massive technological advances we've already made to build useful things that work. But apparently there's no money in that đ¤ˇ
a month ago i left a job i held for several years, a job that took me through a winding road of launching a product, going through an acquisition, lots of high points and lows...but ultimately i got to end the journey on my own terms, on my own time. i couldn't have asked for anything more, especially given the state of the world. i'm so very proud of my work at glitch and fastly, and it's special how i got to be one of just a handful of people who can say they have grown and lead millions of developers in creating the web and community! it was a lot of fucking work, though, and i need a break.
Nick Nisi joins Adam and Jerod to talk about Karaoke, ARC and the business model of web browsers, this WordPress drama, and an epic bonus for Changelog ++ subscribers.
Between and I took 4590 steps.
Converting a Reveal.js slide deck to PDF (1 mins read).
How to convert a Reveal.js slide deck to a PDF, using Decktape.
PDF exporter for HTML presentations. Contribute to astefanutti/decktape development by creating an account on GitHub.
Getting symlinks to work with a git clone
on Mac (2 mins read).
How to restore symlinks in a previously cloned repository, where core.symlinks=false
.
Between and I took 2509 steps.
Some Go web dev notes
Using a separate Go module for your tools.go
(2 mins read).
How to use the tools.go
pattern to source-track your Go tool dependencies, but without polluting your top-level go.mod
.
Between and I took 7420 steps.
Week Notes 24#39 (5 mins read).
What happened in the week of 2024-09-23?
Simon is one of the best-known software engineers experimenting with LLMs to boost his own productivity: heâs been doing this for more than three years, blogging about it in the open.
Between and I took 5673 steps.
"Substack CEO Chris Best said he didn't want to "engage in speculation" about statements like âall brown people are animals."" Given another opportunity to answer correctly by the interviewer, âYou know this is a very bad response to this question, right? Youâre aware that youâve blundered into this. You should just say no. And Iâm wondering whatâs keeping you from just saying no," He declined. So, fuck him. And fuck his site. I'll NEVER use Substack. #BlackMastodon https://gizmodo.com/substack-ceo-doesnt-know-if-should-ban-overt-racism-1850337647
Tech twitter ("tech X"?) is abuzz with Paul Graham's Founder Mode essay. How does that affect you or come into play when you're not a founder? Does it matter at all to you, your projects & your code?
Join us at Orca Security! New roles for Go Developers opened, hand in your CV (and tell 'em Shay sent you :) )Backend DeveloperRuntime Security ResearcherAgent DeveloperDevOps EngineerProposalsđ¸ď¸ cmd/compile: relax wasm/wasm32 function import signature type constraints"Types" in the WASM specđ...
Between and I took 6606 steps.
If you missed it, you can catch the recording at https://www.youtube.com/live/yi5jPnyF9gc
In light of the whole word press situation, I would like to reiterate that free software institutions should be giving the same kind of attention and support to project governance as they do to licenses. It's badly overdue. I think we can say it's dereliction not to.
Some try to keep on top of their emails by aspiring to reach Inbox Zero. I try to keep on top of my code by aspiring to reach Branches Zero. If you're taking continuous integration seriously, you should have zero branches most of the time, and they should only exist (a) if you're not doing trunk-based development and (b) for as short a time as possible.
If the Kubernetes material was honest about "your team will need recurrent annual training to remain current with this tool," adoption would crater overnight. That's not unique to Kubernetes, though it is fun to pick on them for it. _Nearly every_ significant infrastructure tool has this shape. Organizations that adopt these tools are unable to receive their value until their staff know how to use them, and that knowledge is deeply not self-sustaining.
Attached: 1 image "just roll with it" genuinely the best advice
Between and I took 9104 steps.
FWIW employees can go to a board and demand the replacement of a CEO if they find them incompetent. It's worse for them if it goes public. *looks at employees at Mozilla*
What happens when you take two #define champs (Taylor Troesh, Thomas Eckert), a grizzled veteran (Adam Stacoviak), a british bard (Mat Ryer), a PhD (Carol Lee) & you pit them against each other in a game of fake tech definitions?! There's only one way to find out...
Between and I took 16323 steps.
In my experience as a manager and leader, I spend a lot of time trying to get engineers to care more about business outcomes than technical issues. Not because I think the technical issues don't matter. But because I know if that if you're not trying to understand business outcomes, your judgment about the technical issues is going to be much worse. Many engineers fundamentally do not believe this to be true. And it's one of the things that sets them at odds with leadership.
Just realised Sam Altman is the Willy Wonka of AI.
wow 95% of LGBTQ+ adults registered to vote (according to this recent HRC survey sampling ~2400 in Aug 2024) I don't know their sampling methodology but that's pretty wild compared to any other voting registration stat I've seen. Similar to covid vaccine stats which are also wildly good for us. Makes me think about how folks only look to marginalized groups on the national stage to talk about disparity & trauma and not to learn from us as a dynamic, taking action, motivated success story.
no country that has a death penalty has the right to lecture others about human rights
The UK helped usher in the coal era â now itâs closing its last remaining plant The Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottinghamshire is slated to close on September 30th, marking the end of coal power in the UK. Itâs turning the page on an era of dirty energy that the UK helped usher in globally and now has to leave behind to meet climate goals. https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/23/24252195/last-coal-power-plant-close-climate-change-clean-energy
Anytime someone tells me they're pregnan I can't stop myself from blurting out EWW YOU HAD SEX WITH A BOY, i am 39 years old
What happens when the foundation behind a project isn't independent and empowered. The WordPress Foundation seems to not really be independent of Automattic or have any people working for it https://wordpressfoundation.org/about/financials/2023-financials/ Compare to @drupalassoc, @openjsf@social.lfx.dev and other more functional ones https://mstdn.social/@TechCrunch/113197135186493986
be careful not to mix up a mommy kink with a mummy kink; itâs all fun and games until sheâs pulling your brain out through your nose
Attached: 1 image When your IDP goes out of style