Tag: software
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A Three Rings development sub-team seems to have developed a habit of making production server changes at in-person events, right before meals are served. On at least one previous occasion this has led to them missing out on dinner as they monitored and maintained at-risk servers when they ought to be eating.
Until the servers are stable, they don't get their food.
They call it the "crash diet".
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Top 100 Geohasher
I'm now in the top-hundred geohashers! But the exciting achievement is that I upgraded geohashing.site from MediaWiki 1.31 to 1.43, after leaving it somewhat technically-neglected for about seven years!
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AI Software Development – What Does The Data Say?
Jason Gorman's summarised the state of the art in research into the efficacy of LLM-assisted software engineering, and I was reassured to see that it closely mirrors my own personal experience of these technologies, with which I've now experimented for several years.
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BeepAlive - keeping my soundbar from going to sleep
My dog ate the remote for the soundbar on my TV/media centre, and it keeps going into 'sleep mode'. So I wrote a software tool that periodically makes an inaudible noise to trick the soundbar into staying 'awake'. That's how a hacky engineer like me fixes a hardware problem with a software solution!
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Reply to: Deleting Systems You Don't Understand
Ibrahim Diallo shared his experience of deleting all his family PC's .ini files when he was 10, not knowing they were important, and compares it to what some developers do when they refactor-out something that seems insignificant. I reply with a story from early in my career...
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What breaks when one of your developers leaves?
On Friday, I said goodbye to a colleague as she left us after most of a decade with the company. Then this morning, all hell broke loose on some production servers.
Alt
DataDog graph marked to show a co-worker's departure on Friday evening being immediately followed by a flurry of errors which then stopped for the weekend before coming back in force on Monday morning.
It turns out that the API key that connected our application to our feature flag management platform was associated with her account, and hadn't shown up in the exit audit.
Let this be your reminder to go check where, if anywhere, your applications are using person-specific keys where they should be using generic ones!
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Letting Games Die
Inspired by Mike Cook's argument that old video games should be allowed to die, I was inspired to jot down some of my own thoughts and experiences in the area of video game preservation.
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Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists
ChatGPT lied about the functionality of Adrian Holovaty's software tool, Soundslice. So rather than try to get ChatGPT corrected, he just... implemented the feature it had claimed he already had. Is this the first time in history that this has happened? It could be!
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My Default Apps at the End of 2023
All the cool kids are sharing their "lifestack" as we approach the end of 2023. Here's mine.
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![Image representing post: Werewolves and Wanderer [Video]](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q26u/2023/07/werewolves-and-wanderer-title-978x480.png#21764)
Werewolves and Wanderer [Video]
Video version of my blog post about the video game that had the biggest impact on my life: Werewolves and Wanderer.
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Werewolves and Wanderer
A single text-based adventure game I found in a book in the 1980s taught me more about programming than anything else I experienced in that decade.
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Why Did Media Players Look Like That?
As MP3s took off, early player software looked... weird and ugly. To this day, I can't understand why.
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Minification vs the GPL
Does distributing only minified code violate the GPL? What about if the "minification" is minimal and hand-done as part of other code improvements? There's a grey area here, and Dan's going to overthink it!
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From Synergy to Barrier
Disenchanted by a lack of platform support, Dan switches from Synergy to its fork, open-source competitor Barrier.
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Syncthing
This month, Dan's in love with Syncthing, software that keeps his household's data where it needs to be.