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The Surprising Power of Documentation

from Vadim Kravcenko [alt+shift+b] in programming

I’m a big fan of documentation. I think it’s my favorite boring thing to do after coding. It brings the […] The post The Surprising Power of Documentation appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.
11th Jun 2023

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More from Vadim Kravcenko

What I learned building a $1K MRR SaaS in 6 weeks

Question: Answer: The post What I learned building a $1K MRR SaaS in 6 weeks appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.

9th Jul 2024 • 131 votes
I’m sorry

Question: Answer: The post I’m sorry appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.

9th May 2024 • 94 votes
How can you tell if you’re a good developer?

Question: Hey Vadim, So, I've been coding for money for about 5 years now. I've jumped around a lot — Java, Javascript, Python, NodeJS — you name it. The job market's been great, making it super easy for me to switch between gigs. I've done both full-time and contract work across many different companies. I think I've reached the level of being senior as I take on more and more responsibility. At every place I've been at, they seemed to love me. I always got the comments that I'm the best dev they'd ever had. But, personally, I've always felt a bit off. I'm good at bringing the team together and breaking down problems. Yet, there's always someone who can code better than me. They can whip up solutions way faster than I can. I get things quickly, but my code always seemed a bit messier. Now here is where it starts being interesting. I decided to switch jobs again, as Rust is the new fun kid of the block, I decided to switch things up by teaching myself Rust. Landed a job at a big-name brand recently, many thousands of engineers, and I'm feeling way out of my league. The devs here are on another level, I feel like everyone here is smarter than me, even the juniors are soo good, coming up with stuff I wouldn't even dream of. It's gotten to the point where I'm doubting if I'm cut out for this, especially having the title senior but not really being senior amongst my teammates. Makes me think of calling it quits. So, here's what my question is: How can I tell if I'm a good developer? Were my previous companies just bad? Now, I feel like I'm just not measuring up. Looking for some guidance or any advice you've got. Answer: The post How can you tell if you’re a good developer? appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.

6th Apr 2024 • 62 votes
Why software projects fail

Question: Answer: The post Why software projects fail appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.

14th Mar 2024 • 72 votes
Infrastructure: From Zero to Enterprise

Back when I was coding in 2007, my stack was straightforward. I had a shared hosting provider that cost me […] The post Infrastructure: From Zero to Enterprise appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.

3rd Feb 2024 • 57 votes

More in programming

The upvote dilemma

Hiding upvotes on the discovery feed

10 hours ago • 1 votes
The slopocalypse survival guide

Slop is without a doubt everywhere. Be it in restaurant’s menus, music playlists, or online game storefronts, it is now impossible to escape it. Yet, I’ve never met anyone who was actually looking forward to consuming that. No matter how hard it’s shoved down our throats, the human longing to connect with other people through art still remains. Raymond Kotewicz They will not let you filter A simple solution would be to have slop filters. Automatically label AI-generated trash, and let users hide it if they don’t want to see it. So far, I don’t think any of the major internet platforms has implemented this. The common excuse for why they don’t let you easily filter out slop is that it would be technically too difficult. Let me be clear with everyone here: this is complete bullshit. We’re talking about companies that can hire some of the most talented engineers in the world. I don’t think anyone seriously believes they can’t come up with a way to guess if a file has been generated by AI or not. 90% of the slop out there stands out so much everyone can see how it was made after looking at it for 5 seconds. A more plausible reason for the lack of slop filter is that they are simply testing out the waters. They are checking if users will tolerate it. The question tech executives want answered is: will people buy this garbage? And if the answer to that question is yes, here’s what they will do: they will start generating it themselves. They don’t need the useless meat proxies who think typing ten words and pressing enter makes them creative. They definitely don’t want to verse anyone royalties when they could just be making a one time purchase of tokens. If you think this is not real, just ask Tim Sweeney. I bet he will be more than happy to confirm. Roman Navarro Curation by humans for humans So now that it’s clear that tech companies will not save us from drowning in slop, it’s time to turn back to actual humans instead. The good news is they are a lot of people who are here to help you. There are thousands of people on the internet who will search through mountains of content to find the perfect piece of art they want to share with the world. We don’t explicitly call them curators. They are streamers, bloggers, journalists, DJs, overly enthusiast fans, or simply your friends. Some of those people are seriously amazing. There are DJs out there who will spend thousands of hours digging through crates to craft you the perfect ninety minutes of music. Why do you still need those machine-generated playlists? The alternative to blindly trusting the output of a recommendation algorithm isn’t always to become an expert in every field of art. Sometimes you just have to put the trust you had in a machine back into another person. Back to the real world? The real long term solution would be to stop relying only on the internet for distribution. This is already a thing in the music industry. Every city has a record shop that will sell you a carefully selected set of vinyls. For many musicians, physical sales (and concerts) are a much better source of income than streaming. The same goes for the movie. While text-to-video AI is a thing, the real money isn’t made by generating 30 second TikTok dramas. The real money comes from people paying tickets to see a full-length movie in a theater. Sadly I’m not too optimistic about my own field: video games. Somehow it seems the direction we’ve taken is the opposite. We’re all in on online distributions platforms. We have fully accepted them as our new digital overlords. Next month GTA V is coming out without a disk in the box. Sony already announced that the next Playstation will not support physical media. Physical distribution is not even mentioned in the pitch of the average indie publisher. In Breda, the small Dutch city where I live, we used to have two dedicated video games shop. Higher interests rates, expensive rents, and various policy failures have done their jobs: they are both closed. I don’t think this is a good sign for the survivability of the gaming industry.

16 hours ago • 1 votes
LARPing with Agents (and Why It Works)

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23 hours ago • 1 votes
Answers at the back of The Book
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Winner, Name that Ware September 2026

The Ware for September 2026 is a tire pressure monitor from a late 80’s to early 90’s model Porsche, made by Bosch. According to the submitter: Kind of a crazy piece of hardware for the late 80’s – this would be pretty cutting edge for the time. Nobody quite got what the part was – […]

yesterday • 1 votes
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