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So today, I decided to renew my driver's license online, like any modern person would. I started the process by going to my state's driver's license website. The first page is to verify my home and mail addresses. Since nothing changed, I hit "
8 months ago

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More from The Codist

Using Xcode's AI Is Like Pair Programming With A Monkey

I've never used any other AI "assistant," although I've talked with those who have, most of whom are not very positive. My experience using Xcode's AI is that it occasionally offers a line of code that works, but you mostly get junk

3 weeks ago 15 votes
Giving Junior Engineers Control Of A Six Trillion Dollar System Is Nuts

For some purpose, the DOGE people are burrowing their way into all US Federal Systems. Their complete control over the Treasury Department is entirely insane. Unless you intend to destroy everything, making arbitrary changes to complex computer systems will result in destruction, even if that was not your intention. No

a month ago 20 votes
What I Miss And Don't From Working As A Programmer

I retired almost four years ago after nearly 40 years as a programmer. While I still write code daily, I do so to support my generative art rather than get paid for it. Most of my career was spent building new applications, and no matter what my title was, I

a month ago 25 votes
How Many Hours Can You Code?

How many hours a day can you write code, and at what point does the quality of your work go down? Even more important is how many weeks and months of that max effort you can still be effective. In my life, there have only been three periods where I

2 months ago 66 votes
My Art And Color-After Tiling

I make generative art with Swift and use tiling in many pieces. Truchet tiles are generally arranged randomly and contain everything appearing in the final image. What I do differently is to separate the layout of tiles from colorizing the image. I call this technique "Color-After Tiling." For

4 months ago 56 votes

More in programming

New Blog Post: "A Perplexing Javascript Parsing Puzzle"

I know I said we'd be back to normal newsletters this week and in fact had 80% of one already written. Then I unearthed something that was better left buried. Blog post here, Patreon notes here (Mostly an explanation of how I found this horror in the first place). Next week I'll send what was supposed to be this week's piece. (PS: April Cools in three weeks!)

13 hours ago 3 votes
Notes on Improving Churn

Ask any B2C SaaS founder what metric they’d like to improve and most will say reducing churn. However, proactively reducing churn is a difficult task. I’ll outline the approach we’ve taken at Jenni AI to go from ~17% to 9% churn over the past year. We are still a work in progress but hopefully you’ll […] The post Notes on Improving Churn appeared first on Marc Astbury.

16 hours ago 3 votes
Catching grace

Meditation is easy when you know what to do: absolutely nothing! It's hard at first, like trying to look at the back of your own head, but there's a knack to it.

13 hours ago 2 votes
Python Performance: Why 'if not list' is 2x Faster Than Using len()

Discover why 'if not mylist' is twice as fast as 'len(mylist) == 0' by examining CPython's VM instructions and object memory access patterns.

8 hours ago 2 votes
Our switch to Kamal is complete

In a fit of frustration, I wrote the first version of Kamal in six weeks at the start of 2023. Our plan to get out of the cloud was getting bogged down in enterprisey pricing and Kubernetes complexity. And I refused to accept that running our own hardware had to be that expensive or that convoluted. So I got busy building a cheap and simple alternative.  Now, just two years later, Kamal is deploying every single application in our entire heritage fleet, and everything in active development. Finalizing a perfectly uniform mode of deployment for every web app we've built over the past two decades and still maintain. See, we have this obsession at 37signals: That the modern build-boost-discard cycle of internet applications is a scourge. That users ought to be able to trust that when they adopt a system like Basecamp or HEY, they don't have to fear eviction from the next executive re-org. We call this obsession Until The End Of The Internet. That obsession isn't free, but it's worth it. It means we're still operating the very first version of Basecamp for thousands of paying customers. That's the OG code base from 2003! Which hasn't seen any updates since 2010, beyond security patches, bug fixes, and performance improvements. But we're still operating it, and, along with every other app in our heritage collection, deploying it with Kamal. That just makes me smile, knowing that we have customers who adopted Basecamp in 2004, and are still able to use the same system some twenty years later. In the meantime, we've relaunched and dramatically improved Basecamp many times since. But for customers happy with what they have, there's no forced migration to the latest version. I very much had all of this in mind when designing Kamal. That's one of the reasons I really love Docker. It allows you to encapsulate an entire system, with all of its dependencies, and run it until the end of time. Kind of how modern gaming emulators can run the original ROM of Pac-Man or Pong to perfection and eternity. Kamal seeks to be but a simple wrapper and workflow around this wondrous simplicity. Complexity is but a bridge — and a fragile one at that. To build something durable, you have to make it simple.

19 hours ago 2 votes