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Zed has a good debugger built-in but their keybindings are crazy. Thankfully, you can remap them by opening menu Zed / Settings / Open key bindings and adding this to the file: { "use_key_equivalents": true, "bindings": { "f11": "debugger::StepInto", "f10": "debugger::StepOver" // "shift shift": "file_finder::Toggle" } }, Those are standard Windows debugging keybindings. F7 and Ctrl + F11 just don’t make sense to me.
I strongly believe that fast iteration cycle is important for productivity. In programming fast iteration means: how quickly can I go from finishing writing the code to testing it. That’s why I don’t like languages that compile slowly: slow compilation puts a hard limit on your iteration cycle. That’s a general principle. How does it translate to actions? I’m glad you asked. Simulated errors I’m writing a web app and some code paths might fail e.g. server returns an error response. When that happens I want to display an error message to the user. I want to test that but server doesn’t typically return errors. I can modify the server to return error and restart it but in a compiled language like Go it’s a whole thing. Instead I can force error condition in the code. Because web dev typically offers hot reload of code, I can modify the code to pretend the request failed, save the code, reload the app and I’m testing the error handling. To make it less ad-hoc another strategy is to have debug flags on window object e.g.: window.debug.simulateError = false Then the code will have: try { if (window.debug.simulateError) { throw Error("fetch failed"); } let rsp = await fetch(...); } That way I can toggle window.debug.simulateError in dev tools console, without changing the code. I have to repeat this code for every fetch(). More principled approach is: async function myFetch(uri, opts) { if (window.debug.simulateError) { throw new Error("featch failed"); } return await fetch(uri, opts); } To go even further, we could simulate different kinds of network errors: Response.ok is false response is 404 or 500 failed to reach the server We can change simulateError from bool to a number and have: async function myFetch(uri, opts) { let se = window.debug.simulateError; if (se === 1) { // simulate Response.ok is false return ...; } if (se === 2) { // simulate 404 response return; } if (se === 3) { // simulate network offline } return await fetch(uri, opts); } Start by show dialog Let’s say I’m working on a new dialog e.g. rename dialog. To get to that dialog I have to perform some UI action e.g. use context menu and click the Rename note menu item. Not a big deal but I’m still working on the dialog so it’s a bit annoying to repeat that UI action every time I move the button to the right, to see how it’ll look. In Svelte we do: let showingRenameDialog = $state(false); function showRenameDialog() { showingRenameDialog = true; } {#if showingRenameDialog} <RenameDialog ...></RenameDialog> {'if} To speed up dev cycle: let showingRenameDialog = $state(true); // show while we're working ont While I’m still designing and writing code for the dialog, show it by default. That way app reloads due to changing code won’t require you to manually redo UI actions to trigger the dialog. Ad-hoc test code Let’s say you’re writing a non-trivial code server code to process a request. Let’s say the request is a POST with body containing zip file with images which the server needs to unzip, resize the files, save them to a file system. You want to test it as you implement the logic but iteration cycle is slow: you write the code recompile and restart the server go through UI actions to send the request Most of the code (unpacking zip file, resizing images) can be tested without doing the request. So you isolate the function: func resizeImagesInZip(zipData []byte) error { // the code you're writing on } Now you have to trigger it easily. The simplest way is ad-hoc test code: func main() { if true { zipData := loadTestZipFileMust() resizeImagesInZip(zipData); return; } } While you’re working on the code, the server just runs the test code. When you’re done, you switch it off: func main() { if false { // leave the code so that you can re-enable it // easily in the future zipData := loadTestZipFileMust() resizeImagesInZip(zipData); return; } } Those are few tactical tips to increase dev cycles. You can come up with more such ideas by asking yourself: how can I speed iteration cycle?
AltTab solves a simple problem really well: it brings Windows-style Alt + Tab window switching to Mac OS. That’s it. That’s all there is to it. I think Windows way of Alt - tabbing windows is better than Mac’s. It’s a must for someone like me, who switches between using Windows and Mac OS. That small difference drove me mad when using Mac so super thankful someone wrote an app that fixes it. It’s free and open source so no excuse to not to use it.
Stage Manager in Mac OS is not a secret, but I’ve only learned about it recently. It’s off by default so you have to enable it in system settings: It’s hard to describe in words, so you’ll have to try it. And experiment a bit because I didn’t get in the first hour. It’s a certain way to manage windows for less clutter. Imagine you have a browser, an editor and a terminal i.e. 3 windows. Might be annoying to have them all shown on screen. When Stage Manager is enabled, thumbnails of windows are on the left edge of the screen and you can switch to the window by clicking the thumbnail. By default Stage Manager shows each window by itself on screen. You can group them by dragging thumbnail onto screen. For example, when I’m developing, I’m using text editor and terminal so I will group them so they are both visible on screen at the same time, but not the other apps. So far I’m enjoying using Stage Manager.
More in programming
Am I a good programmer? The short answer is: I don’t know what that means. I have been programming for 52 years now, having started in a public high school class in 1973, which is pretty rare because few high schools offered such an opportunity back then. I
The world is waking to the fact that talk therapy is neither the only nor the best way to cure a garden-variety petite depression. Something many people will encounter at some point in their lives. Studies have shown that exercise, for example, is a more effective treatment than talk therapy (and pharmaceuticals!) when dealing with such episodes. But I'm just as interested in the role building competence can have in warding off the demons. And partly because of this meme: I've talked about it before, but I keep coming back to the fact that it's exactly backwards. That signing up for an educational quest into Linux, history, or motorcycle repair actually is an incredibly effective alternative to therapy! At least for men who'd prefer to feel useful over being listened to, which, in my experience, is most of them. This is why I find it so misguided when people who undertake those quests sell their journey short with self-effacing jibes about how much an unattractive nerd it makes them to care about their hobby. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi detailed back in 1990 how peak human happiness arrives exactly in these moments of flow when your competence is stretched by a difficult-but-doable challenge. Don't tell me those endorphins don't also help counter the darkness. But it's just as much about the fact that these pursuits of competence usually offer a great opportunity for community as well that seals the deal. I've found time and again that people are starved for the kind of topic-based connections that, say, learning about Linux offers in spades. You're not just learning, you're learning with others. That is a time-tested antidote to depression: Forming and cultivating meaningful human connections. Yes, doing so over the internet isn't as powerful as doing it in person, but it's still powerful. It still offers community, involvement, and plenty of invitation to carry a meaningful burden. Open source nails this trifecta of motivations to a T. There are endless paths of discovery and mastery available. There are tons of fellow travelers with whom to connect and collaborate. And you'll find an unlimited number of meaningful burdens in maintainerships open for the taking. So next time you see that meme, you should cheer that the talk therapy table is empty. Leave it available for the severe, pathological cases that exercise and the pursuit of competence can't cure. Most people just don't need therapy, they need purpose, they need competence, they need exercise, and they need community.
The excellent-but-defunct blog Programming in the 21st Century defines "puzzle languages" as languages were part of the appeal is in figuring out how to express a program idiomatically, like a puzzle. As examples, he lists Haskell, Erlang, and J. All puzzle languages, the author says, have an "escape" out of the puzzle model that is pragmatic but stigmatized. But many mainstream languages have escape hatches, too. Languages have a lot of properties. One of these properties is the language's capabilities, roughly the set of things you can do in the language. Capability is desirable but comes into conflicts with a lot of other desirable properties, like simplicity or efficiency. In particular, reducing the capability of a language means that all remaining programs share more in common, meaning there's more assumptions the compiler and programmer can make ("tractability"). Assumptions are generally used to reason about correctness, but can also be about things like optimization: J's assumption that everything is an array leads to high-performance "special combinations". Rust is the most famous example of mainstream language that trades capability for tractability.1 Rust has a lot of rules designed to prevent common memory errors, like keeping a reference to deallocated memory or modifying memory while something else is reading it. As a consequence, there's a lot of things that cannot be done in (safe) Rust, like interface with an external C function (as it doesn't have these guarantees). To do this, you need to use unsafe Rust, which lets you do additional things forbidden by safe Rust, such as deference a raw pointer. Everybody tells you not to use unsafe unless you absolutely 100% know what you're doing, and possibly not even then. Sounds like an escape hatch to me! To extrapolate, an escape hatch is a feature (either in the language itself or a particular implementation) that deliberately breaks core assumptions about the language in order to add capabilities. This explains both Rust and most of the so-called "puzzle languages": they need escape hatches because they have very strong conceptual models of the language which leads to lots of assumptions about programs. But plenty of "kitchen sink" mainstream languages have escape hatches, too: Some compilers let C++ code embed inline assembly. Languages built on .NET or the JVM has some sort of interop with C# or Java, and many of those languages make assumptions about programs that C#/Java do not. The SQL language has stored procedures as an escape hatch and vendors create a second escape hatch of user-defined functions. Ruby lets you bypass any form of encapsulation with send. Frameworks have escape hatches, too! React has an entire page on them. (Does eval in interpreted languages count as an escape hatch? It feels different, but it does add a lot of capability. Maybe they don't "break assumptions" in the same way?) The problem with escape hatches In all languages with escape hatches, the rule is "use this as carefully and sparingly as possible", to the point where a messy solution without an escape hatch is preferable to a clean solution with one. Breaking a core assumption is a big deal! If the language is operating as if its still true, it's going to do incorrect things. I recently had this problem in a TLA+ contract. TLA+ is a language for modeling complicated systems, and assumes that the model is a self-contained universe. The client wanted to use the TLA+ to test a real system. The model checker should send commands to a test device and check the next states were the same. This is straightforward to set up with the IOExec escape hatch.2 But the model checker assumed that state exploration was pure and it could skip around the state randomly, meaning it would do things like set x = 10, then skip to set x = 1, then skip back to inc x; assert x == 11. Oops! We eventually found workarounds but it took a lot of clever tricks to pull off. I'll probably write up the technique when I'm less busy with The Book. The other problem with escape hatches is the rest of the language is designed around not having said capabilities, meaning it can't support the feature as well as a language designed for them from the start. Even if your escape hatch code is clean, it might not cleanly integrate with the rest of your code. This is why people complain about unsafe Rust so often. It should be noted though that all languages with automatic memory management are trading capability for tractability, too. If you can't deference pointers, you can't deference null pointers. ↩ From the Community Modules (which come default with the VSCode extension). ↩
I wrote a lot of blog posts over my time at Parse, but they all evaporated after Facebook killed the product. Most of them I didn’t care about (there were, ahem, a lot of status updates and “service reliability announcements”, but I was mad about losing this one in particular, a deceptively casual retrospective of […]
It's only been two months since I discovered the power and joy of this new generation of mini PCs. My journey started out with a Minisforum UM870, which is a lovely machine, but since then, I've come to really appreciate the work of Beelink. In a crowded market for mini PCs, Beelink stands out with their superior build quality, their class-leading cooling and silent operation, and their use of fully Linux-compatible components (the UM870 shipped with a MediaTek bluetooth/wifi card that doesn't work with Linux!). It's the complete package at three super compelling price points. For $289, you can get the EQR5, which runs an 8-core AMD Zen3 5825U that puts out 1723/6419 in Geekbench, and comes with 16GB RAM and 500GB NVMe. I've run Omarchy on it, and it flies. For me, the main drawback was the lack of a DisplayPort, which kept me from using it with an Apple display, and the fact that the SER8 exists. But if you're on a budget, and you're fine with HDMI only, it's a wild bargain. For $499, you can get the SER8. That's the price-to-performance sweet spot in the range. It uses the excellent 8-core AMD Zen4 8745HS that puts out 2595/12985 in Geekbench (~M4 multi-core numbers!), and runs our HEY test suite with 30,000 assertions almost as fast as an M4 Max! At that price, you get 32GB RAM + 1TB NVMe, as well as a DisplayPort, so it works with both the Apple 5K Studio Display and the Apple 6K XDR Display (you just need the right cable). Main drawback is limited wifi/bluetooth range, but Beelink tells me there's a fix on the way for that. For $929, you can get the SER9 HX370. This is the top dog in this form factor. It uses the incredible 12-core AMD Zen5 HX370 that hits 2990/15611 in Geekbench, and runs our HEY test suite faster than any Apple M chip I've ever tested. The built-in graphics are also very capable. Enough to play a ton of games at 1080p. It also sorted the SER8's current wifi/bluetooth range issue. I ran the SER8 as my main computer for a while, but now I'm using the SER9, and I just about never feel like I need anything more. Yes, the Framework Desktop, with its insane AMD Max 395+ chip, is even more bonkers. It almost cuts the HEY test suite time in half(!), but it's also $1,795, and not yet generally available. (But preorders are open for the ballers!). Whichever machine fits your budget, it's frankly incredible that we have this kind of performance and efficiency available at these prices with all of these Beelinks drawing less than 10 watt at idle and no more than 100 watt at peak! So it's no wonder that Beelink has been selling these units like hotcakes since I started talking about them on X as the ideal, cheap Omarchy desktop computers. It's such a symbiotic relationship. There are a ton of programmers who have become Linux curious, and Beelink offers no-brainer options to give that a try at a bargain. I just love when that happens. The perfect intersection of hardware, software, and timing. That's what we got here. It's a Beelink, baby! (And no, before you ask, I don't get any royalties, there's no affiliate link, and I don't own any shares in Beelink. I just love discovering great technology and seeing people start their Linux journey with an awesome, affordable computer!)
