Jeff Martin @cuchaz@mastodon.technology
Building products using embedded electronics. Or trying to.
Joined Mar 2019
Pinned post
Finally got my single-board-computer working as a USB device! 
Now to get the host side working.
And here's a shoutout to the Linux kernel for letting me do almost all of this in user-space! 
Fascinating discussion between Mastodon's creator and its users.
On the one hand, users decry the phasing out of the local timeline in the new official iOS app because the local timeline helps new users find content they might like.
On the other hand, Mastodon's creator says the local timeline should be ignored in the new iOS app because it helps users find content they might not like.
Imagine the society we could have if helping people gave you a comfortable life for yourself regardless of how wealthy those people were.
I feel like this is all too common among software engineers.
You spent most of your time at $dayjob producing things that mostly only benefit a few elites, but at least you get paid. But if you manage to have a huge impact on non-elites, you’re literally making the world a better place for a lot more people, but you can’t replace $dayjob because your feels-good hobby doesn’t pay the bills.
Jeff Martin
boosted
The weirdest thing about burnout for me is that it causes me question not just my work but my identity. Things that on paper I enjoy…things I always have enjoyed…are no longer fun. It’s scary. It brings up feelings not just of “I need a break,” but of “what’s wrong with me?!”
Unsavory search results
Wow, looks like the SEO opportunities for TubeList are wiiiide open!
In a nutshell, it works by analyzing the HTML of a YouTube page for videos. Then organizes those videos into a list. Then generates links to import those videos into a temporary playlist on YouTube so you can watch them. 🎉
I made a thing! 
For some reason YouTube makes it unreasonably hard to watch all the videos on a channel in order.
TubeList makes it much much easier.
Jeff Martin
boosted
Fitness plan for programmers:
every time a build or unit test fails, you have to do 10 push-ups.
You'll become either incredibly good at programming or insanely fit. Maybe both with a bit of perseverance 😅
“You don’t study the research to convince others. You study the research because you’re rather be technically correct than happy.”
https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/i-ing-hate-science/
JetBrains says:
“User feedback is crucial for us when we’re designing new Kotlin features.
Would you like to help shape the future of Kotlin? Fill out this survey to give us your contact info, and we’ll send you invitations to participate in studies and get cool gifts.”
Jeff Martin
boosted
"How do you learn new things?"
I immerse myself in them and do them badly until I do them well.
This! All of this. All day long. Every Day. Twice on Sundays.
if I use a debugger, does that mean I'm engaging in debuggery?
Jeff Martin
boosted
Hello Mastodon and fediverse community! 👋
As part of a UX Research study, we’re collecting feedbacks from Mastodon's users. Our goal is to understand how and why Mastodon is used for and what could be done to improve the user (you 😉) experience
If you are willing to help us, you can find the survey right here : https://forms.gle/k19mPvtEEDYrD6AW8
We’re also holding one-on-one interviews to gather more in-depth testimonials, please contact me for more infos
Thank you all for your help!
Frederic
Struggling with a hard bug at the moment? Me too. You’re not alone. 
https://jvns.ca/blog/2021/06/08/reasons-why-bugs-might-feel-impossible/
For me, its a combination of 1, 3, and 5 right now. 
Hope I find it soon!
“The world is dominated by “free” software and platforms, for which we pay by other means (like rent-seeking and surveillance). European software companies can’t (and won’t) fund themselves this way.”
What a scathing indictment of the US/VC style model for building large-scale software, from a EU point of view:
“In many countries there is a deeply held belief that it will always be possible to eventually exploit users in order to make money, even if you currently aren’t yet sure how you’ll do that.”
I just submitted a bug report this morning and my example code used canonical metasyntactic variable names like "foo", "bar", and "baz".
I was curious where these names came from and found a Wikipedia article on it (because Of Course there's an article on this. I <3 Wikipedia).
The article suggests foo is maybe similar to 福 ("fu"), which can mean happiness.
So "foo" in your code can be an expression of happiness. 😋
Jeff Martin
boosted
>"never lie"
OK, true enough, but when it comes to filling out those "security" questions on a website,
*always* lie.
Building products using embedded electronics. Or trying to.
Joined Mar 2019
