My dad always had a notorious sleep apnea but also has notoriously been strong & 'youthful' all his life, very active, even up to this day at almost 70(never working desk jobs, always moving, etc). This always leaves me wondering about how relevant & impactful this kind of thing really is..
To me just like driving there should be a policy that mandates people respect & act in a way that both you & everyone can move freely and comfortably, lightly, this would be an actual order. We need something like alien philosophy/religion and let us be ruled by it, or, like, everybody just start acting japanese.
Fellow nic addict of 18 years here. If you haven't yet I'd recommend trying out Tabex. I'm still addicted but was able to cut it off by like 85% this year with its aid.
I dunno about young people, but me and some acquaintances discovered and got into stoicism and we just mixed it up with whatever we enjoyed before and that was anarchism, leftism, critical reasoning, philosophy, science, history, etc. It was just something else that was orthogonal..
Its in the words themselves, society is not culture, society means bonding of people/association to a thing, generally implied "civil society". This has nothing to do with some guy being a punk rocker skateboarder anarchist and the other a Mormon and the other a rural farm guy, that they cannot be a part of the same society. That's just not it.
`In fact, if treated properly, most programming things are hard, even things that might seem simple. That is because you have complex pieces that you have to put together and to make them work. And the hardest part is when one has to write the complex pieces from scratch. Things only seem easy because you have people with 5, 10, 20 years of experience doing things that are easy to them because they did them many times before, because they made all the possible mistakes or thought about them and made sure they don’t fall in those traps.`
https://dorinlazar.ro/2021-02-programming-is-hard/
Capitalism is not just about trading, this is an anachronism, maybe deepen your historical & concept research if you care about objectivity. Also see: equi-vocation: etymologically, calling things the same. Aka confusion. https://www.etymonline.com/word/equivocation
As long as coding stuff can be done through SSH, TMUX, VIM and terminal I'm fine. I've got a netbook-like tablet(s3 active with keyboard cover) and working on it is real nice(I hope to start going a bit more nomad soon), I have to switch apps to Slack & browser but the OS handles this so why bother.. My 2013 notebook also holding up well since what I need besides the term is just the browser... I don't think it's going away, but for this kinda of port to be maintained it needs to fit in with what workflow the termnerds and geeklords are doing, I guess.
In my mind I like to entertain the thought though that this bare way of working computers is discovered by more people & younger generations, that maybe they pick it up and do more cool stuff etc because it's something I only grow to like more and more over time. Btw I was never was like the hardcore linux wizard or anything, more like 'touch typing + this is kinda like playing a fighter'. I've got 2 trainees who are trying to pick up Vim right now and I guess a lot of ppl notice it since they never saw someone coding like I do, like doing typing combos and working mostly at the CLI. It's also funny because my colleague at the company is a very respectable senior and about my age but its 2 totally different styles, he's using vscode & autopilot.
I have some RSI though and it sucks when it starts popping, nowadays that mostly when Im working more remotely since then I use normal keyboard & key setup. On my work computer I have a typematrix with some key customizations that have helped A LOT.
Another way of looking at anarchism(or at least how I like to look at it) is to consider that even though humans form structures and hierarchies all the time(e.g.: we make a group and I take the first in line position and the rest follows), this structure/hierarchy/authority can and should be allowed to be questioned, changed, etc(e.g.: You know that I'm going the wrong way and intercede, pointing out, maybe taking the position, etc). This "impermanent" nature is very important because then when you consider the effects of hierarchization, 'solidification', etc, their consequences look a lot like a lot of the problems we see everywhere. I.e.: I decide I'll kill whomever tries to take my position as if it was always mine by birthright or some shit and not a `socially built and agreed upon` one, and if you think of it, looking back, any human structure needs a social agreement otherwise there's gonna be a fight or break-up because humans are social creatures, BY NATURE. Plus, coercion isn't just when I threaten everyone that disagrees with me, if I make up a story/ideology/religion that says everyone must obey me, that's just another form of coercion too.
In this sense, Linux is anarchic because people follow the cool guy doing work upfront for us but at the same time since he's "opened it up" there's a statement that it's not his, and there's also mechanisms through which he's unable to take it away or that others could take his position if he does a bad job, like, shouldn't whats socially created also be socially owned? In Linux case I think it works because the answer was 'yes' from the get go. In this sense, there's just no contradiction at all between anarchism and the situation described, one of the conclusions you could get to is that humans are and have always been anarchists. From this we can also derive "anti-state" because one could argue that most humans didn't even wanted to form or become subject to states, that a lot of what went on there was coercion. The principle wasn't applied and challenging it should be no big deal.
Anarchism is definitely not disorganised, quite the opposite.
My take:
- 34yo dev, brasilian(living in Brazil), started with RoR in 2013 and worked with it on and off since them
- was the first Software hire in a b2b e-bike engineer-DNA startup in 2019, picked Rails for the 'IoT layer', been working on it since them
In this context, I'm still very happy to be developing in Ruby and Rails and it still feels very fresh to me most of the time.
It may come down to, like Vim, it's not exactly in the new stuff department, it's 'niche', even, but the super users and hardcore community apparently will never let it down. It is very well taken care of software and I think there's a lot of people in a virtuous relationship with it i.e.: probably a lot of people running it to get things done, doing good business, making money and satisfied enough that it sort of doesn't matter much what 'kids' looking for the hot new tech to fill CVs think about it. I think RoR is super solid in this regard.
Following on the Vim analogy, I think both Ruby and Rails have the 'power tool' quality/deph in that it keeps rewarding you with more power the more you get the handle of it, there's few things like TDD on RoR. When you're senior and you're not afraid to tweak things as you want it anymore, things get really interesting. For example:
- Microservices x monoliths: I've built a Service Object layer, all Services have an API of .new(:param, :param)(sugarized to initialize_with :param, :param) and .call, .call!, .queue. These service objects can be strung together, allowing for composition. call without '!' gives you an object you can say .success?, .result and react however you want. .call! will raise exceptions. .queue runs it async in Sidekiq. We have over 40 of them, in some cases we refactored out a piece of functionality(e.g.: google sheets integration) and just deleted a whole folder of them, just like that.
All of these 'actions' can be run from any context: MQTT message, API call, console, Sidekiq, Sidekiq-scheduled, tests. In ruby *anything* can be mocked anytime, have you thought about the power of this? I can make an expectation that an --instance of a class somewhere will receive a call--, it could be mine, it could be a class in a lib, it could be something in the framework.
- Sidekiq just works and is awesome. Free fault-tolerance, performant, scalable.
- Building custom piece of architecture, ruby scripting is very powerful: we had bots simulating the motorcycles running and talking with the backend way before we actually had a board and software able to do that. MQTT messages are relayed to Rails app through a custom long running service, it's a ruby script. Later on we've twisted it to test Firmware Updates Over the Air feature, basically, scripting the script itself. So we have a CI/CD job that allow us to stress test/spec test firmware. Right now I'm doing a middleware so I'll script Rack/Rails next, TDD is going smoothly.
- Maybe tweaking it further to make it more of an a Event Driven application.
I think ultimately Ruby developers end up being good developers because of the high power+low cognitive overhead style at the heart of the language.
Now for the cons:
- It is indeed becoming niche. Junior developers probably mostly not learning it. Are they really as productive as they could be on Rails though? I think NodeJs stuff are interesting, I wonder though how productive they actually are. Is the stuff they build really bug-free? Fully featured? Well tested? From my experience they are fast but will overlook obvious bugs in their code as if it was ok. I think the Ruby community had tons of good teachers who focused on elegant working code, RailsCasts, DestroyAllSoftware, etc. Also a lot of influential devs and ppl who learned from them & similar sources, a lot of them still participating or who done amazing contributions, like Aaron Patterson, Jose Valim, DHH.. I don't know how exactly we'll deal with this at the company, but our software is so flexible I think we wouldn't have much trouble breaking it up & integrating, at the same time too, though, our application code is so easy to work on I don't think it matters much if a new dev is not a rubyist.
In conclusion, I guess it depends where you want to go with your life, I myself have always thought of handling actual heavy duty shit with software, being in a core product team, not being a 'job market b*tch' etc. Even if I'm not writing Ruby one day because we have decided to switch to something other or that I want to work on a different project that is running X, I don't really care.