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Zed A. Shaw, Writer Profile picture
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15 Nov, 4 tweets, 2 min read
It occurred to me that the programmers who work at Amazon must be terrible programmers. They're getting paid millions a year for a trillion dollar company and they run around grabbing tiny open source projects to resell...but aren't skilled enough to just make their own?
Take this project as an example:



How is it possible 3 top paid programmers at Amazon can't sit down and crank out a copy in a week. In fact, I'd say if you can't crank out a copy of a small competitor in a week you're not nearly as good as you claim.
They do eventually write their own, but only after the projects decide they've had enough giving Amazon free tech support:

onezero.medium.com/open-source-be…

So, they clearly can do it, but I just don't know why they don't do it as a first move.
I frequently crank out tiny little copies of projects to learn about them. It's not super hard. Here's one that popped up today with Redis in Python:

github.com/boramalper/pyd…

One guy did a 232 line copy of Redis but...millionaire coders @ trillion dollar AMZN can't?

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Zed A. Shaw, Writer Profile picture
17 Nov
I have a lot of people who recently learned to code but then ask me what they could make. I'm a big proponent of copying everything you like (and dislike too) just to learn how it's done, but I think that's too big of a field for some folks to tackle. Here's some ideas:
You should get a little notebook and start writing down random ideas that pop in your head, even if they're stupid. Try to write more than one sentence about the idea so you know what it is later. Drawing a screen or two helps also.

You could also use Zettlr or RoamResearch.
Next, you need to write a short essay about one of your ideas, explaining the idea and possibly getting into a story about who is using it and how they use it. This will help you "export" the idea into a written form and organize your thoughts.
Read 30 tweets
Zed A. Shaw, Writer Profile picture
16 Nov
I'm toying with the idea of getting the PS 5 or Xbox, and I absolutely hate the false scarcity they pull. I mean, I'd pull a J. Wellington Wimpy with "I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a game console next month," but these people just don't know how to write a ordering website.
I'm too old to run around hunting down deals and trying to do Black Friday BS. I don't even care if it arrives next month. Just let me put in an order, send it when it's ready, but *don't charge me until it's sent*. At this point the one I pick is whatever one is available.
I also find it bizarre they can't calculate demand. You've sold like 5 versions of this thing and have the most advanced computerized logistics systems in the world and you're like, "It'll be ready on Black Friday...MAAAAYYBBEEE. Better beat up a grandma for it! MWHAHAHAHA."
Read 4 tweets
Zed A. Shaw, Writer Profile picture
16 Nov
Finished this morning's Nim hacking and, well, it has async IO but it's rough as hell. Pretty much nothing is done for you, so it's a lot like JavaScript before async/await, but weirdly it has the await keyword. Some issues with this: Image
1. I'm not sure why the {.async.} pragma doesn't also setup that function to return Future[T]. It's kind of pointless if all that I get is the await keyword, and then every function I want to wait on has to be hand coded futures. Maybe the docs are just wrong?
2. I'm guessing this is more nanomsg's fault than Nim asyncdispatch, but the whole pollfd, addWrite/addRead system doesn't work on the send. I'll register addWrite, the pollfd will say it's ready, then the nanomsg send actually blocks, which...should be impossible.
Read 8 tweets
Zed A. Shaw, Writer Profile picture
16 Nov
Hit a bug in @WindboundGame that is either the worst possible thing they could have, or a possible new way to make the game more challenging. If you enable the blessing Arms of Imakl suddenly I losing things at random, even in held items, and usually after restoring from a save.
The irony of it is this one blessing in the game is *supposed* to help you keep a couple extra items if you die, and give you a couple slots. I tested that it's randomly losing items by actually crashing my boat 20 times and lost nothing. Also dived in the water and nothing.
But, save, and reload, and yep, lost a couple things. I think what's going on is the blessing adds two inventory slots, and the devs added it late, so they get the count wrong on reload and drop two items.

Now...is this a bug or a feature....? Hmmmmm.
Read 9 tweets
Zed A. Shaw, Writer Profile picture
15 Nov
I finished off that little side Nim project goal of:

HTTP Server
Sends NanoMSG to a backend
Backend does a SQL returning JSON
HTTP Server send JSON to Browser

I mostly copied some code from:

github.com/def-/nim-nanom…

And there's a few odd gotchas in doing this: ImageImageImage
From what I can tell nanomsg has flags for things like "DONT_WAIT", but they seem to be pointless. It doesn't block anyway when you set the flag to 0. I couldn't figure out why it just ran in an insane loop and well, that's all it can do.
One of the things that ZeroMQ did which made it *very fast* is it did a kind of run length encoding of messages. Rather than send 1 million messages all the same, it would just say "that one, 1 million times". Browsing through nanomsg I think that's gone, but it was THE feature
Read 7 tweets
Zed A. Shaw, Writer Profile picture
15 Nov
Browsing through the QUIC and HTTP/2 standards and I'm kind of wondering why all those jackasses who told me I was wrong for saying HTTP/1.1 was garbage for being a text protocol didn't freak out at this heresy. You wouldn't believe the illogical backflips the IETF and W3C did. Image
For a bit of context, I wrote a web server that utilized a precise parser for the HTTP/1.1 protocol, and rejected any messages that didn't parse correctly. Turned out this ended up blocking about 80% of hacks at the time while allowing normal traffic through without problems.
When I did this a whole ton of HTTP/1.1 IETF douchebags made bizarre claims that this would destroy the web, that I had to accept everything or else, and that the parse must be hand written.

Then they quietly released this:

tools.ietf.org/id/draft-thoms…

So I was right.
Read 9 tweets

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