Simon 𐕣he 🪨 Johnson

I found Clojure jobs were generally pretty interesting. One of my jobs was working at a hospital, and we were building software for patient care. So we got to go to the clinics within the hospital observe the workflow, builds tools for the users, and then see how it improved patient care day to day. It was an incredibly rewarding experience.

Sounds like you got double lucky. Hasn’t really been my experience in the medical space. I find larger institutions like that very unreceptive to how software is made and often the environments are constricting and lead to bad outcomes that “nobody can really figure out why”. It often starts at timesheets and gets worse from there.

For me, the language matters a lot, and Clojure is the only language that I’ve used for many years that I’m still excited to write code in. Once you’ve worked with a workflow that’s fully interactive, it’s really hard to go back. I really enjoy having instant feedback on what the code is doing and being able to interrogate the app any time I’m not sure what’s happening. This leads to an iterative development process where you always have confidence that the code is doing exactly what you expect because you’re always exercising it, and experimentation become much easier. You can just try something see the result, and then adjust as you go.

Yeah you can definitely have this kind of stuff in other languages. It’s gonna be similar workflows that are generally BDD & REPL based but you have to have someone who knows what they’re doing do architecture, tooling selection, setting conventions, and helping to put it all together into a maintainable system. Very often that’s skipped at most companies, and I’ve found it to be a lucrative skill in my career.

Right, but what I’m saying the design to need these things was likely based on Deepin running their own distro. They don’t have to consider the security guidelines of other distros like KDE or Gnome, XFCE or Enlightenment would.

Yeah I just haven’t really held out for one. At one point I have this fear that on average regardless of language I’m gonna see the same shit everywhere, so I typically pick by project interest and scale. If I wasn’t such a little cockroach about having a stable income I could have had some fun opportunities holding out for some Haskel, Erlang or Clojure jobs, but I didn’t.

I was once interviewed by a startup that was a crypto payments processor targeting the central American market and the interviewer let it slip that I shouldn’t worry about runway because it comes from a fairly large crypto fund that the founder owns that’s payed into by USAID/NED style soft intelligence services.

I immediately got the ick and I was like this is not something I want to involve myself in for stability’s sake but god damn I could have had a peek behind the curtain.

This is what vertical integration between distros and GUIs often leads to. This could be completely innocuous from Deepin’s end, because that’s just how they made it work in Deepin because they have vertical integration on their own stack. However, It’s completely bad form.

In general Deepin seems to adopt a lot of commercial software industry practices in building its tools, which I’m sympathetic to on some level, but it’s very obvious that the Linux community is not going to accept default-on telemetry. They should have known better after the CNZZ incident.

I’ve found it hard to find jobs with Clojure/Haskell/Rust. I typically look for interesting projects and industries that don’t make me feel icky even though they end up doing so because everything is fucking enterprise sales. My career has kinda been Bar Rescue for idiot companies who have blundered into an extremely hard problem and need someone to actually figure it out before the software stack implodes on itself.

I love Lisp, that’s why I like doing industry work in JS, because it’s very lisp like.

However if you gave an average industry programmer Lisp today they’d fuck up so much worse than the garbage enterprise grade language code that exists today. I switch jobs probably every 4 years and on average I teach 3 people a year what a closure is.

Lisp has a lot of great solutions for a lot of real problems, but these people quite literally fix one bug and create 3. I had a 10+ YOE Tech Lead tell me the other day that they kinda just ignore the error output of the TS compiler and it made me want to tear my eyes out.

don’t even try to learn what a software dependency

Everyone at my company keeps using the term “dependency hell” when referring to literally dependency management and order of operations with a modern package manager like NPM that tracks versions and dependencies.

They’ve literally never experienced working with dynamically linked libraries and they think it’s so hard because they have to understand a tree that exists in data form (e.g. package-lock.json) and can be easily visualized vs a tangled file system and LD_LIBRARY_PATH or Windows standard search order / HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\KnownDLLs.

It’s pathetic.

Margaret Hamilton’s first job out of undergrad was working for Lorenz. She was incredibly accomplished with several stints in top labs, by the time of Apollo. It’s not like opportunities for trail blazing software fell out of the sky on shlubs who barely passed undergrad data structures and algorithms courses.

Vaxry is not a very smart guy. He originally got a wrist slap by FDO saying don’t do your toxic shit here. Then he followed it up by going postal on the FDO mailing list. Then he put up a blog post where he was like like “SJWs are coming for me”.

https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-inclusiveActivists

The entire argument is that you can’t make an exclusionary space for people (no definition of what that means) but you should be able to call them slurs. Who would want anything to do with him? He should have gone full tilt and made a list of slurs you should be allowed to say beyond just arguing for the R-slur. That would have really convinced people he’s not an extremely toxic right wing weirdo.

https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-hyprlandsCommunity

This was his non-apology where he says “lets be real” a lot which is a common way of just ignoring a criticism and then he follows it up with, I should have banned that user instead of doing what I did.

Asking for professionalism in the OSS community is not a huge deal. It’s also quite literally not even about the code AFAIR Drew Devault is still taking Vaxry’s patches. He just doesn’t want him in the community starting shit with people.

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