Under Pressure (More on NPM)

I love movies with no heroes and no villains. Or at least where the heroes have flaws and the villains have reasonable motives. For the full version of the story I am referring to, see this article "How one developer just broke Node, ..."

My twitter feed took me to the account of Laurie Voss. He is the  co-founder of npmjs and made the call for un-un-publishing left-pad. His tweets are fun and interesting and humorous, even when trying to make a decision that will impassion people. He recognizes this and has promised a retrospective.

Azer is still the hero in my reading but this gives me an excuse to post Under Pressure by Queen. [Update: Here is is a proper retrospective  from NPM. For once I am glad I read the comments as some reflect my view and don't need to be restated.]

To my surprise, this video is perfect for an un-un-publish. Nice work Freddie.

-Ginny

PS> While there may be villains in this story, I prefer not to dish on them.

Teşekkür ederim anlayışın ve desteğin için

I do not know Azer Koçulu but I hope I will get to meet him one day. If you don't have Node friends on twitter, you might have missed what Azer Koçulu did. I recommend reading it in his own words at this Medium article: I've Just Liberated My Modules

In case he removes that also, the net net is that he unpublished all his modules, including eleven lines of javascript called left-pad and broke thousands of projects that had dependencies on it. He was not being mean. He was taking a stand.

If you hang around playgrounds, you will hear "Don't touch that. You don't know where it has been." When I type import or require, I take a deep breath and wonder how much other code I am getting. Now I will have both that dread, and a little more gratitude to developers like Azer.

Left-pad was fetched over 2 million times in the last month. It seems very appropriate to listen to Anna Kendrick's Cups -

Thank you for your understanding and support,
Ginny

On Being Polyglot

My new favorite joke is "I am very polyglot. I write bad code in many languages" - Pascal, PL1, D, Assembler, C, C++, Java, Smalltalk, Python, Javascript, ... maybe others.

I was recently sent an article by Richard Eng "Why Smalltalk Failed to Dominate the World". It started me thinking about languages and I've realized

1. I did in fact program in D: I have started saying I started my career writing PL\1 on the mainframe. However, I am sure it D but an internal name and not the current D language. I will stick with calling it PL\1.
2. I like people: When I think back on programming I've enjoyed, my memory involves nice people, with depths of patience and an odd sense of humor. 

Every time I rent a car they ask if a particular model is ok. I always want to answer "as long as it has 4 tires, I think I am set". I am starting to believe that about languages. They all have interesting trade-offs and they might optimize for certain domains. However, as long as they have good people, I think I am set.

And now for a better joke from my new favorite programmer, Emily Dunham  "What do you call a group of Geese? A Gaggle.  A group of crows? A Murder. A group of programmers? A merge conflict. "

And of course some music  (Forest Whitaker by Brother Ali)

IoT App I want (Playtime unlock)

Problem 1: I've been having knee and foot issues for a while. I have a new therapist and new exercises that I don't like doing. His theory is that when I get to 3000 I will be better. I don't like the exercises but I hate counting them even more. I need to know how many I've done for my own sanity. When I lose count, I lose desire.

Problem 2: I love facebook 

The app I want: I want a sensor that attaches to my muscle and can count the exercises. When I've reached a certain count it gives me time on facebook. The more I do, the more time I get.

Or maybe I can just count my exercises in Arctic Monkey Songs (Do I Wanna Know?)
-G