@henrikjernevad I've been reflecting on the fact that most of the products and open source projects I worked on over my career failed, sooner or later.

OTOH I suspect much of my code in a 54 year old product (!) is still alive and well (although I know a lot of new stuff I wrote was ripped out).

This is an effect of working on new/interesting stuff. I am comfortable with my contribution, even as a senior staff developer, as my skill was good engineering rather than technical direction.

@smcn "sinking ship deserting the rat", "charge of the lightweight brigade" - Keir Starmer 😂

@smcn True. Which will make the upcoming PMQs interesting to say the least.

The Chancellor and the Health Secretary have just resigned. Boris Johnson's remaining days, or hopefully hours, in post now seem numbered. The UK deserves a much better PM.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jul/05/sajid-javid-and-rishi-sunak-quit-throwing-boris-johnsons-future-into-doubt

When I'm struggling to understand something, e.g. in software, I change to a lower gear (to use a cycling analogy). I slow down, make notes, check assumptions, clarify definitions, or take a break and try again later.

What helps you "change to a lower gear"?

Boosts appreciated.

Arch linux includes systemd. A less over-engineered alternative might have tempted me away from Fedora. Maybe I should try to learn systemd one of these years, but, based on past attempts to grok it, I tend to agree with https://nosystemd.org/

@clacke Maybe from "yellow-belly" https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/yellow-belly.html

@kev Same here. The culture in IBM and VMware was at least officially in favour of work-life balance. Surprisingly, the same was true of the start-up Interface21 (later called SpringSource) when I joined it. The phrases "family first" and "sustainable pace" helped to justify the approach.

@kev Having said all that, I've often woken up in the middle of the night when working on an interesting project and couldn't get back to sleep without writing down my thoughts about the design etc. So that was a kind of unpaid overtime.

@kev Agreed. I worked 37 hours a week for decades, with no time for side projects because I have a wife and children. I always made this clear to a new manager. Never seemed to get in the way of promotions, interesting work, etc. I think you need to rest to be productive.

#AskFedi Just started a list of software manifestos. Which are missing? https://wordsmith.social/underlap/software-manifestos

Please boost for reach.

Fosstodon is running Mastodon v3.5.1. Did I merely dream that an "edit toot" feature had been added?

@clacke I suspect Michelle Obama could make a pretty good go of it. A few more black president would perhaps improve the USA's race equality.

@clacke Watch this if you can: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_Around_You

@clacke Sounds like the round "one song to the tune of another" on the BBC radio comedy "I'm sorry I haven't a clue", the so-called "antidote to panel games".

@clacke I still have my childhood TI-58, complete with manuals and box. I forget how, but you can hack it to view its internal program memory, which was fun.

@clacke Are you going to capture your findings somewhere?

@clacke It does now, unless you are loyal to Moscow 😉

@dajbelshaw @stux Haven't read the PR in detail (seems to support just a subset of status edits), but I would imagine it would be necessary to prevent a toot from escaping its original instance for a while so it could be edited. Once it had been federated, I'd imagine it would be impossible to edit a toot without the delete-redraft-toot behaviour.

@floppy If you want a book on TDD, this is good: http://www.growing-object-oriented-software.com/.

If you just want to learn it by doing:
1. Write a failing test.
2. Make the test pass
3. Refactor to make the code clean
4. Repeat

(A failing test might not even compile if it's calling something which hasn't been written yet. That's ok.)

I have also used coverage tools when not doing strict TDD to make most code is tested.

Hope that helps!