Tag Archives: learning

Month notes

April 2024 month notes

I’ve read quite a few people complaining about the continuing degradation of Google search results but this month I genuinely started to notice issues with search results about programming and system design. There’s always been a bit of game playing in the top position but the problem I noticed was that the later results feature a lot of recycling of the same information (and in my case incorrect or irrelevant information) so that there was really only one result on the front page.

There was also a lot of Medium links which itself is getting increasing unusable if you don’t want to have an account or engage in whatever pop up activity Medium thinks is going to boost its monthly active users.

Search alternatives

I’ve started using Ecosia for its green credentials and because it seems to have results that are less gamed (although W3 Schools is still too prominent). I also gave Codemate Bot a go, which is essentially a tailored LLM. It seemed a bit better than Gemini and a few times gave the right answer faster than Google searching. However follow up questions were pretty terrible and conventional LLMs seemed to be better at refining.

This is going to be a bit of a painful ongoing task I think.

Online learning

I’ve been revisiting some Javascript and Typescript basics recently because both languages have changed since I originally encountered them and some new features have replaced previous conventions. I prefer text-based learning because I find it much easier to skim over areas that I know that it is to fast-forward through a video. I therefore have been using Educative and Lean Web Club. Lean Web Club is primarily Web Standards based Javascript and a bit of CSS, its small projects and bite-sized explanations are pretty handy but it lacks an internal search for when you can’t quite remember where something is located. It has been handy for seeing examples of how low-level ES Modules work, Web Components and also getting an overview of the different storage APIs that exist (and which ones haven’t been deprecated!).

Educative is broader in its content and works with different content providers to adapt their material to the platform. Therefore the style is a bit more variable particularly in the granularity of the course topics. It features mini-quizzes and again the quality is a bit variable but it does try to use different means to consolidate learning.

Like everything today, Educative has an LLM element which means it can ask open-ended questions that you reply to with free text and then your answer is evaluated. This seems pretty handy for things like interviewing and testing how clear your explanations are. However just like interviewing it can suffer from unclear questions.

For example in one question about distributed systems it wanted more detail on handling distribution across geographic regions but was unclear about whether there was meant to be a global identity service for all regions or the service was meant to be independently distributed so regions were compatible but still globally unique. There wasn’t really a way to tease that out of the LLM and even the “ideal” answer wasn’t very clear on the preferred approach.

What is awesome in Educative (and credit to MDN because it also has this feature in its documentation and I use it a lot there too) is that it has interactive code examples inline that you can edit and play around with. This allows you to see the effect of the code which is often easier than reading about what it is meant to do and you can play around to confirm your understanding of what is happening.

There were lots of Typescript modules I wish had read before I encountered them in the real world: membership of interfaces and its associated type checkers and when basic type inference fails for example.

Rust Nation pre-conference talks

I went to a community meetup of preview talks from the Rust Nation conference that was held last month. The most interesting talk was this one about the culture of purity in Rust around the use of unsafe and in fact how if this desire to be memory-safe is to be realised there needs to be work in some of the core libraries that the language community uses. I thought Tim did a good job of combining practical research with a plea for a more tolerant community.

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Software

Great software delivery newsletters

I currently subscribe to a number of great newsletters around technology and software delivery. While the Fediverse is also a great place to pick up news and gossip I have found that there is something really valuable in having a regular curated round up of interesting articles. It may be no surprise that the consistently great newsletters are produced by people who are engaged in consultancy. I think they inevitably get exposed to trends and concerns in the industry and also can commit the time to writing up their thoughts and reflecting on their chosen content.

Pat Kua‘s Level Up focuses on technical leadership and tends to have good pieces around human factors, managing yourself and creating good systems for delivery. It also often has advice pieces for people coming into technical management or leadership.

John Cutler’s The Beautiful Mess focuses on Product but is also great on strategy and importantly is always focused on getting to a better product process by emphasising collaboration and breaking down barriers between functional silos. I also enjoy reading how he approaches putting together alternatives to roadmaps and strategy documents. I think he has the best sense on how to use things like metrics and North Stars.

Emily Weber writes Posts from Awesome Folk has a focus on management, leadership, consensus building and healthy organisation cultures. As the title suggests it offers a carefully curated selection of posts that are often longer form and are generally from expert practitioners.

Michael Brunton-Spall‘s Cyber Weekly is your one stop shop for news on security and analysis of the key issues of the day.

Simon Willison‘s newsletter is more recent and feels more like a very long blog that is getting pushed into the newsletter format. Despite this Simon is one of the most creative and independent developers you could read and he was early into the LLM and generative AI and has lots of interesting insight into what you can do with these models and what works and what doesn’t. He’s also an (intimidating) role model for what independent, solo devs can achieve.

I have a lot of other subscriptions (and indeed a lot of people seem to be starting newsletters currently) so I will probably need to do a follow up to this post in a couple of months if I see that people are posting consistently useful things. One general thing to point out is that if I’m working on a particular technology (like Django, Go or React) I’ll often subscribe to the weekly community news roundups to get a feel for what’s happening. However I find the volume of links and items is overwhelming if you don’t have a specific interest or purpose in reading through them so I relegate them to RSS when I’m not actively working with them and have a more occasional catchup.

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Clojure

Control expressions are functions too

I am kind of simultaneously learning Clojure and Scala, the former through the London Clojure Dojo (come and join us) and the latter through work. It is an interesting experience but I am very glad that Clojure is part of the mix as it helps understand a lot of things that are seem strange in Scala.

In Clojure everything is essentially either a function or a sequence. It is therefore not surprising to see that an if statement works like a function.

(if false 1 2)

Evaluating the above in a Clojure REPL results in the answer 2: if is a function that evaluates its first argument returning the second parameter if the evaluation is true, the third if false.

The same is true of Scala, with the additional wrinkle that if the different clauses evaluate to different types you could be in type hell. Despite its superficial similarity to Java syntax it is in fact quite different and you can compose it just as you would any other function.

1 + (if(true) 2 else 3)

Evaluated in a Scala REPL gives the result 3.

Scala 2.8 seems much better about making everything return a value (and hence act like a function), val and for will both now return Unit, which is not useful but prevents the compiler moaning.

This kind of thing is much easier to appreciate and learn in a pure functional language than in Scala where you never really know whether something is going to operate in a functional or object-orientated way.

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Scripting

Discovering Scala

Over the last two days I have been giving Scala a quick whirl and I have to say out of all the new languages (functional and otherwise) I have been looking at recently only Erlang is anywhere near as exciting. There is a small fifteen page tutorial and after finishing it I immediately thought: “I want to see more of that”.

I can’t put my finger on it at the moment but I imagine its the fact that it seems perhaps more familiar due to the Java background. The functional syntax is as confusing as any other functional language.

P.S. if you go through the short 15 page tutorial then there is a slight blip in the tutorial when case classes are introduced. All the code for the calculator example should be wrapped in an object block if you want it to work. I.e.

object Calculator {
... tutorial code
}

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