Write Dumb Code

This article from 2018 is on the front page of Hacker News again today.

The best way you can contribute to an open source project is to remove lines of code from it. We should endeavor to write code that a novice programmer can easily understand without explanation or that a maintainer can understand without significant time investment.

The author also mentions:

Every line that you write costs people time. It costs you time to write it of course, but you are willing to make this personal sacrifice. However this code also costs the reviewers their time to understand it. It costs future maintainers and developers their time as they fix and modify your code. They could be spending this time outside in the sunshine or with their family.

This is just as true for closed source code as open source. Source code is read orders of magnitude more times than it’s written. We should optimize it for the reader and optimize it to be easily improved.

Default Apps 2023

I’m so in the Apple ecosystem, this is almost not even worth posting 😅

📨 Mail Client: Mail.app
📮 Mail Server: iCloud, Gmail
📝 Notes: Apple Notes, Byword
✅ To-Do: Things, Apple Reminders
📷 Photo Shooting: iPhone 15 Pro
🎨 Photo Editing: Apple Photos
📆 Calendar: Apple Calendar
📁 Cloud File Storage: iCloud
📖 RSS: Wire
🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: Apple Contacts
🌐 Browser: Safari, Firefox Developer Edition, Chrome (Work)
💬 Chat: Messages, Slack
🎵 Music: Apple Music
🎤 Podcasts: Apple Podcasts
🔐 Password Management: 1Password (but tempted to switch to Apple Passwords now that they support shared vaults)
🧑‍💻 Code Editor: vim, highly customized

It’s becoming quite common for web developer blogs that show up on the front page of Hacker News to not have an RSS feed. This feels like a step backwards. I know RSS usage is not what it once was, but it seems like something you should get for free. Blogging platforms like WordPress (currently 43% of all websites) and even Mastodon support RSS out of the box. The Next.js blog demo automatically builds an RSS feed. There are popular RSS feed generator packages for every language.

For example:

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