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The thoughts and ramblings of Benjamin Pollack, mostly on technology

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How I Review GitHub PRs
Sep 10, 2024 · original
After a long time spent in management, I found myself switching back to an IC role in February. Since then, I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit re-learning how to do all the things I used to do. Or…maybe not re-learning outright, but rebuilding habits and patterns that used to be automatic, but that I now have to think about. One of those patterns involved code reviews. The place I work has a bias towards large, epic-sized PRs. If it’s been a minute since I’ve been an IC, it’s been an hour since I was actively using GitHub for reviews, and an aeon since I was reviewing truly massive PRs. While I was pleasantly surprised to find that GitHub has improved a lot in that area, it’s got a long way to go. You can mark a given file as reviewed, for example, but not a given chunk. You can’t really make notes to yourself in any way other than leaving draft comments, which means you need to
Beating Spelling Bee with Factor
Mar 14, 2023 · original
While I unfortunately haven’t had a lot of time to contribute to Factor for a couple of years, I still love using it for the little random programming tasks I have to deal with day-to-day. Factor’s design makes it perfect for the kind of exploratory work that hits at the fringe of what it makes sense to automate . And on top of that, I still think Factor should be more widely used, so I like doing what little I can with what time I have to “make fetch happen”. One of my current addictions is to the New York Times’ Crossword app. The app, in addition the actual crossword, has a pile of other word games that are perfect for burning a couple minutes. And one of them, Spelling Bee, drives me slightly crazy. Spelling Bee is a simple game: you are presented with seven tiles, each with a unique letter. One of the tiles is gold. Your goal is to come up with as many words as possible that are at
Introducing Hayom
Aug 18, 2022 · original
For quite some time, I’ve had an appreciation for text-based tooling. Not (necessarily) for terminal -based tooling, mind—there are some meaningful benefits to using a GUI, after all—but for solutions that truly think of plaintext as their source of truth. To that end, I’ve been using a nice Python tool called jrnl for years, which makes maintaining a pure text journal really easy. All jrnl really does is to automate maintaining a simple text file in a straightforward way, and providing a few very simple ways to query its contents. And it’s completely happy to use whatever editor you want, so I can go ahead and write my posts in a nice graphical Windows- or macOS-native Markdown editor and not think twice about it. The thing is, I’ve never been entirely happy with jrnl . For reasons that have nothing to do with jrnl proper, and a lot to do with the Python ecosystem, I routinely ran into
Learning Writing and Coding from a Con Artist
Jan 5, 2022 · original
The best teacher I ever had on how to write and how to code was a complete charlatan hack who conned his way into Duke’s English department. No wait, hear me out: the prof (let’s call him Matt, because I’m not even entirely sure he gave us his real name) was an awful professor in most respects. He didn’t grade anything, I’m dubious he had any teaching credentials in the first place, he often didn’t even bother showing up to class at all, and, while I’m about 95% sure he had some college degree, I’m extremely skeptical it was in English, or that it came from Harvard. Due to his expertise in con artistry, my best guess would be General Studies accompanied by a law degree. But! Matt could write . And more than that, he made us write. A lot . I wrote well north of 200 pages in that semester just for his class alone . And a funny thing happens when you write that much: you learn how to intern
I See Deno in Your Future
Nov 23, 2021 · original
Deno is a re-imagining of Node: still JavaScript for the server and command line, still based on V8, but with a drastically improved build story, simplified (hell, genuinely simple ) dependencies, and a vastly improved standard library and web compatibility story. I’ve been using it on-and-off for hobby work for a couple of years now, [1] and I’ve really enjoyed playing with it. One especially unique feature of Deno is its security model. By default, Deno scripts aren’t allowed any dangerous access: not the file system, not the network, not environment variables, not even high-resolution timers. Basically, they need to be hermetically sealed scripts, or be explicitly granted permissions by the user to do anything. The upshot is that you can blindly run a script (e.g. the official welcome script, via deno run https://deno.land/std/examples/welcome.ts ) safe in the knowledge you can’t hose
The Deprecated *nix API
May 20, 2020 · original
I realized the other day that, while I do almost all of my development “in *nix”, I don’t actually meaningfully program in what I traditionally have thought of as “*nix” anymore. And, if things like Hacker News, Lobsters, and random dotfiles I come across on GitHub are any indication, then there are many developers like me. “I work on *nix” can mean a lot of very different things, depending on who you ask. To some, it honestly just means they’re on the command line: being in cmd.exe on Windows, despite utterly different (and not necessarily inferior!) semantics, might qualify. To others, it means a rigid adherence to POSIX, even if GNU’s incompatible variants might rule the day on the most common Linux distros. To others, it truly means working on an actual, honest-to-goodness Unix derivative, such as some of the BSDs—or perhaps a SunOS or Solaris derivative, like OpenIndiana. To me, his
When class-based React beats Hooks
Dec 23, 2019 · original
As much as I love exploring and using weird tech for personal projects, I’m actually very conservative when it comes to using new tech in production. Yet I was an immediate, strong proponent of React Hooks the second they came out. Before Hooks, React really had two fundamentally different ways to write components: class-based, with arbitrary amounts of state; or pure components, done as simple functions, with zero state. That could be fine, but the absolutely rigid split between the two was a problem: even an almost entirely pure component that had merely one little tiny bit of persistent state—you know, rare stuff like a checkbox —meant you had to use the heavyweight class-based component paradigm. So in most projects, after awhile, pretty much everyone just defaulted to class-based components. Why go the lightweight route if you know you’ll have to rewrite it in the end, anyway? Hooks
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Cats
Jul 24, 2019 · original
Inspired by Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Dogs , I thought it would be great to offer you falsehoods programmers believe about mankind’s other best friend. But since I don’t know what that is, here’s instead a version about cats. Cats would never eat your face. Cats would never eat your face while you were alive. [1] Okay, cats would sometimes eat your face while you’re alive, but my cat absolutely would not. Okay, fine. At least I will never run out of cat food. You’re kidding me. There will be a time when your cat knows enough not to vomit on your computer. There will be a time when your cat cares enough not to vomit on your computer. At the very least, if your cat begins to vomit on your computer and you try to move it to another location, your cat will allow you to do so. When your cat refuses to move, it will at least not manage to claw your arm surprisingly severely while ac
The Death of Edge
Dec 8, 2018 · original
Edge is dead. Yes, its shell will continue, but its rendering engine is dead, which throws Edge into the also-ran pile of WebKit/Blink wrappers. And no, I’m not thrilled. Ignoring anything else, I think EdgeHTML was a solid rendering engine, and I wish it had survived because I do believe diversity is good for the web. But I’m not nearly as upset as lots of other pundits I’m seeing, and I was trying to figure out why . I think it’s because the other pundits are lamenting the death of some sort of utopia that never existed, whereas I’m looking at the diversity that actually exists in practice. The people upset about Edge’s death, in general, are upset because they have this idea that the web is (at least in theory) a utopia, where anyone could write a web browser that conformed to the specs and (again, theoretically) dethrone the dominant engine. They know this hasn’t existed de facto for
Messages, Google Chat, and Signal
Apr 26, 2018 · original
Google is about to try, yet again, to compete with iMessages, this time by supporting RCS (the successor to SMS/MMS) in their native texting app . As in their previous attempts, their solution isn’t end-to-end encrypted—because honestly, with their business model, how could it be? And as with Google’s previous attempts to unseat a proprietary Apple technology , I’m sure they’ll tout openness: they’ll say that this is a carrier standard while iMessages isn’t, and attempt to use that to put pressure on Apple to support it—never mind the inferior security and privacy that make the open standard a woefully…erm, substandard choice. So here’s my suggestion to Apple: you’ve got a good story going on right now that you have the more secure, more privacy-conscious platform. If you want to shut down Google’s iMessages competitors once and good, while simultaneously advancing your privacy story for

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