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2026-09-16

Week 297: You don’t get fit by watching sport

If you’re finding working in programming dispiriting, I can wholeheartedly recommend packing in the whole employment thing and spending time working on a project in a new language, for yourself, especially if it’s not web programming.

This goes double if, like me, you’ve been working in Ruby for the past couple of decades. That language and ecosystem, particularly Rails, has now completely fallen to fascism, slop, and slop-loving fascists. Even though I was there 3,000 years ago and I wrote one gem with nearly a quarter of a billion downloads to date, I’m not sure I can bring myself to care about Ruby any more.

As my grandmother, who spoke almost entirely in aphorisms, used to say, a change is as good as a rest. It doesn’t even matter which language you choose: I’ve loved finding my way around the Java programming world, which is not something I ever expected to say. I’ve made a program that does what I want, I’ve learned a lot along the way, and I’ve been able to take advantage of a mature and well-tested ecosystem, including things like FreeMarker, the most capable templating library I’ve ever used.

I’ve done it all without touching an IDE, either, and with nothing more sophisticated than grep and a fuzzy file finder to navigate the codebase. It’s just another language, after all, and if you’re prepared to take the time to understand it and write out the getters and setters and a bit of Maven XML configuration yourself (all right, a lot of XML configuration), you can do it all in any text editor. I’m probably missing out on some magical automatic refactoring commands, but the other side is that making the changes myself gives me more opportunities to understand how things fit together. The compiler catched most of my errors – forgetting the semicolons at the end of lines is the most common – and I’m using spotbugs, checkstyle, and PMD to analyse the code for bugs, solecisms, and other weirdness. I’ve found them useful.

After working my way from a proof of concept and aggressively refactoring it up to something that’s reasonably well architected, I now have a working program which is part of our book publishing workflow.

I don’t give a fuck if Claude could have done it faster. I enjoyed it, and I understand it.

You don’t get fit by watching sport, and you don’t get good at anything by watching a machine do it for you.

I filled in a crack in the plaster of our porch. It was replastered a couple of years ago, and shrinking or flexing had left a line down the corner. I filled and painted it. After it dried, I realised that I had foolishly painted it in satin rather than matte paint, so it’s now the wrong kind of white. At least it should work as an undercoat.

Pat was over from Melbourne and so I saw a whole load of people I hadn’t seen in a while, conveniently at an entirely vegan restaurant (Mallow, near Borough Market). Unfortunately, we ended up in the loudest part of the restaurant. Perhaps it’s time to bring back tablecloths, carpets, and curtains. (I say this with a bit of hypocrisy, as our house has neither carpets nor curtains, but we also don’t have dozens of people in the same room talking at the same time.) Failing that, might I introduce the restauranteur community to the concept of acoustic treatment?

There was a world premiere of a new 4K restoration of weird cult Japanese classic Survive Style 5+ (2004) at the famous, threatened Prince Charles Cinema on Thursday. It’s weird, it’s colourful, it’s poignant, it’s impossible to explain. Great film.

I caught up with Thayer over lunch on Friday, during which she coined the phrase “techboom-ers” to describe those of us who did OK out of the early 21st century and have somehow managed to find ourselves thrown clear of the wreckage.

A friend who was close to being deported after losing his job found a new one, and has now signed the contract. That’s a huge relief, especially for him and his family. When politicians pander to xenophobia for a few more racist votes, it’s real families, friendships, and communities that they are destroying, and they deserve contempt and ostracism for it.

My annual eye test determined that my short-sightedness is worse, and my near vision is also worse. However, I can still read with my current prescription, and my distance vision is still 20:20, so rather than go to a stronger distance vision prescription that would need reading accommodation, I’ve decided to do nothing for now. But age is coming for me, and I’ll need to do something about it next year, I think. Varifocals might help with reading, but I’ll need another pair for the computer. It sounds both expensive and inconvenient.

Links:

• Power grab: “Omarchy should not matter. But sadly it does. As a power grab.”
• The X11 Conservancy Project “pulls together the disparate set of programs which were being written between the very late 80s, and early 90s – usually for Unix and Linux.”
• Opusfived is a simulation of “writing” code using Claude. I can’t vouch for its authenticity, but if it’s really like that I’d lose my mind within a day.
• 関西弁アクセント辞典: A pitch accent dictionary for Kansai dialect. Very useful if, like me, you learned Japanese in Osaka, and find 99% of reference material useless.
• This NASA Color Trick Was Meant for Mars. Now It’s Unveiling Rock Art on Earth.