ntietz.com: getting buy-in, Rust footguns, ergonomics, and more
Hello, and happy Friday!
This last month has been rough for me. I'll spare the details, but I've been sick a lot and it's not clear what's going on. That's reduced some of my free time, but thankfully I've kept up on my writing, which helps me stay happy.
Not a lot to say here other than I hope you enjoy the posts, and I'd love to hear from you if you have a question or comment!
Blog updates
- I'm hopeful but wary of "empathic" AI: Emotions are core to our humanity. They're also something a lot of us struggle with, me included. I have a tough time understanding emotions in others and myself. There are some models now which promise to help understand emotion and expression. This could be huge for accessibility tooling—and for exploitative capitalism.
- Getting buy-in to get things done: Working as an engineering leader means you're working to get things done at a level you cannot achieve individually. To do this most effectively, you have to get buy-in from the people who are going to do the work. This is hard but rewarding, and fortunately there are some signals whether you have it, and some ways I like to get it if I don't!
- Rust's iterators optimize nicely—and contain a footgun: One of the best things about Rust is the ability to write high-level code that's concise and still wickedly fast. Iterators factor into this, and using them a lot is very idiomatic in Rust. I took some time to dive into how these optimize and also explain a trap a lot of people run into with them!
- Instead of "auth", we should say "permissions" and "login": We talk about "auth" all the time, but that's actually ambiguous—it can mean at least two different things! Instead we should say "permissions" for authorization and "login" for authentication. It's more than just communication; it impacts our software architecture, too.
- My portable ergonomic setup: Software engineering doesn't have a lot of occupational hazards, but repetitive stress injury is one of them. I've had my share of pain from RSI, and it ultimately led me to make a portable, fairly ergonomic setup, so I can retain mobility while also minimizing my risk of flareups of pain.
Personal projects
Last month, since I was sick for a lot of it, so I have put my programming language on hold for now. I didn't have a lot of side project time, but did put some into Pique, my project management web app. It's not quite ready for general use (for one thing, it's only running locally), but it's where I can use it for markdown documents to keep track of plans and to-do items for it itself, which is a nice feeling! I do look forward to the day when I can announce that sign-ups are available, hopefully not too far off :)
Thanks for reading and subscribing! Please consider sharing my posts or newsletter with someone who might enjoy it, and have a great month. I'll see you again in June.
❤️ Nicole