Free software wisdom

Tips & Tricks 1 Minute

Every week veteran KDE contributor Kevin Ottens posts a bunch of thought-provoking links on his blog, and last week’s post contained one that I found particularly enlightening:

40 years of programming

It’s a collection of wisdom written from someone named Lars Wirzenius who started his software development career decades ago and has seen it all. While I don’t have 40 years of programming under my belt, I do have 16 years in programming, QA, release engineering, and management, and everything Lars wrote rings true to me. I’d encourage everyone to give it a read!

Here are my favorite takeaways:

  • Take care of yourself, or else you’re no good to others.
  • Useful software is too big to create alone, so your most important skill is the ability to collaborate.
  • Write caveman code anyone can understand, unless complexity can be justified by measurably and consistently better performance.
  • Do work in small chunks, and repeat.
  • Diversity of perspective is important, or else you’ll end up accidentally making something that only works for a narrow slice of people.
  • Know who the intended user is, and try to see things from their point of view.
  • Developing software is political. Deal with it.
  • Learn to write, and write stuff down.

But do check out the whole thing!

Published by Nate

Published

11 thoughts on “Free software wisdom”

  1. “Developing software is political. Deal with it.”

    “… Unless it’s political opinion that opposes ours, in which case we’ll have to deal with it ourselves, by pushing CoCs that limit freedom of speech.”

    There, I fixed it for you. 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Hi Kevin, if you the real one, it’s a honor to see you here,
      if not, do you be a liar .. how ever,..
      you first Set, nope, bullschit.. i programming for a reason like scripts ot other possibilitys ..

      the limit of feedom of speech, in short, “The owner is the King at End” -> .. End

      the limit of feedom of speech, “The” german Moderators where have build a German Reactos Club and gather together against a Free community => Reactos and makes therewith a good running community for Microsoft to crash.. 2020, https://openhub.net/p/reactos/ scroll down to “Community” and “Activity” , Kevin, if you the Real, would it interresting if you overtake the Reactos over the time and bring the Project again to run and open my Account again..
      We need a common WinNT because have one Standard for all under GPL, but must it become a usable..

      best regards

      Blacky

      Like

    1. Classy, Nate. You chose to paraphrase the point more antagonistically than the article wrote it out. It almost seems like you were hoping to be able to call someone a “snowflake.”

      The article’s only mention of politics is basically saying “you exclude poor people if your software requires powerful hardware,” which isn’t really an actionable statement, as it acknowledges software that legitimately requires powerful hardware has to be that way by nature. The entire section is pointless, and it’s interesting you thought it worthy to be included in a summary at all.

      But if you were going to include it, condensing “you have to ask yourself these ethical questions” down to “deal with it” seems inaccurate. “Deal with it” does not imply the self-reflection and questioning that the article suggests is necessary; it implies the opposite.

      Like

  6. Off topic question:

    I experienced and Wayland crash (first one on this system since months) and it turned out that Wayland windows did survive as promised, but all XWayland ones crashed with Wayland. In my case, it was Firefox crash that caused somehow kwin-wayland to bork out too. I can’t replicate it on will, because I was just clicking on something and it caused the issue. I experienced a freeze, then a black screen and then desktop returned with all Wayland windows minus the Firefox, which showed up a crash window and system notification about kwin-wayland crash.

    So the question is: is that reported and worked on? This is still a big deal, depending on apps one use. For me, XWayland apps don’t contain any work that would get lost, so it’s not a big problem. Browsers, Thunderbird, Libreoffice, Dolphin, Kwrite – all are Wayland, so usually nothing is lost, unless the Wayland app is crashing itself and crashing kwin-wayland, like in my case.

    Like

    Reply

  7. There indeed should be a political element of software development, but I think you would be far more successful if you were to constrain the politics to where it ACTUALLY RELATES TO SOFTWARE. For example, taking a positive stance on privacy and encryption (against the desire of numerous idiot politicians to try to ban or break encryption) would be relevant.

    An off-putting thing in the KDE is that there are now certain individuals now deeply involved in the project who have openly admitted on online forums that they see KDE as a platform for themselves to push their own wider social political agendas. “Inclusivity” of oddballs is promoted over keeping things sane and focusing on software quality. Hence we see gay flags permanently on the main IRC channel, for example. The result seems to be that many sane adults* with the engineering and logical reasoning skills to make a difference are being put off. Discussions seem to be becoming dominated by posts from people who should be adults but instead seem to have childish developmental issues – for example, grown men with manga quasi-porn girl avatars, men with cartoon cosplay character avatars or attention-seeking men who want special treatment by trying to force others to be address them as women.

    I also think that KDE suffers from an “industrious idiot” problem (https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191826719.001.0001/q-oro-ed4-00012327 ). Being so welcoming to people means you get people who try to contribute a lot but they lack intelligence or balance, and their ideas are not logical and do not improve usability. You can see this in the release of Plasma 6, whereby it is openly admitted that floating panels were set as default merely for the sake of being different. What is the advantage of a floating panel? Erm, the AMAZING “benefit” is that it adds 4 rounded corners when before there were no rounded corners!!!! It also makes the desktop UI get in the way and be more distracting!!!! Never mind daily usability, someone who only tinkers and doesn’t produce anything useful with their computer is upvoting the design on Unixporn!!! I also take a look at recent merge requests and see the latest amazing fashionista “innovation” is to dick around and try and make UI corners even more round, space-inefficient, and toy-like to make users feel “safe” like they are back in the kindergarten play-pen !! (roll-eyes 👀)

    *I originally wrote the word “professional” here but realized I should change it to “adult”. Promotion of unrelated toxic social cultures, and undeveloped children developing software seems to be a problem for the “professionals” too if the recent culture and toyish UI design coming out recently from Microsoft, Apple, Google, Mozilla, GNOME etc. is everything to go by. I had hoped KDE could be different and stick to rational software development only, but it seems the may be too late to keep out the childish 🐑, especially when I see these are the type of people I see are now being PAID to contribute to KDE as well.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

Leave a comment