If the metric doesn’t follow a bell curve, the average is meaningless and leads to incorrect decisions and understanding. Avoid the trap by talking in percentiles. Default to percentiles, and you’ll better understand how users really see your system.

After a certain number of years, programming becomes much less about correctly instructing the computer and much more about clearly expressing your intent to the humans that will read the code later—including yourself in six months.

Rules I try to adhere to when working on my personal stuff. They might not apply to you, but I have my reasons, so consider them.

1. There should be a one-line command in the root of the checkout called run that starts the thing and does something useful. If it’s a web server it should start on some high-numbered port that’s unique to this particular project (so I can work on more than one and not care) and it should print the URL it’s running on so I can Command-double-click it and see something useful. It should also start anything else that needs to be running for the service to work. If I ctrl-C it, it should die nicely.

2. There should be a one-line command to grab the current deployed ‘live’ database/state, or something close to it, and pull it to the local machine. That way I can debug problems that are happening to live. Ideally this command is the same for all my projects.

3. There should be a one-line command that deploys the service to live (assuming there is a live). The service must ONLY be deployed with this command. It should do everything required to get the current version onto the live server - no multi-step fiddling. I’m not picky between “rsync local codebase” or “check out from Github to remote server” as long as what it’s doing is obvious and consistent. Again, this command should be the same for all projects.

4. There should be a requirements.txt (Python) or a Makefile.PL (Perl) – or whatever the language I happen to be working in at the time uses as it’s local equivalent – in the local directory, and it should be an accurate and complete list of the project’s dependencies. (In fact, the deploy command from Rule 3 should use it to build the environment on every deploy.) Bootstrapping a mostly clean local environment to a working state should be a single command. This command should be the same for all projects.

5. I’m allowed to assume a certain set of local running services. Databases and Redis and a system Python. Everything that’s peculiar to this project needs to be deployed according to Rule 4.

There’s a theme here. I don’t work on my personal stuff a lot. There are gaps between sessions of a few weeks, months sometimes. I do not want to spend time remembering how to do any of the incredibly boring boilerplate crap that is associated with coding. I want to cd into the folder, run a command that I know will be there no matter what the project is, and have it work. When I’ve fixed the problem or added a feature, I want to run a single other command and have the working code on the live server without having to remember anything fiddly about this particular setup.

Deployment is a particular bugbear of mine. I hate sysadmin stuff, so I spend a large amount of my time automating it out of existence. DEPLOYING YOUR CODEBASE SHOULD BE EASY AND CHEAP AND FOOLPROOF. Easy, so you can do it whenever you want. Cheap, so you’re never afraid to do it whenever you want. And foolproof, so you don’t leave a step out and break things.

Yes, these rules also apply to your day job projects.

No, I don’t manage them all perfectly. ASPIRE, GODDAMNIT.

There’s a kind of “civil society” which is mostly about the soft power of public opinion on the actions of government, and then there’s something else that I guess one might call “social capital,” which is why people don’t just go cut the throat of the neighbor and run off with his microwave. It’s been my experience that they’re not the same thing, and the one can actually get in the way of the other.

The Balkans has always been pretty low on “civil society,” because most political decisions are made in smoke-filled rooms by angry drunk guys. But in terms of “social capital” they’re quite keen on looking after one another. The populace is very polite and considerate, by American standards. Hold-ups, muggings, drive-bys, gang rapes, maniacal outbursts by guys with automatic weapons, they’re all practically unheard-of.

The feeling on the streets of Belgrade is vastly calmer and cozier than, say, Los Angeles. By the standards of Belgrade, you’d think that LA was a para-militarized civil war zone, even though LA has got “civil society” like nobody’s business.

The Italians are second-to-none with the “social capital,” which is a major reason why their government is so dysfunctional. Italy really isn’t a “nation” with a “government,” it’s a bunch of extremely civilized city-states where a nationalist lifestyle was imposed during the 1860s. If the local predators in France and Austria hadn’t invented national government, I don’t think the Italians would have ever gotten around to it.

— Bruce Sterling, State of the World 2013, on the WELL

What that really means is that we can’t just bake the UI into some C code. Even a DLL system would have issues because we are cross platform. We need a flexible and extensible system for building UI that’s available everywhere. [..] So given all of that, what’s a logical system for us to use? We could certainly build a custom system and embed lua for example. Or we could license a 3rd party library like Scaleform and use Actionscript. Or we could do the obvious thing and simply use a web browser as the UI system. So that’s what we’ve chosen to do. Basically the client is a transparent web browser (webkit) window over the top of an OpenGL context. All of the front end UI and the top level game UI is being written in Javascript.

At one point we were experimenting with architectural glitches, with repeating sections of test chambers, misaligned sections and three-dimensional compression artefacts. Unfortunately, bugs in transcription by self-replicating robots looked just like bugs in the game.

Emmett “Doc” Brown explains git-rebase

While I’m complaining about geo, let’s drag up some old links about other things I hate working with.

On 24 January 1918 Lenin signed a decree that moved the brand-new Soviet Union from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. In order to bridge the 14-day gap between Julian and Gregorian, 1-13 February 1918 were omitted, so that 31 January was directly followed by 14 February.

– Making <time> safe for historians

In “I scanned %g directories”, you’d expect “directories” to be in the accusative case (since it is the direct object in the sentnce) and the plural number, except where $directory_count is 1, then you’d expect the singular, of course. Just like Latin or German. But! Where $directory_count % 10 is 1 (“%” for modulo, remember), assuming $directory count is an integer, and except where $directory_count % 100 is 11, “directories” is forced to become grammatically singular, which means it gets the ending for the accusative singular.

– A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen To You

People whose names break my system are weird outliers. They should have had solid, acceptable names, like 田中太郎.

– Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

This is why I hate working on software that deals with space, time, people and languages.