With 15 years of professional development behind me, yesterday I had to google how to add an item to a javascript array.

You don't need to respond to feature requests from transphobes. You don't need to welcome rapists back into your communities. When people tell you that free software and hacking should be about technology and not people, you can just tell them to fuck off.

How to collect gender on web forms:

◦ Do you really need to be collecting data about gender?
◦ You probably don't really need to collect gender data.
◦ No really, the odds are very slim you'll be able to act in any reasonable way upon your gender data.
◦ <input type="text">

If you're a developer or something similar, and use open source software in your projects, I really recommend keeping an open source todo list. I try to do it consistently and find it helpful and fun, and here's how it works: 🧵

Why do this? It eventually lets me scratch my own itch, while limiting immediate distraction, and brings all the usual benefits from open source work: experience in working with other people's code, learning new things, community, and a warm fuzzy feeling.

For me this is usually coding, but it can apply just as well to documentation. Like, keep a list of unclear things while going through a tutorial, and especially when you have a bit more experience, you might be the perfect person to improve it with your list.

Portland announcement: Call for Papers has opened! All talks will be pre-recorded, so you can present from anywhere, whether you want to attend our hybrid event in person or not. As before, don’t book non-refundable travel until tickets go on sale.

writethedocs.org/conf/portland/…

Here’s the link to the docs: docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.0/topics/…
I wrote this back in 2015, and since then other contributors made fixes and improvements :)

In Python coding we say "easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" which I'm taking with me to Rust by calling unwrap() on every Result, and then asking my users for forgiveness when my code panics and crashes from a single network hiccup.

Currently just fucking around and finding out while deepening my love-hate for strongly typed languages and the borrow checker, but maybe some day replacing irrd.net query interface (part w/ highest performance need, lowest complexity) with a Rust implementation 🦀

How it feels to git rebase a large feature branch onto a main branch with many closely related changes, but against expectations you get zero merge conflicts and all tests pass right away:

"cRypTo iS goNNa sOlVe aLl tHe prOBlEMs" Yeah, so far everything it did is create problems for everyone. Fuck this.

I called her approach "academic" which she considered a bit insulting, and took revenge by calling my designs "enterprisy". But the real treasure was the awful Rust code we created on the way 🦀

Free first date idea: pair program on #AdventOfCode challenges together, in a language that neither of you really know, which is in between the styles you're both used to, so you both end up struggling with syntax and strong feelings about different design choices.

Happy to finally be able to shut this one down 😅
(by which I mean, switched it off and I'm first waiting a while to see if it breaks anything)

More than semicolons, I sometimes need a second to remember whether or not to use (parentheses) in if/for statements and whether or not to use {curly braces} for their blocks. And also "syntax allows this or not" vs "the norm is to do this or not".