A random idea, but it's about time for me to emit it into the wild.

Project (startup?) idea: An instrumented UI-first testing tool based on computer vision.

Effectively, Selenium but for everything non-browser.

Cucumber-style test descriptions, plus a set of pre-trained models that understand commands such as:

‣ Press the red "OK" button in the lower right corner.
‣ Scroll the top-level pane down until "Solution" appears.
‣ Wait until "Build succeeded" or "Build failed" has appeared on the screen.

Intended reference use case: DevEx teams testing the company-wide IDE setup, so that a new version of some PyCharm / VS Code plugin does not break some important flow.

"Page" load time testing: see how long an app, say, the IDE, takes to load until it is fully functional. I.e. until it can open the project, open a source file in it, and have code completion work with a trivial test case.

Also, works well for performance testing too. For example, to test responsiveness of some team messenger apps, open the same chat window (or a shared doc) from different VPNs around the globe, type the next character only after the one added by the "previous step" agent makes it there.

Would be quite big these days, huh?

My take on the CrowdStrike incident is exactly what @Komzpa half-jokingly said a while back.

“Catastrophies will ensure humankind prevails!”

I’m not _in favor_ of bad things happening. Of course. But the healthy attitude is to embrace them.

We, the technology sphere, have admittedly lost it. Boeing comes to mind first, well, second now. We have let the tech-illiterate career-driven bureaucrats run the show. We, the engineers, have crawled into our holes doing good work where we can, since fighting this corporate and enterprise monsteroucity is not our strength.

Game-theoretically, then, more catastrophies is a good thing. Because it is a wake-up call our industry, or maybe the whole planet, is long overdue for.

I’m an avid Linux user. FreeBSD rocks too. Open source kicks ass. UEFI et. al. are just terrible ideas, since they remove and obfuscate who and what really is in charge of pretty damn important things.

We were not listened to. I still have plenty of friends who sincerely believe the closed ecosystem of Windows is more stable and more reliable than “a bunch of freaks”. And who sincerely believe we should make our society cashless, but not properly-decentralized cashless but rather all the way around.

Well, I may be wrong and they may be right. Time will tell. So far though we have plenty of evidence in a very particular direction. I sure hope no one in their right mind would design a nuclear power plant to be operated by Windows 11.

☝️Sorry for the spam in Russian, but we're going live today with another Dima, just in a few hours.

Сегодня в 19:00 GMT+1 обсудим Современный System Design

В гостях Дима @BoreMeNo
Автор System Design Meetup https://www.youtube.com/@dimakorolev/

Ссылка на стрим
https://youtube.com/live/Gx14ex3NZo0?feature=share

YouTube

#FaangTalk 66 - Современный System Design

Канал с анонсами https://t.me/faangtalk\_news Чат по подготовке к интервью: https://t.me/faangtalk В гостях Дима из https://www.youtube.com/@UC59wf9NCMAwWDsu5CY3PqnQ

Сrazy thought on democracy and it working.

There's a growing wave — which I of course support in my heart — that goes along the lines of:

• If The People are not heard and the country/government acts against the expressed interest of The People, then this country/government can not be considered democratic.

While I — again! — agree with this in spirit, Norway presents and interesting "counter"-example.

• Norway has oil.
• Norway is quite wealthy per-capita.
• Norway maintains a sizable stabilization fund.
• Most voters complain along the lines of "why can we not have nice things when the country sits on this pile of money".
• The country chooses to keep investing this pile of money long-term instead of spending it.
• End result: not a single time in a lot of years the incumbent government won the elections.

Did I mention tax rates are quite high in Norway?

So we have a situation where the country, a clearly advanced one, routinely, decade after decade, goes against its own citizens' expressed interest.

Should "true democracy" win on Norway, people would vote to effectively redistribute this stabilization fund money among themselves. Handouts and/or lower taxes and/or whatever other means.

And yet this is not happening. And I, for one, would not bet on this happening any time soon. Even though, arguably, the average democratic voter in Norway would much prefer to see themselves have more money, not less.

Go figure.

A friend sent me this.

I thought it'd work with overriding this via bind / call / apply, but alas, no luck.

Pretending I really want to do it — OCD FTW! — here's how it actually "works".

Better solutions are more than welcome =)

Linkedin

Artiom Rizhankou on LinkedIn: Today, I faced this task during a live-coding session (see attachment)… | 10 comments

Today, I faced this task during a live-coding session (see attachment). I'm still looking for a "correct" solution. Unfortunately, the tech lead from the… | 10 comments on LinkedIn

Sorry =)

I really liked this podcast with DHH. Totally recommend. Especially the last ~40%.

YouTube

DHH - Ruby on Rails, 37signals, and the future of web development

This week we're joined by DHH, the co founder of 37signals, and the creator of Ruby on Rails. We talk about the future of web development, the history of Rails, and the evolution of the web. David also talks about his views on the longevity of software and…