miniblog.

Stack Overflow is looking for a new CEO: https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/03/28/the-next-ceo-of-stack-overflow/ Includes a short but interesting discussion of what it was like in the beginning -- "does anyone use Stack Overflow?"

On adoption of blockchain technology and finding compelling use cases: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/blockchains-occam-problem

Many use cases for blockchains don't seem to require proof-of-work. For example, a land registry. If I could verify that a house purchase has been written to a replicated transaction log, then I'd be satisfied. I suppose this is giving up decentralisation, which seems OK here.

The challenges of being a FOSS maintainer: https://feaneron.com/2019/03/28/on-being-a-free-software-maintainer/ I can relate. Working on projects with a small userbase that target other devs definitely helps. I'd be reluctant to maintain a popular consumer app.

Metamorphic Testing, a neat technique for transforming test data to generate more inputs to test your software: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/metamorphic-testing/

Gatsby is a static site generator that uses GraphQL heavily to fetch data. It has some really neat reflective features built on top. Wondering which pages are generated? You can query the GraphQL interface!

Shower thought: if you have a code formatter, you don't need to ever insert newlines yourself. You could repurpose the enter key for something else entirely! What would you use this large key for? My first idea is go-to-definition.

The new version of Android will lock down storage APIs, making external SD cards much less useful: https://commonsware.com/blog/2019/03/28/death-external-storage-why.html (Increases security, makes Google Drive more compelling, potentially helps enterprises and integrations.)

WASI is developing a portable, sandboxed system API so you can run WebAssembly outside of a browser: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/03/standardizing-wasi-a-webassembly-system-interface/ WebAssembly has a ton of people doing interesting things, but I do feel there's some overlap with what the JVM planned to do.

I knew that Haskell has an unconventional meaning for return, but today I learnt that return in Scala means something else too! https://tpolecat.github.io/2014/05/09/return.html It's a non-local return, so it returns from the *caller*! Wild. Seems handy for Ruby/Smalltalk style blocks though.

I get significantly more conversations on Mastodon than Twitter, and they tend be more interesting too. That's in spite of the smaller number of people that see my microblogs/posts here. It's nice: there's a distinct community here, and they're worth connecting with 😊

On the perils of storing data in UTC: https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a-silver-bullet/ (Users expect future events to happen at the time specified, even if the timezone changes its policy on summer time transitions!)

MIPS is going to be open source, competing with RISC-V! https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1334087 https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1334317

A really nice proposal to make NullPointerException in Java include a helpful message: https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/8220715 E.g. 'https://t.co/5UTXCp1Wmd_b.to_c'; is null. Can not read field 'to_d'.

AMP for email will make it possible to send interactive emails: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/26/google-makes-emails-more-dynamic-with-amp-for-email/ Regardless of the feature set, it'll interesting to see if it gains much adoption. Rolling out changes to a distributed system is very hard (cf IRC).