Programming Leftovers
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Let's Make Sure Github Doesn't Become the only Option
GitHub is dominant in today’s software development industry. Most professional developers interact with software created, maintained, or controlled by GitHub daily.
Their own marketing material touts that they are “The largest open source community in the world”, and indeed, the 2022 StackOverflow survey shows GitHub as the most popular version control platform by a wide margin. Many well-known open-source projects use GitHub as their source code platform of choice.
GitHub’s dominance is a risk to the software industry. Making GitHub the primary platform gives one company the power to put their needs over yours, or the industry’s. We risk leaving brilliant developers behind who don’t work well with GitHub’s paradigms. We risk being stuck with our old, technical mistakes because the underlying technology never changes. We risk losing control over our tools because they’re not actually our tools.
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Why is GitHub Actions installing Go 1.2 when I specify Go 1.20? [Ed: Why are you using GitHub Actions? It's proprietary, unsafe, and misused by an enemy of Free software, programmers, Go.]
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Waterloo Style
When I first started learning how to program, I stumbled onto an extremely strong programming philosophy that was fairly dominant at the University of Waterloo in the 1980s.
Before I was exposed, I would struggle with crafting even simple programs. Afterward, for pretty much anything codable, including system’s level stuff like databases, operating systems, and distributed systems, building it was just a matter of being able to carve out enough time to get the work done.
Over and over again I’ve tried different ways to explain it in this blog. But I think I keep getting lost in definitions, which probably makes it inaccessible to most people.
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I want to talk about WebGPU
WebGPU is the new WebGL. That means it is the new way to draw 3D in web browsers. It is, in my opinion, very good actually. It is so good I think it will also replace Canvas and become the new way to draw 2D in web browsers. In fact it is so good I think it will replace Vulkan as well as normal OpenGL, and become just the standard way to draw, in any kind of software, from any programming language. This is pretty exciting to me. WebGPU is a little bit irritating— but only a little bit, and it is massively less irritating than any of the things it replaces.
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The Cargo Cult of TCP_NODELAY: When to Use It
I learned a ton writing this post, especially about how HTTP2 works and how its binary format affects network performance. Hopefully you’ll learn something here as well!