Living in the programming world

Eventually, all unicorns turn to be just slim Rhinoceros

For people that are not aware of the term (a term that I actually don’t like that much), “unicorn companies” or “unicorn startups” are companies that basically get hyper-funded and gets a lot of investments in a period of time: the idea is basically that a company (or startup) have such a wonderful idea, or a wonderful execution of that idea, that people want to put money on it, to the point of millions (or even billions) of USD, on the hope that the company will revolutionize the market. Nubank is an example; Twitter’s probably another one; and there were a lot of companies (specially startups) that are trended as “unicorns”.

For me, there is a real problem with the term – it uses a mythological animal to explain the company. Unicorns don’t exist, which basically mean that the “money” an Unicorn Company make also… don’t exist. At least, not for now; there’s a promise that it will be profitable in the future. Considering we’re talking about literally millions of USD, these want to probably get thousands of millions in return. So they start by making less than zero to the point of trying to reach eight zeroes to the right of some number, at least. They also don’t need to be sustainable, or sometimes even have good code, in the beginning – what matters is the idea, and that they somehow get founded by a group of investors.

And that’s where the problem comes in. I worked at some of these companies in the past, but up to that point I never knew what it means to have such a big money invested. The thing is, good practices in both product and code were present, for sure. But the focus was on delivering – so everything goes to the drain if you’re not delivering fast enough – you always have to deliver something new, something that the users will like, and it have to make to production really to see if that idea will make sense or not.

Which is good enough, but there’s a problem. Your products will always get worse.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

We were always this bad.

One point that I keep hearing is how internet made us all worse. In a way, it seems to be true; but let me tell a story first.

When I was young, there was no internet. I think I connected to the internet for the first time in my life when I was 15 years old, and it was way different than things are today – I remember that Google didn’t exist, or it was too slow to run on my very slow modem.

I also have to make a disclaimer: when I was young, like 15 or 16 years old, I did not see too much malice in the world. I could not understand the whole idea of prejudice for example – the single idea that one could hate others for their skin color or for the place they were born was alien to me… until I met someone that, indeed had this mentality. But again, I didn’t think too much about it – that person was not really a good person, and while I did associate with they (I was a nerd boy with no friends, a teenager already makes stupid choices by design, this was only an amplifier) when that person left my life it indeed felt that things were going to be better.

Well, fast-forward to some years, comes the first social networks. And then, I met a whole new group of idiots in 9gag, Facebook, the old Orkut… it was hell, but I made my decision to quit all of these networks, and I felt things, again, were better. After all, the internet gives voice to idiots, that eventually find other idiots, and these make a group that would never act like that in public, right?

Right?

Well, I was already quite old when a very close family member asked me if the relationship that I was starting with the one that eventually became my wife was going well – after all, she’s protestant-ish, and I am catholic (spoiler alert – I am not. But again, that person was already quite old and they never really approved the fact that I didn’t go to church), so the relationship is bound to have problems, right? I dismissed the person, without giving too much though about it.

Until the moment my SO and I got into a crisis, and spent a whole year distant; the moment when I heard the words “it’s weird for you to be with a black woman”.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

Bun is released – let’s jump the hype (NO)!

Bun 1.0 was released. And again, the JS ecosystem did what they do best – fell up into hype.

I actually have no idea why this happens so much in JS world; maybe it’s a lack of maturity (I mean, Ruby also did the same in the past, then they figured out it’s not always a good idea to throw away everything when a new stuff appears), maybe it’s something else; maybe people are just desperate to have something better in the JS world – who knows?

Anyway, I decided to do some benchmark tests. I was already not impressed, because I did test Bun in the past, but let’s see what happens with this new version:
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

They locked us outside of freedom

Recently, I saw myself forced to use a Mac. And then, finally things became clear: why I don’t like macs, and why people do like it, and why Linux is not popular.

It is quite simple, honestly – closed-source software works incredibly well with other closed-source software, and incredibly bad with any open standard.

It’s the equivalent of creating a comfortable city, with filtered air and water, but that somehow makes you allergic to natural air and water. And then, they convince you that natural air is bad for you.

So, let’s dive a little on my experience with Mac – remember, I use Linux most of the time, my wife also uses Linux (by choice, by the way, although basically nobody believe me when I say that, and no, she’s not a developer or a technical person in any way), so my whole life is somehow based on open standards. So, the first thing I tried on my Mac was to start some open standard services – OpenSSH, VNC, for remote access…
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

CommonJS is not a problem – the Javascript ecosystem is

Recently I came across this post saying that CommonJS is hurting the JavaScript world. And while I do agree that the CommonJS specification was not a good one, I also disagree a lot with the article. As someone who have strong opinions about the subject, I decided to write a post about it.

So, here’s the problem: supposing that you have a legacy system that’s years old, and that basically is modular, meaning that people write extensions, or libraries, to that. Like for example, NodeJS’ CommonJS. Now, here’s the problem: if that legacy system is flawed, and you need to change somehow, and your solution is “let’s do something that is better in any way than the older model, it’s faster, etc, but also completely incompatible with the old stuff” – meaning that we have to rewrite everything to be able to be used on this new format – then you’re doing it wrong.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

Pulsar have a green CI, finally!

After so many months, finally we have a green CI – we can consider pull requests and changes that break the CI as “unstable”. This is a huge milestone, and I want to both thank everybody that tracked these failures to check if they were legit, to the people that fixed the legit failures and that fixed the flaky tests. This has been an amazing experience, and it helps build trust on the project!

If you look at the commits from the Atom project and check which ones have passing tests, you’ll see a horrible situation: they mostly don’t pass. There’s even a recent commit called “disable tests” that passes, and then the next commits also fail – so Atom was already failing tests when these were disabled (how is that possible, I won’t dare to think).

So it’s a huge milestone to have a CI that confidently (or at least we hope!) say if we broke something new! But on this post, I want to show not only how cool is that, but also the process and how to avoid flaky tests on the near future – both for Pulsar and for other projects
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

The empire built over beach sand

Completely inspired on this post: https://archiloque.net/blog/a-machine-for-gods-jam/, and my experiences with Pulsar.

The Node.JS Ecosystem, together with so many others, is broken. Maybe beyond repair.

Let’s review the foundations of good software: good code, automated tests, a server that checks if the software works (usually called CI Server), a server that publishes the software continuously as soon as everything is working (usually called a CD Server), and reproducibility – meaning, if something fails, it needs to always fail if we send the same parameters, and always fail in the same place in the same way; if it passes, it must always pass on the same condition.

Now, onto Pulsar
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

Git is a distributed version control system – let’s use it as such

Here, I’m going to talk about git. Simply git. That’s all.

Git is a version control. It means that, for text files, it’ll store differences between a version and another.
Git is distributed. Meaning that multiple people can work on the same file and sometimes even on the same feature and one will not step on each others’ toes.
Git is semi-immutable. A commit is a fixed, immutable point in time containing the difference between the last version and the new version.

Now, let’s talk about what git is not
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

HackerNews, Pulsar, and my answer

First things first: I refuse to create an account on HackerNews. It’s honestly one of the most toxic programming communities that I know of. One thing that always come to my mind when somebody links me an article on HackerNews is the phrase:

The person who says it can’t be done should stop bothering the one doing it

Seems that this first phrase was written, without attribution on the “Puck” magazine under a slight different wording and meaning, but I honestly prefer this newer version. Anyway, back to HackerNews, somebody posted about Pulsar on it. And, as always, the comments are mostly negative. This basically triggered me a lot more than I would like, so instead of creating an account and giving them more visibility, I prefer to address these issues on my blog – so I don’t risk being triggered even more when some stupid keyboard warrior writes nonsense on why our work is useless (I told you I got triggered by the comments!).

So, to answer many of the stupid remarks on the site:
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By Maurício Szabo, ago