@shawn Meanwhile: https://twitter.com/andyeb/status/1074249313797238785 “parallel universes”

Why are senior Android programmers also great photographers? Because they’ve mastered daguerreotypes.

@shawn I am weird and found the “rainbow fruit salad” effect fatiguing and distracting from reading, so I’ve visually muted syntax highlighting for years now. (My coding font of choice is also Verdana. >.> )

@shawn That’s where research comes in, because most everyone feels that way. This isn’t saying color couldn’t be helpful, but that it’s maybe a waste to spend a useful visual communication channel on calling out syntax.

Subjectively students indicated colour code snippets were easier to read & more aesthetically pleasing. Based on the analysis it could be concluded that students do not experience significantly more difficulty reading code in b&w as printed in text books. [bop.unibe.ch]

Is syntax highlighting actually helpful? Not for programming: Hannebauer et al set ~400 participants a variety of comprehension and editing tasks and found no difference in correctness between having syntax highlighting on and off during the tasks. [academiccomputing.wordpress.com]

Help is hard to ask for, easier to give: Pull models to ask for support are good. Push models to offer it are way more effective and feel less burdensome for everyone involved. [willgallego.com]

@33MHz @jgordon and even then “licensed not sold” was a bear (Vernor v. Autodesk [en.wikipedia.org] .

When you are obsessive about documenting as much information as possible, it cuts down on the time it takes to move projects forward and opens up more opportunities to focus on larger goals. [slab.com]

Subscription pricing makes it too easy to hide price increases and to game features. It promotes information asymmetry. [notes.kateva.org]

pet theory: companies which excel at deprecation maintain their velocity of innovation longer than those that excel at maintenance [lethain.com]

@33MHz I liked http://testerstories.com/2017/02/describing-my-role/ even more, but it was not as readily quotable.

@neil @33MHz A good ‘prompt’ trick: in most shells/environments, make “:” a function that does nothing, set your prompt to start with “: “ (note the space) and end with “;”. Then you can copy/paste whole lines, which is much faster in most terminals.

@anth @neil @33MHz Clever! I went the csh way and leaned into numbered command history towards the end of my time with zsh. (All that stopped on switching to fish, which rejected that cshism.)

When our work is transparent to the organization, the need for control is reduced. Visibility into what the teams are doing helps build trust. This reduces the need to place “control artifacts” in place, including numerous metrics. [testerstories.com]

if somebody comes and asks you how something works, my personal belief is that you should be able to open a test that can answer their question. [testerstories.com]

Be aware that while coroutines are considered final as of Kotlin 1.3, there is still a major missing piece in kotlinx-coroutines since it does not provide any type to deal with cold streams. See kotlinx.coroutines#254 for more details. [spring.io]

Apps [nyti.ms] that ask for access to users’ locations, prompting them for permission while leaving out important details about how the data will be used, may run afoul of federal rules on deceptive business practices, said Maneesha Mithal, an FTC privacy official.

Medical journals’ conflict-of-interest reporting system still has many of the same flaws that the Institute of Medicine identified nearly a decade ago. Those have yet to happen. Not even simple federal database checks are performed before publication. [nyti.ms]

These videos show New Southern diverges more from pre-Civil-War AmEnglish than Northern speech. Wikipedia’s “unique vowel shift” in New Southern hints at this: New Southern isn’t archaic at all, it’s actually innovative relative to Northern dialects. [esr.ibiblio.org]