Polymath Engineer Weekly #101
Junior Developers, WAL durability, Estimation, Developer Experience, WASM, Git and Jigoro Kano
Hello again.
Comic of the week
Links of the week
The Death of the Junior Developer
I wrote this post a week ago and have been thinking hard about whether I believe the premise, which is that within a few years, the norm for source code will be that it is written and modified by LLMs via prompting. For all practical purposes, all source code will be written this way, with exceptions becoming ever rarer.
Not only do I believe it, I could even see it happening in 12-18 months at the current rate of LLM progress. I think the change will have a ton of fallout, only some of it foreseeable. And one casualty might well be junior devs, in the sense that they become less marketable and it could cause various kinds of crunches across the industry.
A write-ahead log is not a universal part of durability
A database does not need a write-ahead log (WAL) to achieve durability. A database can write its long-term data structure durably to disk before returning to a client. Granted, this is a bad idea! And granted, a WAL is critical for durability by design in most databases. But I think it's helpful to understand WALs by understanding what you could do without them.
Why do we underestimate how long it will take to complete a task?
The planning fallacy stems from our overall bias towards optimism, especially when our own abilities are concerned. In general, we are oriented towards positivity. We have optimistic expectations of the world and other people; we are more likely to remember positive events than negative ones; and, most relevantly, we tend to favor positive information in our decision-making processes.
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The only goal I have with this article is to make you think about the consequences of new and innovative tools and frameworks. Particularly if they are immediately compelling, they may be empty calories. Consider if there may be disadvantages to adopting a new way of doing things.
Integrate Go Library into a JavaScript Webpage with WebAssembly
With WebAssembly you can integrate different programming languages together. This opens up new possibilities to use great libraries written in one language in another different platform. In this article I want to show how to integrate a Go library for sentence tokenization in a JavaScript webpage. Normally, you cannot run Go code in a web browser, but with the WebAssembly technology you can.
A Git story: Not so fun this time
Monotone was created by Graydon Hoare. In 2001, Graydon, who lived in Canada, wanted to work more easily with his Australian friend. So they developed a system similar to today’s Continuous Integration (CI), which wasn’t widely known yet. Their system ensured that the code always passed tests.
In 2002, Graydon became interested in combining version control with CI. At that time, only Aegis had such a concept. Graydon also saw his friends using BitKeeper and thought that merging Aegis with DVCS could be an opportunity. That’s how Monotone came into being.
Remarkably, Graydon later joined Mozilla and created the Rust programming language.
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Book of the week
Mind Over Muscle: Writings from the Founder of Judo
Have a nice week. 😉
Have you read last week's post? Check the archive.