Tyler A. Young’s Blog

These are my notes on an interview with James Clear: Designing Your Environment to Shape Your Behavior

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I just upgraded from a 2015 Retina MacBook Pro to the new 6-core 2018 model.

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While everyone well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the supposition that any opinion, of which they feel very certain, may be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge themselves to be liable.

—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

Even if we could invent a programming language that used the same terminology as the real-world problem we’re trying to solve, programming would still be difficult because of the challenge in determining precisely how the real world works.

—Steve McConnell, Code Complete

The year was 2014. I was wrapping up about a year’s worth of work on the X-Plane 10 Mobile release, and we were all set for a Christmas release. Timing this was difficult—we were pressed for time, and the App Store approval process takes an indeterminate amount of time; you submit a binary, then wait (in those days, at least 7, sometimes more than 14 days) and hope they approve it. If they don’t—if they reject the app for any reason—you have to go fix the issues they identified, then submit a new binary (and go to the back of the line).

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I’ve put together a number of conference talk playlists for my own “professional development.” This is a list curated by going through hundreds of talks in the GDC and CppCon archives.

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These are a few of the Git commands I find myself looking up all the time.

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This is a summary of the CppCon 2017 talk given by Allan Deutsch.

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The traditional hiring process—source a billion resumes, eliminate them based on keywords, interview the top hundred people, then pick one—is pretty broken. Fundamentally, filtering by pre-existing experience with your tech makes you miss the enormous swath of smart people who _could_ get up to speed on your stack quickly, and potentially become tremendously valuable to you. Whenever I hear people lament that it’s impossible to hire developers, my first question is always: how many good devs are you excluding from your search? Continue reading…

After moving our gigantic SVN repo to a new server, we wanted to speed it up. Note that some of these recommendations are peculiar to using the svn+ssh:// protocol. If you’re serving SVN via Apache or something, you might need very different advice.

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We ran into a situation at work where we needed to move our SVN repo from an old Linux server (running Ubuntu 10.04, in 2017!!) to a shiny new cloud instance.

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