he/him but also any

Recovering software developer, computers resenter

I like playing the bass guitar, painting, and some other things I’m not very good at

Mastodon @sjolsen@tech.lgbt

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • At my last job, doing firmware for datacenter devices, almost never. JTAG debugging can be useful if you can figure out how to reproduce the problem on the bench, but (a) it’s really only useful if the relevant question is “what is the state of the system” and (b) it often isn’t possible outside of the lab. My experience with firmware is that most bugs end up being solved by poring over the code or datasheets/errata and having a good long think (which is exactly as effective as it sounds – one of the reasons I left that job). The cases I’ve encountered where a debugger would be genuinely useful are almost always more practically served by printf debugging.

    Profilers aren’t really a thing when you have kilobytes of RAM. It can be done but you’re building all the infrastructure by hand (the same is true of debugger support for things like threads). Just like printf debugging, it’s generally more practical to instrument the interesting bits manually.




  • Based on my own experience and years of spectating flamewars I figure somewhere between 40-80% of any programmer’s aesthetic preference is familiarity. I use Liberation Mono (probably because it was the default on some ancient version of CentOS or something) and I doubt it’d be anyone’s first choice, but every now and then I’ll come across something with its own defaults and it just bugs me.

    On topic, the most obvious difference between Intel One and Iosevka is the radically different aspect ratio.


  • I can’t remember whether this was the default behavior, but on the original iPod Classic you could browse your albums sorted by artist, and within artist by year. It’s a small thing, but it made the iPod feel like it was designed by someone who really cares about music, for someone who really cares about music, and I haven’t seen that approach replicated anywhere else in the 15 years since that model came out.

    Just as a point of comparison YouTube Music by default doesn’t show your own library, and even that by default is just a hodge-podge of anything music-adjacent you’ve watched on YouTube. :(