Laravel's Blade templates are just absolutely phenomenal. The partial rendering, the integration with Livewire, the first class component paradigm. It's just far beyond stock Django / Jinja at this point and delivers some serious dev experience performance boosts.
Have you ever heard the phrase "man your battle stations"? Turns out in the US Navy there is also "cleaning stations" and there is a call for all hands to cleaning stations on the regular. I have proposed something similar on a few teams I've been on. Daily won't work and quarterly is too long. The problem is the sprawl that comes from cleaning up things that have unintended side effects. But yes, paying the interest on the tech debt needs to be normalized across our industry.
As of late, I've been thinking about how "debt" may not be the right metaphor.
Fiscal debt is a one-dimensional number that becomes higher or lower from some offset, but it can't change direction. There's no "complex numbers debt."
But software engineering is only one-dimensional if your problem domain is so constrained that the only roadblock to execution is time-at-keyboard, and that's rarely the case in most software (especially startups and hacking). I've too often seen that debt just "evaporates" when the company pivots or the entire system is replaced by another system or rendered completely irrelevant to continue accepting the notion that debt works as a metaphor. Even in the small, too often I've seen things flagged as, for example: "debt - we should consolidate these two pipelines on top of a smaller set of helpers" only to see the use of the pipelines diverge over time such that it turned out to be a great first step to keep them separate and duplicated.
Sometimes things to be improved / cleaned up are obvious, but cleanup assumes taking disorder and making order out of it, and that requires us to know what order even looks like.
There's also in some places 'Friday Afternoon Projects' (also known as FAP iykyk) where you're allowed to work on anything, I'd honestly prefer companies allow me to work on whatever I want once a week so I can put energy into tech debt items, and tools that might make everybody's lives easier.
Simon have you ever given a talk or written about this sort of pragmatism? A spin on how to achieve this with Datasette is an easy thing to imagine IMO.
The query languages that aren't SQL keep popping up and they're honestly nicer to read/write in application code in many contexts but none have the ecosystem/maturity or "every BI tool speaks it" advantage. Until there's a single non SQL language that runs efficiently everywhere from my laptop to the datacenter and every tool between SQL wins.
SQL forever? Maybe but please let me stop writing it as strings in my actual application code. Sqlc is a hope for me. It is almost like treating your DB as an RPC.
There is already a way to completely avoid writing SQL strings in your application code, and it’s not even an ORM.
In your SQL database create lots of views and functions. Don’t be shy. There is no limit to how many you can make. Every single time your application needs to do a parameterized query, have it call an SQL function instead.
This method probably increases how much SQL you have to write overall. But it allows you to completely separate the SQL from whatever other programming language you are using. All the SQL exists in one area with whatever framework you have for handling schema migrations. Your application code now interacts with the database via an API of functions you have designed and never actually builds a query.
Hits close to home after I've caught myself tweaking AI drafts just to make them "sound like me". That uniformity in feeds is real and it's like scrolling through a corporate newsletter disguised as personal takes.
what if we flip LLMs into voice trainers? Like, use them to brainstorm raw ideas and rewrite everything by hand to sharpen that personal blade. atrophy risk still huge?
I lived without a microwave for a ~year and ended up buying one again because they are pretty convenient.
So maybe it's not high on the list based on the value you are measuring but it definitely has a convenience value that isn't replaced by anything else.
The fun one for me is that I moved countries and last I checked there’s still no way to change your phone number on ChatGPT short making a new account, so now my account is associated with a phone number that I no longer have access to and will eventually be reassigned to someone else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-CTkbHnpNQ
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