launch ftw, part 10
Brian Hicks, July 6, 2023
As promised, it's tomorrow and I'm brainstorming more audiences. In addition to including things where I have an advantage, this time I'm trying to be as specific as possible without limiting community size. I want to be able to read posts and interact with people regularly, so let's say an ideal size would be having a post per day or more.
Here's my list (I've italicized new things and crossed out ones that I've made more specific:)
- Elm
- Rust
- Ruby
- Haskell
frontend developers- CSS
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
TDD practitioners- unit testing
- integration testing
- property-based testing
- tech/team leadership
- staff engineering
- Vim/Neovim
And again, let's put this into ELO anything…
| Rank | Item | Rating | Difference from Last |
|---|
| 1 | property testing | 1401 | |
| 2 | Rust | 1369 | 32 |
| 3 | tech/team leadership | 1359 | 10 |
| 4 | Ruby | 1293 | 66 |
| 5 | staff engineering | 1275 | 18 |
| 6 | unit testing | 1223 | 52 |
| 7 | CSS | 1220 | 3 |
| 8 | Haskell | 1199 | 21 |
| 9 | Elm | 1164 | 35 |
| 10 | Vim/Neovim | 1117 | 47 |
| 11 | TypeScript | 1088 | 29 |
| 12 | integration testing | 1075 | 13 |
| 13 | JavaScript | 906 | 169 |
Overall, I have 3 reasonable top things. There's not a huge difference between them, but two of them are techniques. I've had trouble with that so far!
But, to be honest, I really love property testing—it ticks the same boxes for me that lightweight formal methods does, but with the benefit that it refines to actually testing code. Point is: I'm enthusiastic about this! And, as another bonus, I've taught the basics to enough people to know what they struggle with. I think my own enthusiasm is a big bonus here: I'm going to have a harder time making this work sustainably without that seed. (However, I'm also aware that I don't want to rely on riding a happy feeling. Work can be hard and I won't always feel this way!)
On the other hand, Rust might make a lot of sense. There's an enthusiastic community and the people seem pretty reasonable. I feel a hesitation to dive in, though, and I'm not sure where it comes from. I think I'm going to leave that on the shelf for now, though, and focus on property testing.
So, next steps… I could try to find communities to look at. A brief search shoes that there's some in Elixir, some in Python (with Hypothesis,) and I know that there's some discussion on this in other FP languages. There are also some classic blog posts that I could stand to re-read. But first, I want to see if I can do the actual Launch FTW lesson cold. (Yes, finally getting back to that!) That'll be next time!