bytes.zone

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:)

And again, let's put this into ELO anything

RankItemRatingDifference from Last
1property testing1401
2Rust136932
3tech/team leadership135910
4Ruby129366
5staff engineering127518
6unit testing122352
7CSS12203
8Haskell119921
9Elm116435
10Vim/Neovim111747
11TypeScript108829
12integration testing107513
13JavaScript906169

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!

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