Amy Lang

As a retired software engineer with over 30 years experience using everything from C/C++ to Java, C#, Python, Go, etc., my preferred language is 𝘚𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘬. Why? Because of its practically nonexistent cognitive overhead. Because of its enormous productivity and scalability. Smalltalk is so small and simple that you can learn the entire language in less than 15 minutes. Not one month. Not 3-6 months. 𝗙𝗶𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝘂𝘁𝗲𝘀, 𝘁𝗼𝗽𝘀. A 2017 study by Capers Jones, the world's leading expert in software metrics, showed that Smalltalk was the most productive of all the major programming languages. The secret sauce is 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘮𝘪��𝘨 in a purely graphical environment. Smalltalk's object-oriented model makes scaling applications to any size practically effortless. Unlike all other OOP languages. Having said all that, I find Rust and Smalltalk to be highly complementary languages. When you need reliability and performance, it's hard to beat Rust. When you need short development time and flexibility, it's hard to beat Smalltalk. The thing with reliability is that low cognitive overhead lends to fewer human errors. A small, simple language makes it easier for you to fully understand the system that you are building. You focus on the problem, not the tool's complexity and cognitive overhead. This was the thinking behind visionary proponents like Alan Kay (Smalltalk), Per Brinch Hansen (Edison), Niklaus Wirth (Oberon), and Rob Pike (Go). Of course, many engineers are not concerned with complexity and cognitive overhead. They're willing to accept these in return for safety and performance guarantees. Ultimately, though, Rust programming is like programming in a straightjacket — discipline is enforced, flexibility is sacrificed. These are the trade-offs.

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In this article, the White House urges developers to avoid C/C++ and use memory-safe programming languages. It made me reflect on what this means in reality. Like, is it just about the usage of languages that don't allow arbitrary memory access via pointers? Runtimes with references that get garbage-collected automatically? What about type safety? I can see a lot of issues that can potentially arise in a code for not using a language that doesn't enforce practices like this at the compiler level. What do you think?

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Just published version 3.0.0 of Waiter, my Lua package designed to serve Roblox instances (GameObject equivalents) to you with ease. Featuring... • 📦 More ergonomic package structure (e.g. Waiter.get.children(), Waiter.waitFor.descendants()) • 🛡️Support for Custodian, my new package inspired by Rust Result and Option types • ✅ Unit tests written with the TestEZ library Since you've gotten this far, why not take a quick peek at the GitHub repo?

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Join me in-person at #GitHubUniverse where I'll be hosting the Understanding the risk of script Injections in GitHub Actions workflows workshop with Rob Anderson. Your GitHub Actions workflows are code and are suspectible to security vulnerabilties and other errors. In this workshop you'll learn more about script injection and other vulnerabilities in your Actions workflows, how to leverage GitHub Advanced Security to identify and fix them, and get exclusive access to GitHub Certification content and a free voucher to take an exam! 🔵 Date: November 7-9 🔵 Location: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco 🌟 Highlights: 👩‍💻 Workshops galore: Dive deep into the latest tools, technologies, and best practices with our expert instructors. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting your coding journey, there's something for everyone. 🤝 Networking opportunities: Connect with fellow developers, industry leaders, and GitHub experts from around the world. Share ideas, collaborate, and build lasting connections. 🎯 Hear from industry leaders: Gain insights across AI, security and DevEx from top tech visionaries who are shaping the future of software development. 🚀 Stay ahead of the curve: Discover the latest trends and innovations that are driving the industry forward. 📚 Certification voucher: The GitHub certification program is currently only offered to our employees and our partners. At Universe, the program will be available for all attendees, customers included, for the first time ever! Purchase any workshop & get a FREE certification voucher to test onsite! Sit for 1 or all 4 certifications live at the event. No worries if you don't pass as you will get a FREE voucher to retest. Level up at GitHub Universe and don't miss this opportunity! 📌 Save the date and don't miss out on this opportunity to expand your knowledge and grow your professional network. 👉 https://lnkd.in/e5gnh6hg #liveevents #github #githubadvancedsecurity

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Went on a small .NET 8 adventure. It's been a long time coming but the built-in #TimeProvider and #ITimer improvements are a game changer in terms the struggles of #unittesting Date and Time within an application without custom implementations. Really impressed and happy with it 20 years delayed. https://lnkd.in/gEHS7EdU The other new .NET 8 feature that is enjoyable is the #minimalapi capability. When you need to get APIs up fast and they are not very complex this gets proof of concepts, etc off the ground quickly. https://lnkd.in/gHpByFHH #microsoft #dotnet8 #api Also, like to give props two my favorite .NET unit testing NuGet Packages: Fluent Assertions: https://lnkd.in/gWqW7ScT (#fluentassertions) FakeItEasy: https://lnkd.in/gEjxEznb (#fakeiteasy)

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Records are a fantastic way to work with immutable data in C#. They have some decent built in features that enable data encapsulation: - ToString() shows the data instead of just the type name - Value equality evaluates true if properties are the same - You can inherit from other records Later this week I'll be releasing a video which demonstrates the above features and discusses the use cases for records in your C# projects. Until then, take a look at my other C# videos, and let me know if there's any specific topic you'd like me to cover. 👍 Have an awesome day 😁 https://lnkd.in/esCF7HSK #csharp #dotnet #softwaredevelopment

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If you're looking for free and open-source software alternatives to Serverless Framework and don't want to go down the CDK Imperative path, then take a look at sam-expand. sam-expand wraps the SAM CLI, and gives you the power to use or author plugins written in JavaScript or TypeScript as ESM compatible modules. starterstack is a proof of concept with 20+ CloudFormation stacks built and deployed using sam-expand. https://lnkd.in/eFia-EUF https://lnkd.in/era_AXpd

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Added piping input from stdin. We're now supporting: $ cat data.csv | go run main.go I have to say I really like the golang io.Reader & io.Writer interfaces. They both deserve a Chef's Kiss each. Next steps: - Figure out how to test this. I'm tempted to run os.Exec and test it the way my users use it. But the main command function is isolated, so I can also test "inside" golang. - Refactor and generalize the CSVToJSON function Moving to io.Reader and io.Writer params will allow me to add more inputs and outputs in the future. Want to write to os.Stdout? Well, it implements the io.Writer interface. What about to a file? That also implements io.Writer. Same thing on the input side. Have another two Chef's Kisses. Ya deserve it. https://lnkd.in/gB5jBq4G #golang #cli #softwaredevelopment

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You don't want to miss out on hiring great developers because you failed to set your candidates up for success 🥴 Developers perform best when they have a decent idea of what to expect from an interview process. "I really appreciate getting an overview of the whole interview process, from the get go. I like to be aware of how many rounds there’s going to be, and a rough timeline. When is the company looking to hire by? What kind of coding challenges am I going to be doing? It’s hard to come in and be put on the spot with no context around what you’re doing and the aim of the exercise […] Just give us a little time to prepare mentally." - Ricardo Tovar, Software Engineer 🎙️ Extract from our webinar “What Developers Hate Most About the Hiring Process & What Recruiters Should Do Instead“ #TechRecruitment #CodingInterviews #TA

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Not sure about pair programming or working solo? You already have someone looking over your shoulder and helping you. That someone is your compiler. Pump up the warnings. Turn warnings into errors. Add static analysis and style enforcements. Poof. Instant "pair programmer"! Not enough? If your team would like additional human eyes and decades of embedded software experience to review code and provide critical advise, consider my services! #embeddedsystems #softwareengineers #software #codereview

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With all the recent layoffs I'm going to guess many people are missing the benefits of the Google internal developer ecosystem right about now. You may be wondering "how am I possible going to survive without all the amazing tools that Google has to offer?" Perhaps I can help a little. Heres's my monorepo: https://lnkd.in/gdY7rtfV. Just clone it and make it yours by deleting the personal stuff in /shell. It has full support for Bazel (aka Blaze) and a basic presubmit system that you can customize with shell scripts. Right now it has the core goodness of google3 and I'm going to keep improving it. Hopefully this will ease your pain a little as you transition away from the mothership. #google #layoffs #bazelbuild

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Since reviewing pull requests is a fundamental part of a developer’s day-to-day, my colleague put together this helpful step-by-step guide! Compare your method to this simple four step process on the Capital One Tech blog.

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I couldn't have put it better myself: "The problem is most engineers don’t want to do operations work. They want to build the product. They want to add tangible value. But organizations will force this upon them, and engineers will either work with what they’ve already got, guess their way through some new cloud service, or the #DevOps tasks will slowly become the responsibility of a few individuals that become the “DevOps” team."    Cory O'Daniel Co-Founder of Massdriver This article is full of #itoperations gems >> https://hubs.li/Q01t-pL20

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I coded a simple bash script with a menu to reload a git history in master|main branch if is needed. 😎 https://lnkd.in/e7BaJi7B #bash #git #github #sysadmin

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As a software engineer, I was in the pursuit of finding an appropriate means to express the concerns pertaining to the problem space. Be it TDD, OOP, Actor Model, and Functional Programming to name a few. But all of them fall short. I felt that I always wind up in solution space without fully assimilating the problem space. I was mistaken to infer that programming languages are not ideal for modern problems. But the problem turned out to be not programming languages. They lend themselves to the solution space. I stumbled upon a tool created by Leslie Lamport, TLA+. TLA+ leverages math to express the problem space way better than programming languages. I don't know why computer science curriculums don't include such mathematical thinking and approaches to comprehend the problem space better. I believe all software engineers should be adept at mathematical thinking. That's one of these videos and materials that helped me in spotting where I was wrong from the get-go. Hillel Wayne

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New Apollo Blog Post where I get to publicly talk about one of my bigger, or at least more foundational, projects last year: how we deal with dynamic #CircleCI configs inside our Gradle workspace! (spoiler alerts: detecting Gradle changes then reflecting them via Mustache templates into Circle configs.....) AND best part of it: you can too, because a ton of my work got released as #OpenSource (not officially supported, yada yada) So excited to finally show this off!

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Hi SWE job hunters! I wanted to take a moment to share a personal journey that I hope may be of value to Software Engineers who are in the early(or not!) stages of their career or those feeling the weight of the job application process. My journey in tech began without a college degree, and while I currently serve as a Senior Software Engineering Manager, the road to get here was anything but straightforward. My initial foray into the job market saw me sending out an astounding ~400 applications before finding the right fit. It was a challenging period, filled with uncertainties and frequent rejections. However, it also became a time of profound learning and growth. During this intense period of applications and interviews, I felt the need for structure and clarity. Thus, I started meticulously tracking every job application - the role I applied for, the various stages of the process, points of contact, the type of application, and so much more. All of this was compiled into a detailed Google Sheet that I would like to share with you. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/dFpAX57B 👆 Feel free to copy this into your own drive Why is this sheet valuable? 1. Organization: With numerous applications in flight, it's easy to lose track. This sheet helps you stay organized and on top of follow-ups. 2. Data-Driven Insights: Over time, patterns emerge. You might notice certain roles or application types yielding better results. This data helps in refining your job search strategy. 3. Motivation: Keeping a record acts as a motivator. It's a tangible testament to your effort and dedication, pushing you to stay persistent. 4. Structured Study Plan: This isn't just about applications. The sheet also offers a study plan, guiding you on topics to focus on and helping set daily and weekly goals. Whether it's targeting a specific number of applications per day or brushing up on crucial tech topics, this plan ensures you stay on track and continue growing. If you're in the midst of your job search, or even just starting, consider using this tool. Adapt it to your needs and make it your own. Remember, every rejection is a step closer to the right fit, and every application is an opportunity for growth. To the early-career Software Engineers out there: Stay persistent, believe in your journey, and always be open to learning from every experience. The right role is out there, waiting for you. Happy job hunting, and feel free to reach out if you have questions or want to chat! 💼🚀 #softwareengineer #job #jobsearch #tips #software #engineering #template

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