Software Disenchantment

• Faktory

  23 5,494 7.7 Go

  Language-agnostic persistent background job server

  

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance's entire thesis is "What is Quality?" How do you define it? How does it come about?

You can still get software quality but you have to be willing to devote time and effort to it. The binary for my modern, commercial background job engine written in Go, Faktory, is 5MB in size.

https://github.com/contribsys/faktory/releases/tag/v1.8.0

I know when I see an iOS app that is 5-10MB in size, I know it was crafted by someone who cares.

• Apollo-11

  127 56,524 5.1 Assembly

  Original Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) source code for the command and lunar modules.

My more positive take on this: our runtime environments are bloated because we have ways to enable trust, stability, and iteration speeds that people wouldn't have dreamed of in years past.

Your Notion desktop app and Google Chrome both support embedding & displaying multimedia content that's controlled by people that you may not trust, but they can draw on decades of engineering to sandbox that content. They can independently be updated without worrying about a centralized `flexbox.dll` that may or may not be the right version. They do not require building a new executable to make the vast majority of UI changes. And the cost is simply storage space and initial download bandwidth.

We can look with rose-colored glasses at an era of "every byte of assembly has been hand-crafted." I, too, look in awe at what was achieved with such things as https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/tree/master/Luminar... . But that software, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer#Softw..., took 1400 person-years of work.

We have to compare apples to apples - the abstractions we have today would not prevent such a piece of software from being built, and indeed would allow us to build that exact software, even bit-for-bit the same, much more easily due to abstractions on our tooling itself. We have not departed a world where, given a nation-state budget, one could pay for 1400 person-years of work and create the AGC (though one might make arguments about the distraction levels of modern society, but that's a different thing entirely).

But we also exist in a world where I can build and ship a cross-platform video chat application in an afternoon (well, not counting app store approvals) and be reasonably confident that my app will be compatible with, and secure on, practically any computer or mobile device sold in the past half decade, regardless of how many other apps may have been installed on each device. I'd venture to say that Apollo engineers would, and do, find this aspect of our world fascinating, too.

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• tersenet

  8 107 1.8 Nim

  A new type of JavaScript-free light-weight fast browser built on rst and web assembly. Does not actually exist.

Here's an idea I had that is a bit related https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet

Although I may never have time to actually work on it. Especially since it will be a complete waste of time unless I can get a huge number of people to adopt it.

• ui-editor

  26 0 8.4 JavaScript

  A collaboration tool for engineering teams. Working concept for design tool that can generate readable code. Aimed to replace modern bloatware like jira, slack, outlook, IDE, and redundant work. A developer tool built by developer to make designers do the developer's work.

I took a step to solve framework bloatware for web interface. Frameworks are meant to speed up development.

Here is my project https://github.com/imvetri/ui-editor.

It started as a challenge to find single syntax to generate code for all framework, then it scales to low code, and right now at design to code

• DOOM

  91 12,738 2.5 C++

  DOOM Open Source Release

  

Here's a repo for you with no test coverage and no auto-generated DI. They using unsafe pointers all over the place, too!

https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM

Shall I prepare the postage for the letter in which you'll call John Carmack an MBA? Should we send another to Chris Sawyer? I heard he didn't even write a formal design doc for Roller Coaster Tycoon!

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

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