> I have a very long diatribe on the state of document editors that I am working on, and almost anyone that knows me has heard parts of it, as I frequently rail against all of them: MS Word, Google Docs, Dropbox Paper, etc. In the process of writing up my screed I started thinking what a proper document format would look like and realized the awfulness of all the current document formats is a much more pressing problem than the lack of good editors. In fact, it may be that failing to have a standard, robust, and extensible file format for documents might be the single biggest impediment to having good document editing tools. Seriously, even if you designed the world’s best document editor but all it can output is PNGs then how useful if your world’s best document editor?

#rant

The perfect dictionary of popular programming words.

My favourite one is:

> "dsl — A domain specific language, where code is written in one language and errors are given in another."

#rant

> If you are a programmer, you’re probably familiar with this Knuth quote:
> Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

> I think this logic is flawed. If your program is still a prototype and does, for example, 1% (20%, 50%, 90%) of what it’s supposed to do, and it is already slow, then it’ll only be slower after you finish it, no? You will make it do more, why would it become faster?

#rant

> My honeymoon with the #go language is extremely over.

> This article is going to have a different tone from what I've been posting the past year - it's a proper #rant. And I always feel bad writing those, because, inevitably, it discusses things a lot of people have been working very hard on.

> If you're already heavily invested in Go, you probably shouldn't read this, it'll probably just twist the knife. If you work on Go, you definitely shouldn't read this. I've been suffering Go's idiosyncracies in relative silence for too long, there's a few things I really need to get off my chest.

> Almost every week I accidentally get into this logging argument. Here’s the problem: people tend to log different things and call it a best-practice. And I am not sure why. When I start discussing this with other people I always end up repeating the exact same ideas over and over again.

> So. Today I want to criticize the whole logging culture and provide a bunch of alternatives.

#rant #devops

Interesting take on margin:

> We should ban margin from our components. Hear me out. Margin breaks component encapsulation. A well-built component should not affect anything outside itself. Margin makes reusability harder. Good components are usable in any context or layout.

#css #rant

> Please don’t write your documentation in Markdown. Please. I’m begging you.

> Markdown is tolerable for short documentation, like a readme.md. Past that, it’s the wrong tool for the job.

A very good #rant about markdown issues. Provides several solutions as well.

#docops

> Between 1998 and 2003, searching for something on Google was magical.

> Today, if you're looking for something that is technical, specific, academic or generally non-commercial, good frigging luck. The world's best information retrieval system has devolved into something reminiscent of 2006-era Digg: A popularity index that's controlled by a small number of commercially motivated players. They call themselves "SEOs."

#rant

> The only people entitled to say how open source 'ought' to work are people who run projects, and the scope of their entitlement extends only to their own projects.

> Just because someone open sources something does not imply they owe the world a change in their status, focus and effort, e.g. from inventor to community manager.

A very good piece from Rich Hickey (#clojure author) about how open-source really works vs how users of open-source think it works.

#rant