A bunch of new stuff I’ve bought has arrived recently and this is the weekend I finally get around to setting it up.

New Furniture

The largest one is a new couch. I’ve been sitting on a second-hand two seater that my parents gave me when I’ve moved out. It did the job but it was getting quite old and saggy, and I’ve been finding myself wanting to have something larger that I can lie across. So about six months ago, I bought a new couch. It was meant to come last December, but got delayed thanks to Covid-19 supply chain issues. But it finally arrived this Saturday.

But before it can be delivered, I had to prepare the way, as they said. I did that on Friday, moving the old couch around to make space for the new one and also taking the opportunity to clean up a little.

The placement of the old couch is a little awkward, but it will only be for about a week and a half before it leaves my house.

Delivery time was between 10 and 12 on Saturday morning, and it was near the end of the delivery window when the movers eventually arrived. There was some concerns about getting the couch through the door but they managed to do so by standing it up on its side and sliding it through.

The delivery went smoothly, but I wouldn’t call it a great “first launch” experience. Apparently it’s policy not to take all the packing material, which means it’s something I have to deal with. It’s not a huge problem, and it’s not the first time I had to get rid of waste over several weeks, but it did take the shine out of enjoying a new piece of furniture.

But that aside, it’s great having a new couch. One interesting thing about the long time gap from purchase and arrival is that I forget how it felt trying it out in the store. It’s firmer than I remember and the height of the seats are a little short. It’s feels like a whole new experience from scratch. But I expect I’ll get use to it over time. And it’s not like I didn’t realise these properties when I actually tried it out during the shopping phase.

All in all, I’m really happy with it.

New Electronic Devices

Today (Sunday) was all out electronic devices, starting with a new M2 Mac mini.

This will replace my 2018 Intel Mac mini, which will become a home server. This is actually the first Apple Silicon computer I own. I’ve been using a M1 MacBook Pro for work for a year and a half, and I’m reasonably confident that the M1 chips will handle the type of things I’d like to run.

Going through the setup was pretty seamless. I tend to start all new machines from scratch, meaning I don’t migrate anything over. Since the old Mac mini will be still around, I’ll move projects and documents over to the new Mac over time.

The one thing that didn’t work out as well as I expected was my USB audio interface. I’ve been using a Roland Quad-Capture as my audio interface and while I was getting ready to move to the M2 chip, I did a search to see whether Roland had drivers that worked with Apple Silicon. At the time I thought they did, but when I tried installing them they didn’t work at all. Another look today confirmed that there was no driver support the M2 chip.

This was a bit of a setback. I think next time I make sure to actually do a search for “thing M2 support” instead of just browse the driver download page and infer support for something when it doesn’t explicitly say “does not support M1 Macs”. It would also be helpful to remember that MacOS 10.X does not equal MacOS X. 🤦

Anyway I’ve got another audio interface on the way. It’s another Roland product, since I think something designed for music production means the device will be able to handle low latency audio. I also need something with MIDI since I do occasionally use it for music production. This new one uses the built-in MacOS audio drivers so hopefully I don’t need to worry about driver support going forward.

Apart from that, I’m still in the process of setting the Mac up. It always feels a little strange moving to a brand new machine. It’s like moving house or going to a holiday let: everything its new to you, you need to find out where things are, and none of your old things are there. But it’s also a good opportunity to form a few new habits. For example, I may try using Safari as my browser instead of Vivaldi, and start using Mac-Assed Mac Apps like NetNewsWire in lead of web-apps. I might be a little more judicious about keeping my Download folder cleen as well. I saw a cronjob that will remove things in that folder after a week. I’ll give this a try and see if a clean Downloads folder works for me.

The last bit of kit is a new Smart Keyboard Folio case for my iPad.

I finally bit the bullet and replaced my old keyboard folio with a new one. The keyboard was completely non functional in the end and the lining was starting to peel off, so it was probably time for a replacement anyway.

I’ve only tried the new one for a few minutes as I was looking up passwords and setup instructions for the new Mac. So far it’s working well. The only concern I have is that I’ll have to go through this again in three years time.

So that’s all the new stuff I got setup this weekend. Most of the setup will continue over the next few weeks, especially the new Mac, but I’m happy I got the most of it done.

Some follow-up from my post about Spotify videos. I looked into this a little and from what I understand they’re not full videos but “short looping video clips that play during certain songs,” at least according to this website.

So I guess my initial belief is incorrect. Spotify might have music videos (they’re a bunch of articles about them thinking about it in 2020-21) but this looks to be completely different.

Furthermore, you can turn them off. They’re called “Canvas Video Clips”, and if you go into the preferences of the Android mobile app, sure enough there’s a switch for them.

Not sure why I missed that when I was looking for that option earlier. I guess because I was looking for a preference with the name “video” in the label. But this switch seems to work and after I turned it off, this visuals stopped.

Still toying with the idea of cancelling my subscription for other reasons but at least this is one less concern I have for using the service.

It’s a bit surprising that higher-order functions like map and filter have not caught on in Go.

They seemed to have caught on quickly when they were added to Java. One of the long standing issues back then was the clunky and verbose approach to writing closures. Java 8 fixed this with the introduction of the lambda (the -> operator). Suddenly, what once took multiple lines of boilerplate could be done in a single expression. The underlying mechanism was still the same but the new syntax was enough to get people to use it (amongst other things, read on).

I don’t see that in Go. With generics in Go 1.18 reducing the need for interface{} and type assertions, I would have expected the tide to turn a little: more maps and filter functions, and way less for loops. But it hasn’t seem to happen yet. I still see those same for loops that I’ve been seeing over the last eight years.

I’m not sure of the reason but I can guess I could be explained by two things.

The first is Go’s culture. And yeah, you could describe Go as having a culture¹. It’s one that’s quite conservative and methodical. Fancy ways of doing things that sacrifice readability in favour of terseness is usually frowned upon. It’s proper to make sure the code is clear, even if it takes more room on the screen.

The culture comes through in the design of the Go language itself. A classic example is the use of the error type rather than exceptions. And I think it partly explains why higher-order functions have not caught on. It’s not because you can’t do it. At least you had proper closures in the language, which is something you couldn’t say about Java, back in the pre-1.8 days.

But I don’t think culture is enough. You couldn’t say that using higher-order functions in Java 1.6 was a big thing back then either². What got them moving so quickly?

This is where I think reason number two comes in, which is the lack of standard library support. When Java 8 came out, every collection type was retrofitted with a bunch of higher-order methods which made it trivial to map, filter or reduce anything you need. There was event a new streams package, allowing you to build pipelines that are nothing but higher-order methods. All of this was useful and fun to work with, and people naturally wanted to use them.

Nothing like this existed when Go 1.18 was release. Nothing like this is in the upcoming release of Go 1.20.

Now, to be fair, this is very characteristic of how Go maintainers add features. They take their time, making sure not to break backwards compatibility or locking themselves into a design that is difficult to evolve. And I understand the reasons for why they want to go slow here. But that means that an “official” package of higher-order functions will take time to be ready. And no such package exists now. Sure, there are open-source and experimental ones out there, but would you be using those for any production level code? Maybe adding one more for isn’t exciting, but at least it doesn’t involve another dependency (and you’re already using for loops in several of your other functions anyway).

So I guess I’ll need to wait a bit longer for higher-order functions to be more of a thing. I can’t say I’m not disappointed: one of nice things about working in a language like Ruby, JavaScript, or even Java itself, is all the higher-order functions they have. I’m still hopeful that they will come eventually. After all, generics are only a year old. And Go as a language may move slowly, but at least it’s still moving.

I use the Categories feature of Micro.blog to organise the types of posts I make on this site. One of the categories I have on this blog is called Long Form Posts, which I use to file all the posts I have that have titles. This is done automatically, such that I don’t have to think about adding a post to this category once I’ve written it¹.

It’s a little hard to find the relevant features in Micro.blog to do this, but they’re there. Here’s how you can use them to make such a category on your Micro.blog blog.

Creating The Category

The first thing you need to do is create the category:

1. Click “Categories” in the sidebar. You should be presented with a list of categories on your blog. You can add a new one by clicking “New Category”.
2. Give your category a name. I chose the name “Long Form Posts” but it can be anything you want: Titled Posts, Essays, etc.
3. Click “Create Category”.

The new category should show up in the list of categories on Micro.blog. You should also see the category appear on your blog as well. If you were go to the archive page, the list of categories should appear, along with all the posts on your blog. Clicking it will show only the posts that have that category.

The new category should also have an RSS feed, which you can use in any standard feed reader. You can get to it by clicking the category on your blog, and adding feed.xml to the URL. For example: the URL https://lmika.org/categories/long-form-posts/feed.xml is the RSS feed of my Long Form Post category.

Creating The Filter

The Long Form Post category should exist now, but you may notice that it’s empty. At this point you need to manually add the Long Form Post category to each post you want in this category by selecting the checkbox in the Edit Post window. In you want Micro.blog to do this automatically for each category that has a title, you will need to create a Filter:

1. Within the “Categories” section, click “Edit Filters”, then click “New Filter”.
2. For a filter that will select all blog posts with a title; in the “Post length” picker, choose “Only long posts with a title”.
3. Select the category you want these posts to have, then click “Add Filter”.

Now any post with a title will automatically be given the Long Form Post category. You can try this out by writing a post, giving a title, then saving it as a draft. When you go back to edit the post, the Long Form Post category checkbox should be checked.

Finally, to apply the new filter for any existing post, click “Run Filter”.

There was a bit of a discussion on Mastodon and various blogs about how best to call someone who writes code for fun or profit. I’ll spare you the prologue of how this discussion that has been going on since the start of the profession itself: I’m sure you’ve heard it all before. But hearing one of these terms today got me thinking about this, and I thought I’d say what my preferences are.

As someone who writes software for my job and hobby, I personally prefer the term “developer”. I usually call myself a “developer” or “dev” when I’m around a group of my peers. When I’m with lay people, I usually say that I’m a “software developer” as people can associate a developer as one who’s involved with building houses (this has happened to me once). I don’t mind the term “coder” or “programmer” either, but I don’t feel like it fully describes what I actually do, given that about half my job involves things other than code (as much as I dislike that fact).

Officially my role is “engineer” but I don’t really care for the term. The reasons are the same as anyone else that’s got a problem with it, namely the fact that we’re not bound to the same level of accreditation that “real” engineers are (civil, electrical, etc.). But I think my dislike for it also has to do with the fact that the job of a “software engineer” usually involves more than just the “engineering” side of things. There’s design work, planning work, operations, etc. that feel beyond the scope of what could simply be called engineering. I guess one could say that an engineer is required to consider maintenance when they’re designing a structure or electrical circuit, but I feel like us software developers are more involved in the day-to-day operations of things than our “real” engineer counterparts. I could be completely wrong here though: I don’t know a thing about what “real” engineers really get up to, so I probably can’t say.

One term I’ve recently started hearing more is “individual contributor”, and I must say I don’t care for the term. It’s feels so abstract and wishy-washy; so divorced from the actual act of working with the code which, arguably, is a pretty important part of delivering value for a project. I don’t know how this term got so widespread. Maybe is a way of grouping all the activities involved in software development into one noun-phrase. I guess if I’m being charitable, I can see it that way. After all, the existing terms don’t really work as well for doing this (I’m guess that’s why the question was posted on Mastodon in the first place). And yet, I still get this feeling that the existence of this term is to deliberately reduce the importance of value these people deliver, as if we’re interchangeable cogs. It might just be where I see this term, so I could be completely unfair. But that’s how I feel, and it’s for that reason I don’t like using this term.

So that’s pretty much it. All in all I’m generally okay with being called what you’d want me to call, and I won’t call you out if you called me something else (except “Java monkey”, especially since I haven’t work in Java for a few years now). But if I had the choice: call me a “dev”, “developer” or “programmer”; try not to call me a “engineer”; and please don’t call me an “individual contributor”.

And please don’t call me at home. 😛