A Broken Watch

Hansen Writing Ball This morning I switched on my monitor, noticed the LCD screens of my newly built mechanical keyboard--the Ergodox Infinity--go from "breathe" to a greeting with the qmk logo from its freshly flashed firmware, and then my monitor greeted me with its Emacs session from yesterday. Even though it was not my original intent when switching on and plugging in, I found that I couldn't resist continuing to type up the next logical part of a keymap I started working on for a different mechanical keying device: My long-finished but never customized RAMA m10. Ergodox Infinity (center) RAMA m10 (top right) As I finished joyfully typing the rest of LAYER1, on to LAYER2, it made me think of a story I once read about Nietzsche and his typewriter. I remember the striking thing about it, and probably the reason it occurred to me again in this moment, was how much Nietzsche wrote about using the typewriter and how he thought about how our tools and techni...

I'm starting to think that programmers who dip into the homebrew, demoscene and retro communities and come out talking about the beauty of programming with constraints are getting it slightly wrong. You want constraints? If you're in a programming or engineering profession, you already have them. Heck, if you're in any profession. But, I know programming/engineering professions best because I've been in them for like 20 years. Your constraints are: Horrible bosses, bad management decisions, a pathological Capitalistic enterprise, idiotic schedules, badly written existing code bases and technical debt, people at higher levels with political control that know a lot less than you, lack of creative or design control, etc. You want constraints? Probably also throw in: Non-existing or ineffective build and test automation, annoying auto-formatters, syntax requirements, unhelpful code reviews and nagging code review requests with people circumventing the tests to get past ...