Buttons are a fundamental element in user interfaces, but it’s easy to make some accessibility mistakes when using icon-only buttons in QML.

First, please avoid icon-only buttons and only use then, when the icon is very well known (e.g. arrows, delete or favorite icons) and the space is limited.

In case you still want to use an icon-only button. Make sure to set the text: property and that it is also translatable. Otherwise, a screen reader won’t know that to say about the button. This is because the text: property is used as default value for the Accessible.name: property, so when it is not set Accessible.name is empty and the screen reader can only say that the currently focused control is a button. The trick to have both the text: property set and an icon-only button is to use the display: property and assign it to the AbstractButton.IconOnly.

This gives us the following code:

import QtQuick 2.15
import QtQuick.Controls 2.15

Button {
 text: i18n("Favorite")
 icon.name: 'favorite'
 display: AbstractButton.IconOnly
}

Finally, another essential part is that an icon-only button requires a tooltip. We need the tooltip in case the user is unsure about the meaning of the icon and we need more details.

import QtQuick 2.15
import QtQuick.Controls 2.15

Button {
 text: i18n("Favorite")
 icon.name: 'favorite'
 display: AbstractButton.IconOnly

 ToolTip.text: text
 ToolTip.delay: Kirigami.Units.toolTipDelay
 ToolTip.visible: hovered
}

Note that this used the ToolTip attached property instead of a separate item ToolTip {} as it is more memory efficient. With the attached property, we share the tooltip instance across the entire application instead of instanciating a ToolTip popup for each button.

The KDEPIM team like most got impacted by the pandemic and had to let go of lovely traditions. One of those being to meet in Toulouse at the beginning of spring. The last one was in 2019 so reviving that meeting was long overdue.

Since the last time, quite a few things changed in Toulouse of course… for instance the old venue wasn’t available anymore. Luckily, with a couple of friends we revived the local C++ Workshops a few months back in a new venue as well. Since it is a cool fablab very well situated in the town center we asked them if they’d be ready to host Free Software hackers for a whole week-end and they happily agreed to it.

Thanks to this nice conjunction of events, we organized the KDEPIM Sprint 2023 the first week-end of April

The Warm-up

Some of the team (namely Ingo and Volker) arrived early before the official start. Of course, we planned for that and had access to the venue from the Friday afternoon.

But before heading there, we had to visit the now mythical Cake Place™ for lunch. With a pair of happy hackers fully loaded with fat and sugar, the work could start.

We thus finished preparing and planning what would happen during the week-end once we would be joined by Laurent and Carl. We also managed to get started on some of the explorations around KCalendarCore which would end up being a recurring theme for some of us.

Day 1

After a quick breakfast at the venue, we started listing the topics we wanted to discuss during the sprint. Most of it was already captured on the wiki before we arrived but a couple more appeared at that point.

We basically identified two types of conversations:

• those for which we needed bigger discussions with everyone to set the overall direction;
• those for which we already had agreement on the direction but needed a finer grained look at them to actually have a proper battle plan, they didn’t require everyone and we did break out groups for those.

All of this was time boxed with proper debrief and capturing notes on the wiki to try to avoid loosing too much context. This pretty much filled up our day but we managed to have a few patches done during that time.

As for the conversations they covered mostly the following topics:

• decoupling KDAV from KIO
• easing the use of KCalendarCore::Calendar for asynchronous code (since it exposes a synchronous API)
• overall shrinking KCalendarCore::Calendar’s API, it’s fairly large and unfocused currently, we want to focus it on an easy to use core
• deciding on a new custom properties API for KCalendarCore
• retiring the mixed maildir and the kolab resources which is easier said than done, since we want to ensure minimal disruption for the users using those resources
• improving the Windows compatibility, especially important for Kalendar at the moment
• retiring the Kross based account wizard for a modern QML one
• fixing important dependencies in akonadi-contacts to reduce reliance on widgets (necessary for Kalendar and mobile)
• using QtKeychain in KMailTransport properly
• removing the KMailTransportAkonadi API
• eliminating Kalendar’s reliance on some of the KOrganizer settings
• improving our APIs for QML consumption and factoring out some of Kalendar internals for reuse
• and of course, planning and the overall timeline towards a “PIM 6” release

The KDEPIM team being currently fairly small, one of the constant concern which forced some of the choices we made was to keep it realistic. It’s no use to make grand plans we can’t execute on the large codebase we have to maintain with only a handful of people.

Now if more contributors are coming in (hint hint) we could of course be more ambitious at places in the future. We definitely have the ideas, so if you want to have fun and help, get in touch!

Day 2

We managed to conclude the last discussion we planned before Laurent had to head back home. This means we successfully covered all of the 15 topics we had to deal with while everyone was around. We tried to make sure they all led to actionable items.

That’s why to plan and drive the effort, we created a new project on Gitlab. This already got filled with the results of our discussions. Some of the issues being actively worked on as I’m typing this. Merge requests are already pouring in various PIM related repositories!

I’m looking forward to running my scripts on said repositories in a couple of weeks to see how noticeable the uptick of activity will be. ;-)

Last but not least

I’d like to thank Artilect and KDE e.V. to make this event possible. This wouldn’t be possible without a venue and without at least partial support in the travel expenses.

Also, I’d like to give a special thanks to Sébastien Dinot who has been my partner in crime pulling this off. He’s been a big help with some of the logistics and a very patient key master.

Finally, if you like such meetings to happen in the future so that we can push forward your favorite software, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation or contacting Artilect for a donation as well (they unfortunately don’t have a donation page up yet but that’s coming).

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-13.

The Twitter API is now effectively unmaintained | snarfed.org

Tags: tech, fediverse, twitter

Twitter continues its slow death… That likely explains why the Mastodon to Twitter bridge I’m using has become so unreliable. I’ll just keep ignoring it I guess.

https://snarfed.org/the-twitter-api-is-now-effectively-unmaintained

Cerebras-GPT: A Family of Open, Compute-efficient, Large Language Models - Cerebras

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, foss

Clearly aims to demonstrate the superiority of their specialized hardware for training. That said it’s nice to have proper open models available (architecture, training data, weights… it’s all in the open).

https://www.cerebras.net/blog/cerebras-gpt-a-family-of-open-compute-efficient-large-language-models/

What is the origin of model-view-controller? - Quora

Tags: tech, architecture, design, history

Nice historical perspective from Alan Kay about the MVC architecture pattern.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-origin-of-model-view-controller

Biscuit authorization

Tags: tech, cryptography, security

This looks like an interesting new authorization scheme.

https://www.biscuitsec.org/

Making Python 100x faster with less than 100 lines of Rust

Tags: tech, rust, python, profiling, performance

Nice walk through for a use of PyO3 to make some Python code much faster. Nice to see how useful py-spy turn out to be in such scenarii as well.

https://ohadravid.github.io/posts/2023-03-rusty-python/

Make your own Optionals

Tags: tech, programming, java, type-systems

There are nice mechanism in the Java type system nowadays to no rely on Optional all the time. This is a good reminder of the main alternative.

https://mccue.dev/pages/3-28-23-custom-optional

The Ambiguous Zone - Ben Northrop

Tags: tech, team, craftsmanship, organization

We might start in a software career attracted by the “perfection of the machines” (already debatable) but indeed to make anything meaningful we need to interact with other people. I often say it but I’ll say it again: it is a team sport.

https://www.bennorthrop.com/Essays/2023/the-ambiguous-zone.php

Why Engineers Need To Write - by Ryan Peterman

Tags: tech, craftsmanship, writing, remote-working

Indeed, this is the most important skill we need next to coding. Especially in a remote work culture.

https://www.developing.dev/p/why-engineers-need-to-write

The Definition of Senior: A Look at the expectations for Software Engineers

Tags: tech, career, management, leadership, engineering

Nice (even though a bit long) explanation of the skills needed for a senior software engineers. Definitely a bunch of good advises in there.

https://loige.co/the-senior-dev/

Incompetent but Nice - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Tags: management

Note it’s not about impostor syndrome, I guess lots of us think we’re in this category, that doesn’t make it real.

Anyway, from the management point of view this is indeed a baffling situation when you encounter someone like this. What to do? Definitely not always easy, sometimes induced by the organization as well so it would be too easy to blame on the person alone. We need to pay more attention to those and there’s clearly no magical recipe to handle them.

https://jacobian.org/2023/mar/28/incompetent-but-nice/

The age of average — Alex Murrell

Tags: culture, architecture, design

This is indeed a phenomenon which I find odd. Everywhere you look, culture seems like it became homogeneous… I don’t like this much, but indeed it means it’s easy to be distinctive if you want to.

https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average

Bicycle – Bartosz Ciechanowski

Tags: science, physics, bike

Once again an excellent deep dive… We’re getting into the physics of biking, and there are some surprises along the way! In any case this is fascinating all the thinking which went into such an object, the wheels alone are a very clever system.

https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/

Treat your to-read pile like a river | Oliver Burkeman

Tags: culture, productivity

Good advice to fight against FOMO as far as reading material is concerned… just pluck things as they pass by. There’s so much content there’s likely redundancy anyway, hopefully. Yeah… I’m not cured.

https://www.oliverburkeman.com/river

Bye for now!

Another month in the year, another collection of bugfixes and features I contributed to KDE!

Documentation Improvements

Something I want to improve for KDE Frameworks 6 is the API documentation, it’s pretty bad sometimes:

[Bugfix] For plasma-framework, we started marking private QML types as internal. I’m in the process of manually fixing up the custom QQuickItem types in plasma-framework too, although I haven’t gotten around to opening up a merge request for that.

[Feature] I opened a doxyqml¹ merge request to make it’s output more useful, by automatically adding import statement hints to the page:

Plasma 6 Porting

[Feature] Early this month, I ended up porting most of our applets to Plasma 6! The current hitlist is:

• Sticky Notes
• Binary Clock
• Color Picker
• Fuzzy Clock
• Web Browser
• Konsole Profiles
• Media Frame
• Quick Launch
• Quick Share
• Timer
• Input Method
• Activity Manager
• Kicker

The two I’m still working on and need further testing and reviewing:

• Comic
• Kate Sessions
• Disk Quota (if you have disk quotas, please help me test this one!)

I also fixed activity switching, and fixed KRunner’s broken layout.

For those who are building Plasma 6 for the first time, extragear modules are now built by default!

PlasmaTube

[Feature] I started using PlasmaTube which is KDE’s Youtube Client, to replace FreeTube. I started by cleaning up and overhauling the account management, so it flows better.

[Bugfix] I also made the info chips non-interactable, fixed the spacing on video grid text, added more loading placeholders and stop desktop users from being able to drag the video page.

Ruqola

[Feature] Because of $work, I discovered that we have a Rocket.chat client! I miss being able to quickly switch my presence via the tray icon, so that’s the first thing I opened a merge request for.

Dr. Konqi

[Feature] Someone pointed out that the margins in the bug reporting wizard was terrible, so I started a redesign of the whole UI trying to update it to look similar to our modern applications:

Tokodon

In preparation for the 23.04 gear release, I added a slew of new features and bugfixes!

• [Bugfix] The Status Composer is now automatically focused, and you can press CTRL+Enter or CTRL+Return to submit.
• [Feature] You can now check, allow and deny follow requests.
• [Feature] When replying to a post, the post now shows up inline in the composer!

• [Feature] There are now way more notification filter types, not just “All” and “Mentions”.

And of course, there are of course many bugfixes:

• [Bugfix] Account strings that are just “@” are now detected and handled properly, so it doesn’t get stuck.
• [Feature] When searching, it’s clearer for slower connections that the list is temporarily empty because it’s loading.
• [Bugfix] Don’t allow users to edit the visibility of existing posts, which doesn’t work.

[Feature] As a treat for people who manage popular accounts - like our great KDE and Krita promo teams - I have a work-in-progress merge request to allow you to group notifications! I expect to find time next month to finish and polish this feature, but no promises yet.

Miscellaneous

• [Bugfix] Finished Nate’s work on hiding separators when the kickoff is sorted alphabetically, this will land in 5.27!
• [Feature] Added a unit test to Kalendar.

I’m happy to announce KTechLab release version 0.51.0. KTechLab is an IDE for microcontrollers and electronics. This new release contains the following changes:

• updated and improved translations
• the Serial Port component, for better compatibility, uses Qt’s QSerialPort, instead of operating-system specific library calls
• experimental support for Windows; it requires MSVC 2019 compiler
• various stability fixes
• modernisation of the codebase, porting away from some deprecated APIs

The release tarball of version 0.51.0 can be downloaded from KDE servers. Its checksums are:

SHA256Sum: 046b9ce1f2c2a93e1da734a416674a5bb5da3203ac773d49ed693b8492f6d212
SHA1Sum: 7729b67050caee5b65fe4dd1dfbfce213cea44ac
MD5Sum: 2853c6867535995c1ead598e98fce6e3

Useful links related to KTechLab

KTechLab has a mailing list at KDE called ktechlab-devel: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/ktechlab-devel

On IRC, developers are mostly reachable on freenode.net, on #ktechlab channel.

The source code of KTechLab is available in KDE Git, at https://invent.kde.org/sdk/ktechlab

Instructions for building and running KTechLab are available in the README file from the source code; online version of that file is available at https://invent.kde.org/sdk/ktechlab/-/blob/master/README ; The very short instructions are: run sh build-simple.sh and then sh run-simple.sh.

The notes from joining KDE: https://community.kde.org/Incubator/Projects/KTechLab

KTechLab bugs at KDE bugtracker: https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=ktechlab

We're happy to announce the new release 5.10.0 of KPhotoAlbum, the KDE photo management program!

The ChangeLog for this version is as follows:

Changed

• View-related actions formerly found in the "Settings" menu were moved to the "View" menu.
• Make options "Display Labels in Thumbnail View" and "Display Categories in Thumbnail View" reachable via the "View" menu and allow both actions to be assigned keyboard shortcuts (Implements: #145346).
• Store the untagged tag information inside the index.xml file instead of the Settings (Implements: #461206).
• Change scroll direction in the annotation dialog's date edit fields to match common (western) expectations and the date picker.
• Prevent scrolling past the occupied areas of the date bar.
• Files are now always created with group read/write permissions (Fixes: #438128).
• When exiting the demo mode, the demo database is now always saved if it isn't deleted.

Dependencies

• CMake: 3.18
• Qt5: 5.15
• KDE Frameworks: 5.78

Fixed

• Improve readability of "Show Tooltips in Thumbnails Window" tooltip.
• Fix image selection order for newly added images (Fixes: 442325).
• Improve date bar behavior when zooming the date bar and changing views (Fixes: 357237).

Removed

• Default shortcut for "View" images was removed.
  Pressing "Enter" to open the viewer is now the preferred way. To restore the old behavior, reassign the shortcut via "Settings | Configure Keyboard Shortcuts...".

Thanks to everybody having contributed to this release! The authors were (according to git log and in alphabetical order):

• Christophe Giboudeaux
• Tobias Leupold
• Luigi Toscano
• Johannes Zarl-Zierl

Have a lot of fun with the new version!

— Tobias

As you probably have heard by now the lastest development versions of Plasma and KDE Frameworks require Qt6. This transition has been in the works for a few years by now, but it was only somewhat recently that we took the plunge and started relying on Qt6 exclusively for Plasma. Plasma 5.27 is the last Plasma 5 release and continues in bugfix-only mode.

For people who want to hack on Plasma features this raises the obvious question: How do I build Plasma 6 to hack on it?

Before diving into this, a word of warning: Current Plasma master is in no way “ready for production”. There are known-broken things and things may temporarily regress at any time. That said, the only way to get towards a stable thing is to dig in and fix things. So let’s see how to do that.

For this explanation I’m assuming you have build KDE software with kdesrc-build before. If not we have some extensive documentation for that. First you need at least Qt 6.4 installed. The usually best way to get that is from your distribution. If your distribution does not have Qt6 packaged yet please complain^Wtalk to them. CMake should complain about any missing Qt6 modules/development files, but make sure you have the qtpaths tool installed beforehand. It should be named something like qtpaths6 or qtpaths-qt6.

Now we need to teach kdesrc-build to build Plasma with the right configuration (git branches, CMake arguments etc) for building with Qt6. The easiest way to do that is by using a separate kdesrc-buildrc file. kdesrc-build comes with a sample Qt6 configuration file that you should use as a starting point. Replace the line include ~/kde6/usr/share/kdesrc-build/kf6-qt6-build-include with a path to your existing kdesrc-build installation. For me that would be include ~/kde/src/kdesrc-build/kf6-qt6-build-include. You can also apply other customizations that you usually do in your kdesrc-buildrc. Then save the file as e.g. ~/kde6/kdesrc-buildrc. This configuration will download, build, and install everything under ~/kde6. Currently it is very important to keep Qt5-based and Qt6-based builds separate since there will be conflicts between the installed files.

Now you can invoke kdesrc-build as usual, with one slight difference. Passing --rc-file=/home/user/kde6/kdesrc-buildrc will make it use the Qt6 configuration. If you omit the --rc-file argument it will use the old, Qt5-based configuration, so you can keep building Qt5- and Qt6-based stuff in parallel (but installed into different locations). Since kdesrc-build --rc-file=/home/user/kde6/kdesrc-buildrc is a bit of a mouthful you might want to configure a shell alias like kdesrc-build6 for it.

Now you can do kdesrc-build --rc-file=/home/user/kde6/kdesrc-buildrc workspace to build Plasma. Note that it’s expected that not all modules successfully build since not all of them are adjusted to Qt6 fully yet.

Once Plasma is build you want to log into the new session. To do that go to ~/kde6/build/plasma-workspace and run sudo ./login-sessions/install-sessions.sh once. Then you can select the new session at login in SDDM.

Now for some question that might be on your mind:

Q: Is it stable?

A: No, see above.

Q: When will it be stable?

A: Time will tell. It will be several more months before we can consider a Plasma 6 release.

Q: I tested it and found a problem, what should I do?

A: Report it to bugs.kde.org, and state that you are using Plasma master. Or try fixing it yourself.

Q: I want to work on a Plasma feature, what should I do?

A: Try developing it against Plasma master. If you find yourself blocked by anything please tell us.

Q: Does this apply to other KDE software as well?

A: Yes. Note that most applications allow building against Qt5 and Qt6 from the same branch though. And some apps aren’t ported to Qt6 at all.

Q: I did not understand a word of what you just said but I’d still like to help.

A: One way to help is by donating to KDE. Your donations help me have time to do things like working on Qt6 support or writing this blog post

After the recent release of KBibTeX 0.9.3.2 as the last release of the 0.9.x branch, it is now time to make a stable release of KBibTeX 0.10.0. Tar-balls are as usual available at KDE’s download mirrors. Some of the changes were documented more than two years ago in a pre-release (0.9.90), but here are the highlights taken from the ChangeLog:

• New online search: Semantic Scholar
• Migrating Inspire Hep to REST API
• Fixing and revamping ACM's Digital Library (a.k.a. ACM Portal) online search
• Refactoring NSA ADS to use official API
• Updating BibSearch code: cover page improved, preparing code for translations, adding progress bar
• Tabs in the entry editor can show short messages to use, e.g. in which tab DOIs or URLs are to be entered
• Fixing UI issues with ColorLabelWidget
• Using KRatingPainter instead of home-made StarRating's paint function
• Various improvements and refactoring when (PDF) files get associated with an entry
• Use Qt's own QOAuth1 class instead of external library QOAuth
• Having ICU as an optional dependency only, provide internal, static translation from Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) characters to ASCII-only representations
• Greatly refactoring and modernizing CMakeLists.txt files, generation of camel-case headers, private/public linking to libraries, ...
• Updating translations (contributions by various authors)
• KDE Bug 421612: When suggesting entry ids, do not count ‘small words’
• KDE Bug 424033: Can't associate a file with a relative path without having the file copied
• KDE Bug 423976: When formatting IDs, non-word characters should be used as word separators
• KDE Bug 426856: File encoding is not always stored
• KDE Bug 379443: Slowdown when loading citation with many authors
• KDE Bug 433005: Cannot unselect entry list view columns in BibLaTeX mode
• KDE Bug 433084, KDE Bug 453455: Fixing crash when opening .bib file
• KDE Invent issue 1: Properly handling letter modifiers such as \c{e} instead of \ce
• Adding and extending numerous automated tests
• Numerous other fixes, clean-ups, refactoring, ...

Thank you to everyone who contributed. Happy compiling and packaging!

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-12.

twenty-five years of curl | daniel.haxx.se

Tags: tech, tools

Happy Birthday curl! This project is really focused and popular.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/03/20/twenty-five-years-of-curl/

The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

Tags: tech, microsoft, browser, surveillance

This browser is really an horrible data harvesting platform for Microsoft’s benefit. They never learn…

https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2023/03/18/the-dark-defaults-of-microsoft-edge.html

Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought - Bitestring’s Blog

Tags: tech, web, browser, surveillance

It’s clearly way too reliable. This needs explicit hardening.

https://www.bitestring.com/posts/2023-03-19-web-fingerprinting-is-worse-than-I-thought.html

Meta gives up on NFTs for Facebook and Instagram - The Verge

Tags: tech, facebook, nft, funny

How surprising, did they realize this was one more fad they were helping to fuel?

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23638572/instagram-nft-meta-facebook-quits-digital-collectibles

The climate cost of the AI revolution • Wim Vanderbauwhede

Tags: tech, climate, ai, neural-networks, gpt

The climate constraints are currently not compatible with the ongoing arm race on large neural networks models. The training seems kinda OK, but the inferences… and it’s currently just rolled out as shiny gadgets. This really need to be rethought.

https://limited.systems/articles/climate-cost-of-ai-revolution/

The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging From Large AI Models | Quanta Magazine

Tags: tech, ai, gpt, complexity, emergence

Now, this is interesting research. With all that complexity, emergence is bound to happen. There’s a chance to explain how and why. The links with the training data quality and the prompts themselves are interesting. It also explains a lot of the uncertainty.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-unpredictable-abilities-emerging-from-large-ai-models-20230316/

Hallucinations Could Blunt ChatGPT’s Success - IEEE Spectrum

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt

Now this is a properly balanced piece which looks beyond the hype. Usable yes, if hallucinations don’t have a high impact. Can the hallucinations be solved? To be seen, I personally have my doubts with the current architecture… at least banking it all on human feedback is being very naive about the scale of the task.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-hallucination

Google and Microsoft’s chatbots are already citing one another in a misinformation shitshow - The Verge

Tags: tech, ai, gpt, google, microsoft, criticism, fake

Training sets are obviously already contaminated… now it’ll be a race of hiding such mistake under the carpet with human interventions. That’ll be a boon for misinformation. That’s what we get for a useless large models arm race.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/22/23651564/google-microsoft-bard-bing-chatbots-misinformation

ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”!—Stephen Wolfram Writings

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, computation

Now, this starts to become interesting. This is a first example of trying to plug symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches together in the wild. This highlights some limitations of this particular (quite a bit rough) approach, we’ll see how far that can go before another finer approach is needed.

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/chatgpt-gets-its-wolfram-superpowers/

Epic’s new motion-capture animation tech has to be seen to be believed | Ars Technica

Tags: tech, ai, 3d, animation

Now this is a truly impressive technology! This will make facial motion capture a really smoother process.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/03/epics-new-motion-capture-animation-tech-has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed/

Image Codec Comparison

Tags: tech, photography, codec, art

Interesting benchmark, this seems to point toward AVIF and JPEG-XL as two great codecs for pictures.

https://giannirosato.com/blog/post/image-comparison/

ThumbHash: A very compact representation of an image placeholder

Tags: tech, graphics, frontend, hash

Interesting algorithm for generating image placeholders.

https://evanw.github.io/thumbhash/

TinyVG

Tags: tech, graphics, vector

Looks like an interesting vector image format. Let’s see if it gets some buy in.

https://tinyvg.tech/

Modern Font Stacks

Tags: tech, frontend, web, fonts

Very nice approach to avoid the font bloating on the web. I’m slightly concerned about the maintenance over time but at least it has proper fallbacks and the fonts used seem widespread enough (for now).

https://modernfontstacks.com/

Introducing Ares - The Fastest Way to Decode Anything

Tags: tech, tools, cryptography, encodings

Still a bit young but looks like an interesting and fast tool to decode random data.

https://skerritt.blog/introducing-ares/

Envio is a command-line tool that simplifies the management of environment variables

Tags: tech, tools, command-line

This looks interesting, I especially like the fact that it’s easily encrypted, definitely a good thing regarding secrets. Now I wonder if that’s easy to couple with direnv…

https://github.com/humblepenguinn/envio

Why I Will Never Use Alpine Linux Ever Again | Martin Heinz | Personal Website & Blog

Tags: tech, docker

This is a very good point, it’s good to reduce containers size. Be careful of the cost though.

https://martinheinz.dev/blog/92

Laurence Tratt: How Big Should a Programming Language Be?

Tags: tech, programming, language

Interesting musing about a language size and how it evolves over time. There’s clearly tension between making it too big and keeping it relevant to modern uses.

https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2023/how_big_should_a_programming_language_be.html

Why people misuse inheritance | Thoughts, solicited and otherwise

Tags: tech, object-oriented, programming

A good point… everybody should know at this point that delegation should be favor. So why do we keep turning to inheritance even in cases we shouldn’t? Convenience and writing less code mainly. Unfortunately that leads to bugs more often than not.

https://solicited-thoughts.bearblog.dev/why-people-misuse-inheritance/

System design and the cost of architectural complexity

Tags: tech, architecture, complexity, hr, bug, productivity

It’s been a while since I dived into reading a Ph.D thesis… I bumped into that one through an article which was trying to summarize it but I wasn’t super happy with it. That’s why I decided to go to the source.

It’s an interesting read, it has the benefit of making a clear difference between complicated and complex from the get go, which is welcome (generally a good sign for me). If you want the tl;dr it’s at the end of page 16: “we found that differences in architectural complexity accounted for differences in developer productivity of 50%, three-fold differences in defect density, and order-of-magnitude differences in staff turnover”.

Note the last point about the staff turnover should be taken with a grain of salt though. It is well explained in the limitations of the study, being a lot in the high complexity areas of the code can also be a sign of higher skills and thus more job opportunities.

Anyway, I think we all suspected some link between complexity and productivity but I always wondered how much. Seeing how the study was done it’s definitely not an absolute answer (very thorough and precise, even historical data taken into account over several releases… but in a single company). Still the value is in at last giving us some rough numbers on how far the impacts can go. Thus, the scale of those impacts are potentially huge.

Maybe it’s time to stop trying to find rockstar developers or mythical 10x developers (common “leprechauns” of our industry)… Let’s focus on tackling undue or uncontrolled architectural and code complexity instead, shall we? Even better if that’s done through the use of documented patterns when applicable.

Interestingly, the literature review part gives a few clues about why there is under-investment in architecture in general, or reworking the architecture on long term project. It’s unclear to organizations the costs of the undue complexity will carry. It’s exactly what this thesis tries to shed light on (see tl;dr above).

Also, it’s interesting to see confirmed that the perception of the architectural complexity we have is often wrong when looking at parts in isolation. The relationships need to be transitively mapped to start to grasp the presence of architectural complexity. That’s why only coordinated efforts can tackle it, it’s almost impossible to tackle for a single developer.

Of course I’d advise reading it in full, that requires investing some time into it though.

Very stimulating, I’d like to apply some of those tools on projects in the wild but I’m not sure there are ready made tools available. Also I’m wondering what we would find if I’d reuse some of those in ComDaAn to work on temporality of changes rather than dependencies. I think this could give interesting insights.

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.¹⁄₇₉₅₅₁

Go slow to move fast - Thoughts on software and technical leadership

Tags: tech, project-management, technical-debt

Technical debt was an interesting metaphor to kickstart the conversation but has been overused. It can still be useful, especially with the proposed approach here to make it intentional and explicit. This can be factored in how to drive the project.

https://jordankaye.dev/posts/go-slow-move-fast/

Project Management for Software Engineers | Kevin Sookocheff

Tags: tech, project-management

This is a good summary of the most important points in the PMI body of knowledge. If you dabble in project management it’s worth looking at it.

https://sookocheff.com/post/engineering-management/project-management-for-software-engineers/

I’ve been employed in tech for years, but I’ve almost never worked – Emmanuel Maggiori

Tags: tech, business, agile, criticism

OK, not a perfect article, I think there are a couple of blind spots in the reasoning (I doubt all the estimates were as systematically bloated as presented here). Still, it’s another interesting account of the problems created by the cargo cult agile. It indeed seems to resonate with the fact that the tech sector is very hype driven. A lot of useless work then ensues.

https://emaggiori.com/employed-in-tech-for-years-but-almost-never-worked/

Why Construction Projects Always Go Over Budget — Practical Engineering

Tags: tech, engineering, estimates

For all we like to point out the software industry for blowing up estimates and budgets… it’s not a unique phenomenon, civil engineering is also struggling with it. This is a good reminder.

https://practical.engineering/blog/2023/3/21/why-construction-projects-always-go-over-budget

Culture Viruses | Stay SaaSy

Tags: management, hr, culture

Interesting way to frame the potential problems around organizational culture. This indeed influence behaviors quite a bit so should be in check. It also shows it’s a complicated problem you don’t want to overdo it, freeze the culture in place, and see it used mainly for blaming… it’d effectively turn into a cult.

https://staysaasy.com/business/2023/03/01/culture-viruses.html

Bye for now!