Dylan Beattie
@dylanbeattie
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Codes, chords & conferences. Creator of @RockstarLang , guitars & vocals @_Linebreakers_ , host @TechBugsShow , founder @Ursatile , organiser @LondonDotNet . He/him.
London, UK
Joined May 2008
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Why, only this morning I was thinking how much I’d love to travel in a machine that combined all the best bits of Hindenburg, Chernobyl, Titanic, and a Travelodge.
Sky Cruise is a concept for a nuclear-powered sky hotel. This video rendering shows the aircraft designed to fly with 20 electric engines, housing over 5,000 guests in nearly nonstop flight [full video, Hashem Al-Ghaili: ]
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GitHub is down.
Don't panic. We've trained for this.
Take a deep breath, grab a marker and a whiteboard, and let's implement some sorting algorithms. Just like we did in the interview.
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Just saw a tweet that said "Stay at 127.0.0.1. Wear a 255.0.0.0" and I'm like... that's a class A subnet. That's a mask big enough for you and 16,777,213 other people. That's never gonna work.
Be smart, people. Stay at 127.0.0.1, wear a 255.255.255.248.
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Context: JetBrains' founders are Russian. They have offices in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Free speech isn't really a thing in Russia. To openly condemn the actions of the Russian government could have serious repercussions for them, but they did it anyway.
Спаси́бо, JetBrains.
As JetBrains we condemn the attacks taking place. Our hearts are with the Ukrainian people, including our own colleagues and their families.
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Learning to code is an essential skill in the modern world. Here's a handy diagram showing you how to get started.
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I'm getting fed up of articles that attribute a decline in mental health during the pandemic to people working from home. How about a year where we all work from home but we can see friends, travel, go to shows, restaurants, go to the gym, and THEN see how mental health is doing?
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My favourite part of preparing a talk is the bit where I get bored and make Powerpoint do crazy unnatural animation stuff just to see if I can.
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Going to a conference? Yes! Introduce yourself. Say hello. Chat to people. They're lovely. Really! And if you're already chatting in a group, make your group approachable using
@ericholscher
's Pac-Man Rule.
Here's how it works.
Have fun!
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One of the biggest challenges with centralized logging is establishing consensus about what log levels actually mean. Here's a quick primer.
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Company says: “Due to the GDPR, we are no longer able to offer our service to customers in the European Union.”
I hear: “You are not a customer. You never were. You are PRODUCT. Now that your privacy is protected by law, you are no longer worth anything to us. Go away.”
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"Yeah - there's already a user legend for that."
"A what?"
"A user legend. It's like a user story, but for stuff we know will never happen."
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Introducing Rockstar - a proposal for a Turing-complete programming language in which you can write programs that are also 1980s power ballads.
Here's an idiomatic implementation of FizzBuzz that complies with the draft
#rockstar
language specification.
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- Hire a competent infosec team.
- We don’t have budget for that.
- OK, be prepared to pay 1.5% of turnover in fines for each GDPR violation
- We don’t have budget for that either.
- Well, golly. Sounds to me like you don’t have a viable business model any more. Sorry about that.
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Danish orthography says that place names starting with Aa should be sorted as if they start with Å - but ONLY IF THEY ARE PLACES IN SCANDINAVIA. So this list is in Danish alphabetical order:
Aachen
Berlin
Zurich
Aarhus
But, sure, it's the *computers* that make life difficult...
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It's not that JavaScript is *broken*, you understand.
It's just that the language specification contains plot twists.
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Changing hardware is way harder than changing software. Software, you can ship a new feature next week and then kill it next month. Hardware can take years. This is why I have an actual physical key on my keyboard whose default function is to show this dialog whenever I press it.
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One day I will get bored of thinking of new ways to usurp the "rockstar developer" trope...
Today is not that day.
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When npm was first released in 2010, the release cycle for typical nodeJS package was 4 months, and npm restore took 15-30 seconds on an average project. By early 2018, the average release cycle for a JS package was 11 days, and the average npm restore step took 3-4 minutes. 1/11
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The 11 in C++11 refers to the number of legs that have now been nailed onto the dog whilst attempting to build a better octopus.
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I bought a blood pressure meter last week. The first time I used it, my BP was a little high, and the display read "8/10". OK. Eight out of ten. Not bad. Next day I got a 9/10. Yesterday 134/83, and the display said 10/10.
YEAH!
Today it said 11/10 and I realised it's the date.
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'British Independance' is trending. Yes. With an 'a'. I'm not entirely sure what an 'independance' is, but I think they might all be referring to this?
#BritishIndependance
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This may in fact have been a good idea... but I think
@mopman
deserves some kind of recognition for a beautifully crafted social hack that it would appear has actually resulted in an amendment to an Act of Parliament. Nice work.
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"What do you mean, this code is stupid? It looks EXACTLY like the architecture diagram you gave me!"
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THREAD: Today's
@Fastly
outage is a nice moment to reflect on the fact that developers are absolutely terrible at writing error messages. Earlier today, some of the biggest sites on the web were offline for about 15 minutes. The BBC, the New York Times, Reddit, the UK government.
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Went on a protest march... ended up on being interviewed live on BBC TV. See if you can spot the point where they stopped asking me the questions we had discussed beforehand.... :)
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$ create-react-app my-react-app
$ cd my-react-app
$ cloc .
Before you even open a text editor, your project contains 1.5 million lines of code. Most of it contributed by volunteers and enthusiasts. No formal review or release process.
This is 'normal' in modern web development.
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There are exactly two ways to add new JavaScript to an existing web front end.
One is to do it by hand, spend two weeks swearing and end up wishing you'd just used a plugin.
The other is to use a plugin, spend two weeks swearing and end up wishing you'd just written it by hand.
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Too many people confuse management, leadership and mentoring. Management is organising an all staff Christmas lunch at Pizza Express. Leadership is persuading 75% of them to go to a karaoke bar afterwards, and mentoring is gently reminding them not to try singing “Gangnam Style”.
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Great lies to tell junior devs: "we use i, j and k as indexes in for loops in honour of Dijkstra."
"So how do you pronounce Edsger W. Dijkstra?" "If you want to stay friends with Dutch and Belgian people - don't."
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Registrations recently opened for the new .africa TLD. I speculatively applied to register one. I got it.
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Speaker tip: always make one of your presentation slides a full frame screenshot of the Windows Blue Screen of Death, and then forget which slide it is. The unexpected shot of adrenaline will help to keep you focused and alert during your presentation.
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I just got an email which claims "The metaverse will be the most complicated machine ever built."
This is the part where the tech bros all nod and agree, and anyone who knows anything about, say, a Rolls-Royce Trent 900 turbofan laughs so hard that a little bit of wee comes out.
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I'm not saying you can tell everything about a country by looking at the plug sockets they use, but when you see an outlet from Denmark next to one from the USA, it's hard not to draw a few conclusions.
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StackOverflow runs on C#/.NET.
Github is Ruby and Erlang.
Facebook was built in PHP; now it's in Hack.
Twitter was Ruby; now it's JVM.
Google is Java, Python, C++ and JS.
36% of the world's top million websites run WordPress.
Tech stack is not the differentiator you think it is.
Is a startup running .NET a startup you would invest in?
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One of the most common antipatterns in software is the junior dev > mid > senior > “architect” career path. Software architecture is often a very different set of skills from hands-on development. We don’t promote cabin attendants to pilots based on years of aviation experience.
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@doctorow
Don't forget how, thanks to sponsored listings, Mr. Alastair Fry's Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery is now one of the most significant locations in London.
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I will repost this every time another Google app's recognisable, distinctive icon gets replaced by a meaningless coloured squiggle.
Today we say farewell to Authenticator's metal "safe dial" icon, which is now a coloured asterisk.
RIP, chonky dial. You were a good icon.
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Looking at the markup produced by some modern web frameworks is really, really depressing. How is this a responsible use of bandwidth? CPU power? RAM? How many billions of cycles are we burning every day to parse crap like this – most of which is only there to display ads anyway?
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“People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they're too stupid and they've already taken over the world.”
- Pedro Domingos
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We should put libraries in airports. Quiet spaces. No music. No coffee. Just tables, and books, and wifi. Find a good book? Take it with you. Read it on the flight, then pass it on to the library at your destination airport.
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@quetwo
@jcyr
Guidance here in the UK is you can socialise at home in groups of up to six people. Or at least, that’s one of the many, and often contradictory, things that we have been told. So a /29 subnet gives you an address each plus network & broadcast.
It is a *extremely* niche joke. :)
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@happyhippy2015
@eucopresident
I created that poster. Every time I see one of your posts, I’m thrilled that people out there are still seeing it and sharing it. Keep it up. :)
❤️🇪🇺
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DID YOU KNOW that Bon Jovi's 'You Give Love a Bad Name' was originally written about REST APIs? See the full version
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Turns out the Equifax hack was due to a bug in 'a popular plugin called REST':
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I've been writing software professionally for 20+ years, but every time I try to use git rebase I end up feeling like I'm actually too stupid to be doing this at all, probably too stupid to live, and I should just give up and donate myself to medical science.
Or a glue factory.
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And the Academy Award for most confusing use of a quadruple negative on public signage goes to...
@TfL
! Outstanding work.
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I'm doing a thing. In C#, it would have taken 20 minutes. JavaScript about the same. But no, this project is in TypeScript, the Magical Unicorn Language created by nailing a traffic cone onto an unsuspecting donkey and feeding it M&Ms because that's how you make it shit rainbows.
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Business objective: put the ball through the hoop.
Every startup engineering team ever:
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I get that lots of people miss working in an office. I get that some jobs are better suited to remote working than others. But to attribute a decline in mental health to "disconnecting from workplaces" when so many other factors are involved is disingenuous at best.
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Oh internet.
Problems with macOS? “Get a Windows machine!”
Problems with Windows? “Put Linux on it!”
Problems with Linux? “You should just get a Mac, dude.”
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Things I wish I'd thought of earlier than I did: add a test to your app's test suite which fails if any of the certificates used in your app expire within 90 days.
Then when the test fails, you have three months to renew the cert.
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"It says here you have web development experience... can you show us some of your work?"
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A Twitter thread, in which I will post some images to determine whether Twitter is still highlighting white male faces regardless of the composition of the image posted.
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@SwiftOnSecurity
RAF Vulcan bomber pilots trained to fly with one eye. On operations they’d wear a lead patch over the other, so in the event they witnessed a nuclear detonation they’d have one good eye left to fly home with.
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The more I work with document DBs, the more I'm convinced there was a bunch of JS developers who looked at SQL and went "wait - we need to learn a query language AND design our data structures up front? Nah, screw that, bro. We'll just invent a JavaScripty database instead."
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Developer friends. On March 29th, British developers will no longer be allowed to run JavaScript, AKA ECMAScript, which is controlled by the European Computer Manufacturers' Association.
Fortunately, work is well under way on a replacement: UKMAScript.
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Shout out to the people who came to my talk today about 3D graphics rendering – and then got up and walked out when I started talking about vectors… how did y’all think this stuff worked? Puppies and snacks? 🤣
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Recognition is important. I've worked incredibly hard to create the most dependable source of natural drinking water in the IT industry, so I always get a little tingle of satisfaction when I open one of those recruiter emails that starts:
Dear Dylan,
I trust your well.
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It still blows my mind every time I type "docker-compose up" and it downloads, configures and starts a set of services that previously would have meant an entire weekend of installing Linux on old computers I had lying around and running make until I wanted to cry.
Docker rocks.
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I've just joined
@NDC_Conferences
as their Online Community Ambassador. I'll be working with the NDC crew, and all our speakers and supporters, over the next few months, helping NDC to deliver world-class virtual events and workshops. Read all about it:
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@d_feldman
@FakeRyanGosling
If the software is running on, say, a guided missile with a known maximum flight time – after which it explodes – you get the kill part for free and don’t need to worry about the restart bit.
Memory leaks on missiles don't matter, so long as the missile explodes before too much leaks. A 1995 memo:
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@samhogy
I can't remember who said it, but I saw somebody last year say "You are not 'working from home'. You are stuck at home, during a global pandemic, trying to work. They are not the same thing."
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I just clicked a button in Excel 2019 on Windows 10 and discovered a secret time portal to 1992. I think this might be the oldest bit of UI code I've ever seen actually running in a contemporary OS.
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Ah, Ruby. The only language where somebody says you can get the date of Easter using first.Sunday.after.first.FullMoon.after.SpringEquinox and you genuinely take a moment to work out if they're joking or not.
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Nothing captures the reality of living in the UK quite so succinctly as this, the “we have no idea” suncloud rainsnow icon used in the weather forecast:
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JavaScript was released on December 4th, 1995. Happy 25th birthday to the world's most successful, and most misunderstood, programming language.
❤ 🎉🎂🥳
#JavaScript25
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Picked up a Russian translation of Watchmen in a comic store here in Novosibirsk. More homework. Starting with trying to persuade myself that Rorschach is not called “Popwax” in this version.
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Docker is brilliant. I don't say that enough. Being able to spin up MS SQL Server with all my databases in it, work on it while I need to, and then spin it down again, and not have any MSSQL services actually running natively on my dev machine, is just really amazingly wonderful.
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I’ve worked damn hard to create the most reliable source of drinking water in the IT industry, so I always get a little tingle of satisfaction when I get one of those recruiter emails that starts:
Dear Dylan,
I trust your well.
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@Baddiel
I saw a fishing boat take to the sea,
On a day when the year was new,
Recalling all the years before,
And time and tradition so true,
I tried to capture thought in rhyme,
And commemorate voyages past,
I thought for a bit, and looked at the time,
And decided I couldn’t be arsed.
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I must admit that I'm ever so slightly apprehensive about travelling on Boeing aircraft right now seeing as the doors keep falling off. Fortunately my flight from İstanbul is on a planemodellookup.M32, which sounds like the sort of aeroplane where the doors almost never fall off.
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Sad to see that John Conway, the creator of Conway's Game of Life, has died. I can't be the only one wondering whether if we put three living mathematicians next to him he'll come back to life... but I suspect not.
RIP, John, and thank you for the countless hours of fascination.
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Buying webcams/cameras? Here's a guide.
Things that need 4K:
Wildlife.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Industrial Light and Magic.
Astronomy.
Things that do not need 4K:
Your face.
Your PowerPoint slides.
Your friends.
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Over the years, I've worked hard to establish a reliable source of clean, safe drinking water. It hasn't been easy, and it's mostly pretty thankless, but I know I'm not completely unappreciated because every so often, I get email that starts with:
Dear Dylan,
I trust your well.
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@kateleth
The bit between Jan 2000 and Sep 2001 was great. Cold War was over, we'd survived the Millennium Bug, the web was just getting mainstream, social media didn't exist yet, and the worst thing most of us had to worry about was whether Leonardo di Caprio was going to be in Star Wars.
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I'm watching the President of the United States speaking in complete sentences for the first time in four years and the sense of relief is almost overwhelming.
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Time passed. Months, years, decades. The dark days of npm and nodejs were all but forgotten... until one fateful morning, a security researcher, digging through the archives, fired up the video feed from the npm vault, just to see if anything was still there. 11/11
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"Join our Slack team!". Hmm. Do I like you enough that I'm prepared to allocate 150Mb of RAM just to be in your gang?
What a broken system.
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I'm not saying tech has a diversity problem, but we could save hours of everyone's time by using this CFP form for all our events...
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Last week I spoke and ran a workshop at Modern Frontends Live. It was one of the worst events I've ever participated in; of 25+ advertised workshops, I believe that mine was one of the very few that actually took place. Here's my account of what happened.
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Lionel’s gone. We took him in this morning, we were both in the room with him so we could say goodbye. It was definitely time, and it was calm and peaceful, but we’re going to miss him like you wouldn’t believe. Goodbye, Mr Grumpkin. We love you.
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2014: YouTube develops algorithms that automatically detect copyrighted music based on a corpus of digital signatures submitted by copyright holders.
2019: any recording, performance or composition containing melodies or excerpts of copyrighted material is flagged immediately.
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Hey everyone! I made a company! Say hello to
@Ursatile
. Developer training, technology strategy, architecture, legacy code... if that sounds like something you could use some help with, get in touch.
Please RT for reach. :)
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Someone on the
@monzo
engineering team has shared some graphs recently, showing the microservice architecture that powers Monzo’s banking systems. And I see some quite well-known people, respected figures in the software field, making some rather pointed observations about it.
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Today’s open-source counter-take: if you’re building a product, service, or business that depends on code which somebody shared for free on the internet, succession planning is your problem, not theirs.
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OK, time for a little recap about how to write good error messages. Comes down to remembering four things:
* Helpful
* Human
* Honest
* Humble
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It’s so good to see more public infrastructure embracing the beauty of zero-based indexing.
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Happy 42nd birthday to The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, whose advice, printed on the cover in large, friendly letters, is more relevant than ever in these interesting times.
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