Bluecode

Favorite Languages And Tools

Which are your favorite languages and tools for building things? Please explain your experience and why you like them.

The most important thing is that I should enjoy using a language or tool. Spending time with code all day, what I am doing should be a pleasure (at least most of the time). Simplicity is a big plus for this. Also, I shouldn't feel like I am hitting a wall with what I want to do (at least not very often). And my favorites so far would be Go, Flutter and Flair.

I learned Go for my internship at the University of Kent. The purpose of that project was to collect DDoS related-data about the most popular domains on the web on a daily or weekly basis. I was responsible for developing a tool that collects DNS and status data a given list of domains. Performance-wise, Rust or Elixir could make more sense, but Go made the development much quicker for a student. I got a lot of work done and had a good time. It's one of those languages with a big agenda, and I love that the agenda is simplicity. I really like the error handling and concurrency mechanisms of Go.

Most of my programming experience has been with Flutter and Dart to develop the mobile app of Upcarta. Even though I won't follow a career in mobile development (I want to do a little bit more exciting things), I enjoy coding with Flutter. Dart and Flutter's design is very good. I find it much easier to read compared to HTML, and the UI code rarely requires comments. Flutter is still young and there are gaps in the development ecosystem which make things frustrating for no obvious reason. But still it is a pleasure to code, and there are many useful packages built by the community that ease my pain.

Flair (https://github.com/flairNLP/flair) is an open-source NLP framework. I worked with NLP for my graduation project, and at first wanted to use huggingface and TensorFlow, its API and models. There was lots of boilerplate code and frustration about things not working. The NLP-guy at Upcarta recommended flair, which made things much faster. You can just use and fine tune state-of-the-art models with it. It is built on PyTorch, therefore is integrated well and can handle many different types of tasks such as sentiment detection, NER, etc. I recommend it to any friend who has an NLP project.

Code Quality

What for you is the most important for writing quality code?

Coding is a very communicative process. You rarely code alone, and even if you code alone, a couple of months is enough for a piece of code to be mistaken for a stranger's. So quality code for me would be understandable and (obviously) performative code.

In order to make code understandable, it is important to determine the simplest blocks and combine them in a clear and intuitive way. The code should make sense and come as natural to the reader. There are many practices available for that such as variable naming, DRY and KISS. But in the end, I think it just comes down to understanding this approach. I have written and read a lot of low quality code in the past year, and I have rewritten a lot of it. Sometimes after writing some code, I just need to take my time and come back to it the next day.

Favorite Code

Which are your favorite open-source projects and packages?

Bloc library and Nostr.

Bloc is a state management library built by the Flutter community. For a beginner, it was quite difficult to learn and use. But once you learn, it is very easy to see why and how are the state changes are happening. It gives you clear, extensive control over the state.

Nostr is a protocol for anti-censorship, software-independent, decentralized social network. Basically it is just posting notes over relays, with cryptographic verification. I like it because it is very straightforward and opinionated about censorship. It also allows you to use whichever client you want, giving you the option to not use clients that will show you ads or features you don't like. Also, it is well integrated with the bitcoin environment (most of its users are bitcoin people-though I am not) so offers a unique way of monetization for the platforms and users with the feature of zapping posts and profiles. There is an active community that is building all sorts of things on top of Nostr. I hope the future of the social internet will not be at the hands of a couple of companies, and I believe Nostr could be the way. Note: Technically, its uses are not limited to social media, but what I have seen the most is social media apps being built on top of it. I use Damus, a mobile social media app built on top of Nostr.

Role-Models

Do you have any programming role-models? Do you have any favorite book(s) on software? Who, which ones, and why?

Jonathan Blow has been a role-model since I played the Witness and Braid at the age of 16. I also try to watch his talks on our need on a modern programming language to replace C and C++, and how some attempts got some things right and some things wrong. Currently he is building a new language called Jai. I admire his approach to programming concepts. Even though he has some sort of a bad reputation with the way he disagrees with people, I think he is a brilliant mind worth following.

So far no book on software has intrigued me that much.

After this question, I picked up The Mythical Man-Month, and it's delightful. Clear pieces on software development. I recommend the first parts where Brooks talk about the joys and woes of software.