💌 Ballad, Amado, Simplicity 🗣

Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

🎵 The song for this post is the one embedded below. 🎵

Alright I overloaded on music videos last time, but this song knocked my socks off when YouTube autoplayed it. I lost concentration on my code and just alt-tabbed to be like "aaaaAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!" If you're a Spanish-speaker, do give it a listen to the end!

Grateful to my parents and grandparents for playing all sorts of great music in the house growing up 😄

Amado milestone

I don't actively work on Amado 💌, but people still talk and hear about it, and once in a while someone wants to make one. Today a friend not only launched their campaign, but paid for it. Amado is now a few billion dollars more profitable than Slack, Uber, Lyft, and Peloton combined. 💸🤑💰

Sometimes I'm tempted to put in the last 20-30 hours over a month or two that it would take to make it more robust and less embarassing, usable without handholding; but it's a bit hard to find the time and energy (startup hustle! pandemic!), and I'm having much more fun on silly OCaml than than, like, a product.

But! Reminder that I'm here to handhold anyone through making a campaign if you'd like. You can pay what you like (which can be nothing, or better yet, donate); it's a lot more about mission to me, and I get thrilled thrilled thrilled when people use it to make a gift for someone they love.

Programmers and "simple"

I'm trying out Alcotest for my OCaml bot, and the README says:

Alcotest exposes simple interface to perform unit tests. It exposes a simple TESTABLE module type, a check function to assert test predicates and a run function to perform a list of unit -> unit test callbacks.

Now, listen. Did you have to write "simple" twice in two sentences?

Simple doesn't mean anything, other than "I like it this way," or "it makes sense to me, right now, with low effort." That last one is often because "I wrote it!" also applies. It's become such a thing that I reflexively hiss when I see it in READMEs.

Now's a good time to re-link the Devil's Dictionary of Programming, with definitions like:

framework — A product with the business logic removed, but all of the assumptions left in.