Tech-inzichten door Niek de Greef. Reflecties op technologie, software development en de impact van digitale innovaties op cultuur en maatschappij.
The cool-tools website makes many tools review sites superfluous.
I stumbled upon the YouTube channel from Mark Frauenfelder, Editor In Chief of the website and had great fun watching the video they made of the first podcast.
The Cool Tools initiative has a website, podcast and Youtube channel. It is just fantastically nerdy. Watch the semi-scientific comparison between the Bernzomatic TS4000 vs. TS8000 and other great videos.
Recomendo gathers 1000 reviews.
I am hiring, and because this is new to me, I researched a bit how companies are recruiting nowadays, and where (Indeed seems to be the incumbent).
Going through the job description I noticed how many skills requirements drastically limit their target audience by including long lists of technologies and tools. I gathered the following list from just a handful of job descriptions:
Rundeck, Jira, Jenkins, UrbanCode, ServiceNow, Git(hub), Python, Flask, Bootstrap, PHP, Golang, Ansible, React, Angular, Docker, Kubernetes, Javascript, HTML5, Java, Node.js, CSS, R, AWS, Sonar, Fortity, Polymer/Lit, Hadoop, Elastic.
Sites list these technologies as prerequisites. This will put off very good people that just have not acquired a specific tool-skill yet. On the other hand very good people that have too much of a preference for the latest and hottest tool, may be put off by these specific tech lists.
More importantly, the variety in the list above seems to imply that tools are not as important a skills as the eagerness and ability to quickly learn new skills and tools. And also it warns you that if your skills are too narrowly based on specific tools, you may be sailing in shallow water.
The Human Capital Trends 2019 report from Deloitte similarly predicts a future of jobs where new skills needs “are forcing organizations to create more flexible and evolving, less rigidly defined positions and roles”.
We will need to learn lots of skills and tools. But we only know which ones, when it happens.
These guys have a real fresh and liberating view on design.
It’s not my rant, but once you think about something a certain way, you tend to find more support for that opinion.
Vincent Cerf: AI Is Not An Excuse!
It is quite astonishing. In EWD 139 – written in the first half of the 1960s – Dijkstra argues why their to-be build Dutch computer the EL (Electologica) X8 should no longer be equipped with a punch card reader. Looking back, for at least for twenty more years after this article (IBM) computers were still being equipped with punch card readers.
Not only is Dijkstra very clear with his arguments, but he is so much opposed to the punch card that finds that having to write them down he finds, very Dijkstra-ish, a test of his decency. His arguments are the following.
The punch card technology has become obsolete. It is simply not needed anymore, there is paper tape now (this is the time before terminals and time-sharing).
The way you must use punch cards, the “style”, leads to local solutions for reliability (parity checks) instead of structural redundancy solutions over the entire document.
The limitation of 80 characters leads to technical “ad hoc” conventions and constraints, and limits the ability to improve the readability of programs.
Finally, Dijkstra argues that a single card does not have information value. You need the whole stack, on the right order. Which makes punch cards very impractical to use.
Dijkstra concludes the article that is so much a Dijkstra paragraph, that I can not leave it out.
“Hier wil ik het bij laten. Als mensen mij komen vertellen, dat zij met recht van ponskaarten gebruik gemaakt hebben, dan verandert die mededeling minder aan mijn opinie over ponskaarten, dan over de man.Ik concludeer dan, dat deze man voldoende inventief of ordelijk geweest is om van een in wezen ongezond middel gezond gebruik te maken. Als pleidooi voor het medium – ik kan niet anders – is zo’n mededeling zonder enig effect.”
In my imperfect english:
“I will leave it with that. If people come tell me that they have rightfully used punch cards, than that statement changes less in my opinion about punch cards, than about the man. I conclude then, that the man has been sufficiently inventive or orderly to use an essentially unhealthy tool in a healthy manner. As a appeal for the medium – I can not do other – such a statement is without any effect.”
