Tie Your Laces Correctly / Cool Tools

Tom Denley ran this session. The premise was that Tom had recently taught his daughter how to tie her laces, and discovered that he had been doing it wrong for his entire life. Tom proposed to show attendees how to tie their laces more efficiently, and to use that as a prompt to talk about technologies and practices about which we have had similar "I've been doing it wrong" revelations.

We discussed the proper shoe lace knot (the Reef knot), and contrasted it to the improper the Granny knot. We mentioned Ian's shoe lace site and tried to learn the Ian knot

We moved on to talk about technology revelations.

It was very hard to deliver a vanilla Hello world app all the way to prod at "a bank"

Important to "Flush the pipe" before we try to release real things

We discussed the "Forbidden Banana" -- things that we don't do, but we don't know why.

It was mentioned that "Because the auditor said so" was sometimes a cover for this.

We mentioned Chesterton's fence -- can't make changes until we understand why

An anecdote where someone was doing some work and discovered a reverted change from years ago that had attempted this before -- repeated history

We discussed that commit messages should focus on the "why" not the "what"

We talked about naming tests, again emphasising the why not the what

JUnit display names in Java allow for longer descriptive names in place of the method name.

LLM that critiques commits messages and test names etc.

Google notebookLM... Learning french. Give it all your notes and it'll build audio, podcasts. Also lingoclip sing along

LLM writing commit messages

Feature requests being implemented by LLM

Whisper to dictate commit messages and prompting LLMs. Is that faster than typing?

History of vibe coding

Touch typing and Vim

So useful to learn touch typing

I've never made it

The thinking is the bottle neck

The flow is not broken/lower friction

Helix editor

Previous editor called catcoulie?

Create markdown file for processes in people's head.

Definitive run book

Sequence diagrams get out of date -- generate from the code. Keeps doc close to the code

Unison language, comments are type checked

Fitness/ bdd/cucumber

Testing in scala Vs java

Lazygit terminal UI

Z/vscode/intellij/neovim

Relearning shortcuts

Doing different languages gives you perspective e.g static vs dynamic languages

Concepts are transferable

Hp4s. Spring

End to end w virtual Dom

DTO tests etc, but versions in DB

pass for PW manager

keepass/Lastpass/1password/dashline

Framework Vs. Apple

Airtags on stuff

Battery change annually

Open hw equivalent

Snooze an email

Gather.. virtual office env

Return To Office

Tuple screen share, low latency, no Linux

Pairing tools code with me on