30 entries for September 2025

Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

[The term "barefoot developers" is a riff on the Mao government's 1960s "barefoot doctors" initiative to train people from rural villages so they can serve as healthcare providers in their undeserved communities.]

[Barefoot developers] are technically savvy and interested in solving problems for themselves and people around them, but don’t want to become fully-fledged programmers. They still live within the world of end-user-facing applications.

they rely on low and no-code tools. And they do wildly complex things within them, pushing these apps to their limits.

This describes my technical capacities well. Though sometimes I can surmount the "command line wall", I almost always prefer other ways.

Vance is Worse

[If the thought of him dying pleases you] because you think it will end our present horror, you are the problem.

Have you heard the expression self-defeating prophecy? It's a prediction that prevents what it predicts by predicting it.

You no longer need JavaScript

CSS can do nesting now!