Blog

I recently turned 30. For a lot of people, capping off another decade like this can a pretty sobering experience.

For me? Eh. I saw it coming.¹ Back when I turned 27, I remember noticing that the addition of one year caused people to change from rounding down to 25, to rounding up to 30. “I’m not old yet,” I thought, “but I do think I’m running out of youthfulness.”

But there’s a silver lining to all this: I now have more social license to be the grouchy old man that I was always meant to be. “Get off my lawn!” I’ll shout, assuming I can ever afford a house big enough to have a lawn.

So I’ll start now with one example: it’s really striking how things that you saw develop over the course of your life end up being taken for granted by those who are younger. For them, this is the way things have always been. For you, you can trace it back through your memories: these were decisions that were made in a specific historical context, and have been maintained due to inertia even when the context for them breaks down.

So in this article, I want to focus on a specific example of this from the tech world, that I’m surprised people don’t talk about more explicitly:

Twitter’s character limits.

I don’t often get deep into technical minutiae on this blog, preferring to write for a more general audience. Despite that, programming computers is still my day job, and the articles that do get into technical detail tend to get people interested: the article that dove deep into the type system I developed for my thesis got some recent attention from Hacker News, the article about how to extract messages from WeChat is consistently one of the pages with the most hits (presumably because it’s useful to some people), and I’ve even gotten some good feedback and attention to my unpolished and unedited programming languages notes from university, which I only barely ever publicized.

@Kronopath I've learnt more Scala in 20 minutes of reading your notes for April 27/16 than in all last week. Your style is great!

— Francesco Dondi (@fdondi1) March 10, 2017

I’ve even gotten a bit of a reputation at work as someone who can explain things to people in a way that’s understandable. I’ve been trying to lean into that strength at my job, and while I’m doing that, I may as well bring some of that knowledge to the outside world as well, where appropriate.

All this to say: this article was adapted from something I wrote at work, in order to explain some subtleties about how smart pointers in modern C++¹ work to people that only had experience with older C++. More specifically, this gets into how the way you use smart pointers should impact the design of libraries and their APIs.

It’s been just over two years since I first moved to Silicon Valley.

Ever since I wrote Scenes from New York, I always intended to put together another collection of photos for the San Francisco Bay Area. But two years is a long time. For Scenes from New York, I had only been living there for nine months. The city was still new to me, and I could still comment on it as if I were an outsider.

But here, now, in California? I’ve gotten used to its quirks, its advantages, and its dysfunctions. That makes it harder to talk about this place objectively in a way that people from the outside would understand.

But still, I’m going to try anyway.

I’ve talked before about how negativity and criticism are crucial to growth and should be preserved. This time, I want to talk about conflict.

I’ve found that I have pretty differing reactions when I see or participate in conflict, depending on the situation.

If I see a couple bickering about whether or not they’re going to go out for dinner, I generally don’t have a good reaction. It tends to be a shallow argument, they’re probably hungry and in a bad emotional state, and ultimately one day eating in or out (usually) doesn’t matter.

There’s a more constructive version of this though.

For a brief moment, the wireframe fibres constructing the world were visible. But in the blink of an eye, they vanished, and the man found himself in a comfortably decorated, warmly-lit room with a short, dark-haired woman who looked to be in her early thirties.

She smiled at him. “Welcome back. It’s good to see you again. How have you been?”