Kevin Berridge

Surprised to see how much of the tech community is still active on formerly-Twitter, and how quiet bluesky is by comparison 😭 I don't want to go back to that place.

Installed Fedora Linux on my 2015 Surface Book 1 last weekend. It feels faster than my i9 windows thinkbook with 4x the ram now. Amazing how far linux has come! Couldn't have installed the surface kernel without AI, but that's a huge hack anyway so no shock.

Quality is never an accident.

"Have to have" is one of the weirdest expressions.

I started trying to setup neovim this weekend and I just posted about my progress and the experience so far: www.kevinberridge.com/posts/202502... What editor do you use? Got any tips for me? #neovim #vim #neovide @neovim.io

Keeping this blogging streak alive! This one is about the problems with long-lived feature branches and the problems with all the alternatives too: www.kevinberridge.com/posts/202501...

I love @react.dev and @solidjs.com async model so much that I gave a talk explaining why they're awesome But React's "you need a framework to fetch data" has been a little annoying to deal with. Especially because I've seen Solid deliver the promise with only native APIs.

Agile was a big topic at #CodeMash. And there is this a sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken, assumption that you can't plan software projects. So we must do short iterations and frequent deploys. I think iteration is good, but is it true that we can't plan? www.kevinberridge.com/posts/202501...

#codemash was a fun time again. Thanks to all the speakers and organizers! It's always nice to see old and new conference friends. Possibly inspired to maybe consider writing a talk again 😉

@jimmybogard.com enjoyed your modular talk, thanks! Curious, do you know of any books, tools, articles, whatever that address the separation of the database layer? That's such a complex area between how to model it, derived data, ensuring consistency, eventual consistency, etc

@leonadato.bsky.social really enjoyed your Technical Empathy talk yesterday, thanks!

Early deploy, followed by much snow on the roads, but I have arrived at #CodeMash! Better late than never!

Bring back comments! Clean Code ruined us with its advice about comments. Not really it's fault. We all drew the wrong conclusion.

Looking forward to #codemash Th and Fri! Wasn't going to go because of other travel lately, but made the last minute decision to attend. I remember when tickets used to sell out in minutes, so it's nice to be able to grab a ticket last minute 😅

Trying to get back into blogging. I used to do more journal-style blogging -- just "thinking out loud" and reflecting on things and writing them down. New Year's are good for this kind of thing, right? So here we go, What is a Software Engineer's Job?: www.kevinberridge.com/posts/202501...

Sometimes, the simplest things are so hard... spent most of today dealing with a SQL perf problem that boiled down to simply: "are there children in this table and not in this table"? Couldn't find a performant way.

The chaos of JS builds makes me really appreciate the simplicity of C# projects and solutions. Fun today with two similar projects but had their package.json, tsconfig, and webpack files in totally different places!

New hire orientation is a Rollercoaster between "wow, we really have our shit together" and "crap, that's embarrassing".

I coded InstallPSModules last night. Went to bed. Immediately thought, "Why did I write it like that? There's literally no reason to do that!" Changed it today. Fascinated by stuff like that, the brain just gets in a rut, I guess. Version 1.1 is out now 😄 #powershell

Naming is hard, but if you're naming your classes "Helper" you've lost. ☠️

Jujutsu (git) looks so cool, but I admit I'm nervous to use it in production repos. Git Butler looks great too for similar reasons, but I got errors when I tried it out. What I REALLY want though is a code review process based on these workflows that is NOT Pull Request based!

When coding *anything*, ask, "How can this fail, and how will it handle and recover from failure?" And if you can't make it eventually consistent and self-retry-ing, then make it possible for your users to retry.

I had a try at making this bsky-follow-finder.theo.io Enter your handle and it will find people followed by lots of the people you follow (but not you)

Are there any low ceremony approaches to "caching" denormalized data to speed up complex queries (Sql Server)? Redis? Memcache? Or should I go straight into learning #Kafka and #Debezium?

This week, I added a feature I'd been trying to get to for 6 months, and it only took 3 hours! But then I spent the entire rest of the week fighting with JS build infrastructure, node versions, and test tooling to ACTUALLY land it. And it's still not fully done. 😡

Back in 2014, I gave a talk called OOP: You're Doing it Completely Wrong. As time has gone on, the subtext of that talk for me has become "... so Functional is probably a better fit for you." Maybe I should write that version? vimeo.com/91672848 #programming

It's nuts that JavaScript was one of the most ridiculously garbage languages in existence but now TypeScript is one of the most advanced and powerful type systems. That something like that can happen is awe inspiring.

Software is too half-ass-able. I think that's why programming is so damn hard. The consequences for our choices aren't visceral enough to offset how easy half-ass-ing is. To the point where you don't even realize you've been half-ass-ing it until it's too late.

The Big Idea of React is that your entire UI is just one big projection function from the simplest possible "state". That is so elegant and makes so much complexity evaporate, I can't even imagine programming any other way anymore!