Notices by Lars Wirzenius (liw@social.nasqueron.org)

Premature stability: when you gain enough users that making backwards incompatible changes becomes a bad idea, before your software is actually mature.

Cf. C's operator precedence.

Who seeks constructive discussion, does not call those they disagree with names.

It's been a while since I've repeat-tooted this, but reading the latest Crypto-Gram triggers this toot:

IoT is short for Insecurity of Things.

"If a user feels stupid, the programmer has failed."

Once again I'm moved to say that someone doing a lot of good work is not a reason to tolerate them behaving badly.

If a piece of software, or a service, doesn't have automated tests, you won't know it doesn't work at all until you need it. If you don't run the tests automatically, and sufficiently frequently, you won't know something broke until it's too late.

For the holidays, you could say thank you to some of the people who write free software you use, especially software that isn't hugely popular.

Those of us who write little-known software may go for months without hearing from a user, and it can be a little de-motivating.

Hearing from someone who actually uses one's software gives an energising jolt that can carry one through several weeks of darkness and cold and wet.

@algernon I'm half-tempted to set up https://standard-rants.branchable.com for this kind of thing.

True software freedom for this age: you can get the source code of a service you use, and can set it up on your own server. You can also get all your data from the service, and migrate it to another service (hosted by you or someone else). Futher, all of this needs to be easy, fast, and cheap enough to be feasible, and there can't be "network effects" that lock you into a specific service instance.