Changing a dev

Andrea Leopardi told me I had to stop using IO.inspect and use dbg instead. He is right and dbg does some spectacular stuff for me now. But I wouldn't have tried it without some social pressure.

People kept telling me types are fantastic and give so many great things and yadda-yadda-yadda. I didn't care. Then for a client project I had to learn Elm. This did give me an understanding of what types bring. I still don't consider them quite the unmitigated good that some do. It was the necessity of my work that shoved me into that experience and I don't regret the experience.

As a rule I'm curious and interested in new tech. Better ways of doing things. But there are so many leading edges you could push that you have to pick yours. I constrain myself to primarily do work in the Elixir ecosystem. I might poke around with ML and AI but I mostly care about whether I can use it via Nx. I explore embedded Linux heavily right now but I have one foot planted in Nerves and Elixir.

You will find people that push and optimize all sorts of things. Some will tune their keyboard situation for eternity. Some live and die with their vim config. Some build a life inside of emacs. Others will find the perfect shortcuts in VS Code. Others will script everything. Others again will Docker and Ansible everything in their path.

Some things I will not change because I have muscle memory for my way of doing it. That's the IO.inspect vs dbg thing. Other things would require moving so many other things and I'm actually quite happy with where I am. This is where I am with Elixir. I have no reason to go to Rust. I'll happily learn Rust properly when I need it for something. There are things I have in Elixir that they don't and there is no massive upside for what I do over there. Same with Go. It seems very respectable but I don't want or need it for anything currently. I am not in an experimental or exploratory state with the fundamentals of my stack. I have been at times but I'm not currently.

If you show me two different ways to do a thing in Elixir I'll swap between and try them easy. Like a keyboard-enthusiast switches keyboards and layouts. I have a special keyboard. I have a mildly tweaked layout. I never touch it. I will never optimise it until something pushes me over that edge. If it breaks I'd need to do something new. I revisit switching to neovim from VS Code every now and then but always get lost in not wanting to learn the packaging and extension system and drop it. I'd prefer it in several ways but it is not where I want to invest myself. So I use vim mode in VS Code and get along alright. Actually writing this post made me fix my worst irritation. Ctrl + R was not working. It now does.

There are two ways in which you can easily move people. Short distances within their comfort-zone and wherever they are settled. The more settled the more effort you need. Long distances when they are actually exploring, looking for options or in active pain about the current choice. Moving someone a long distance when they aren't looking would typically require some outside motivation. Work, social pressure, urgency or some other forcing function.

I get a bit excited by tools outside Elixir now and then but I rarely do very much with it. I do more exploration in stuff like deployment where I find the story unsatisfying. But very much with an Elixir lense.

Where are you settled? Where are you exploring? What are you constantly tuning? You can reach me on the Fediverse where I'm @lawik@fosstodon.org or by responding to this email to lars@underjord.io.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate it.