Is “Software Engineer” A Legal Job Title?

Posted on 2022-10-19 by jcs

If you do software development work, your job title almost certainly is some variation of “software engineer”. It’s a ubiquitous way of describing a developer role. So much so that it hard to see how it could be controversial but it is. In many jurisdictions, the term “Engineer” is reserved for licensed individuals who have undergone extensive testing and what amounts to an apprenticeship. Some jurisdiction use the term “Professional Engineer” for this but it’s common for the law to simply specify “Engineer”.

All that notwithstanding, most jurisdictions have accepted reality and ignore the software engineer term. Most exceptions are for politically motivated gotcha reasons such as the infamous story of the Oregon community that charged a man with practising engineering without a license after he criticized the traffic light system.

Alberta, Canada, however, is insisting on the prohibition and is suing a company for using the term software engineer as a title for its workers and in its job postings. This sort of silliness is not new. Edsger Dijkstra has an amusing story about applying for his marriage license in the Netherlands in 1957 and being required to list his occupation. The authorities refused to accept “programmer” on the grounds that there was no such profession.

It’s time for Alberta to accept common usage—much like we’ve had to swallow the popular misuse of the word “hacker”. No one is going to be confused by the term software engineer anymore than they would likely think a “sandwich engineer” is professionally trained and licensed.

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The Jargon File

Posted on 2022-10-18 by jcs

Today I got a text from a friend who is not from the Hacker culture. The text described a series of tasks he had just performed that were a canonical example of yak shaving. He didn’t know the term, of course, so I responded that the technical term for what he had undergone was “yak shaving” and pointed him to the appropriate entry of the Jargon File.

Doing that reminded me of the joys of the Jargon File and how it’s something that everyone in our tribe should be familiar with. It’s endlessly enjoyable to just browse through random entries and savor their screamingly funny humor. I’ve written about it before (see here and here) but it’s been a while so another mention seems justified.

Many of the Jargon File terms have been part of my vocabulary for a long time but I sense is that there’s been less uptake among younger hackers. Or perhaps the jargon has just changed. The Jargon File was, as far as I can tell, last updated in 2003 so it may not reflect current usage.

Regardless, it’s still worth reading to understand our shared culture and because it is really, really funny. If you haven’t already, follow the link and read a few of the entries. And be sure to read about the magic switch. It’s absolutely my favorite hacker story. You can see a picture of the switch in this comment to my post about it.

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Thoughts On A Text Editor

Posted on 2022-10-17 by jcs

Jeremy Friesen has some thoughts on what hopes and expects is his last text editor: Emacs. He’s been using Emacs only since 2020 so he probably can’t yet be described as a journeyman Emacs user but he is an experienced developer and knows about editors and what makes a good one.

Along the way, he tried JEdit, Textmate, Sublime Text, Atom, Vim, and VS Code but none of them worked for him. Emacs, of course, is famously flexible so he was able to make it fit his workflow rather than the other way around.

Friesen also reminds us—in the context of VS Code—of Microsoft’s longstanding policy of “embrace, extend, extinguish”. That’s the policy of embracing some open standard, extending it in proprietary ways, and when they reach critical mass, using their market dominance to destroy the open standard or software. That’s the same problem that I wrote about in Red Meat Friday: VS Code As A Venus Flytrap.

But VS Code is really beside the point. We Emacsers use Emacs because it’s the best editor for our workflows. We may feel sorry for VS Code users and fear that they’ll learn about Microsoft’s behavior the hard way but we don’t obsess about it anymore than we obsess about Nano.

Regardless, take a look at Friesen’s philosophical post on what makes a good editor and why Emacs satisfies his needs.

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Chrome Incognito Mode

Posted on 2022-10-16 by jcs

Why oh why won’t you listen to me? I keep preaching the gospel but you keep ignoring me. It’s not the end times, exactly, but there is an important point to be made. That point is: STOP USING GOOGLE CHROME OR ANY OTHER GOOGLE PRODUCT. Google is not your friend. Their sole purpose is to exploit you and capture as much data about you as possible in service of their advertising empire.

This latest tirade is prompted by this and this article that discuss Google Chrome’s incognito mode. The problem is that Chrome’s incognito mode is not very incognito. Don’t take my word for it, read the article and see what Google’s engineers say about it. The discovery from a lawsuit reveals emails from Google’s engineers making jokes about how insecure the mode is and saying that it should be compared to Guy Igcognito from the Simpsons. Again, this is not outside critics saying this, it’s Google own engineers. Go ahead. Read it and see what Google’s own people think about Chrome.

I don’t use Chrome so I can’t speak authoritatively about it but from everything I’ve read, it’s a pretty good browser except for the fact that it vacuums up everything you do and reports it to Google. Stop enabling this sort of psychopathy; use a browser that at least pretends to respect your privacy. If you’re on macOS, Safari isn’t a bad choice. If you’re on Linux or (shudder) Windows, consider Firefox. Firefox really has made strides in protecting their users’ privacy. There are plenty of others too, but I don’t really know much about them so I can’t make any intelligent comments about them.

One thing for sure: you need stop using Chrome. It doesn’t bring anything other than spyware to the table that you can’t get elsewhere.

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Emacs Keystrokes in macOS

Posted on 2022-10-15 by jcs

This is your periodic reminder that you can get most of the Emacs editing keystrokes in any macOS application. I usually publish this reminder when I see a tweet or post from someone who has discovered that the Emacs cursor movement keystrokes work in macOS.

Here’s the tweet that inspired this post:

That’s great, of course, but you can do much better. You can, in fact, arrange to have most of the Emacs editing commands available everywhere in macOS. Here’s my original post that explains how to do that. The links in that post lead to a Harvard server that sometimes is not available. If it’s down when you try to get the keybindings file, you can get it here. If you prefer using Esc instead of the ⌥ Opt key for Meta, get this file instead.

Having those keystrokes available takes some of the sting out of having to leave Emacs to use some Apple specific application. I don’t know Leo Shimonaka and I’m not on Twitter so if any of you do know him, please point him at this post or otherwise let him know what to do to get all the Emacs goodness possible.

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Red Meat Friday: Europe Brings the Regulation

Posted on 2022-10-14 by jcs

There’s an old joke about some proposed device that would benefit the world. The U.S. said, “We’ll bring the design.” China said, “We’ll bring the manufacturing.” Europe said, “We’ll bring the regulation.” That’s a bit unfair, of course, but like all satire it has a kernel of truth.

Case in point. The EU has finally made good on their crusade to make everyone use the same charger cables. It’s easy to feel that this a largely a good thing. After all, it will reduce the number of different types of chargers and make users’ lives marginally easier. We here at Irreal are not fans of this sort of thing.

First of all, the diverse cables are not really much of a problem even by first world standards. Yes, it’s a minor inconvenience but in the Irreal bunker we have MacBooks, iPhones, and iWatches all of which use different cables but it just never occurs to us to complain or think the different cables are an imposition.

Secondly, this is the classic case where the market really does work. If people actually feel strongly about this issue, they’ll punish those companies—and let’s be honest, we’re talking about Apple here—that don’t offer a standard interface by buying from their competitors.

Finally, and most important, why in the world would we let a bunch of bureaucrats with no real knowledge of the technology involved decide what type of electronics can be offered? You can be sure that these people all had the time on their DVRs flashing all through the 90s and perhaps even today. They are the absolute last group of people any rational person would want making these types of decisions.

Judging by the comments on the issue, the Irreal position is not the popular one but it is the correct one.

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The Ethics of (Self) Job Automation

Posted on 2022-10-13 by jcs

Back in January, I wrote about the story of a developer who automated his job with some scripts and then spent the next few years pursuing his own interests at work while letting his scripts do his job.

Many people have an immediate reaction that this isn’t right, that the developer was somehow cheating his employer. That idea is deeply ingrained in us but consider: the job that the employer was paying for was getting done and probably with fewer errors than before. The total benefit to all concerned was increased so why was it dishonorable? Yet the feeling of unease persists.

In 2018 The Atlantic published an article—since resurrected by Pocket that explores this issue. Surprisingly, even among the developer community the reaction was pretty much equally divided with half feeling that such action was cheating and half failing to see the problem.

It turns out that such automation is surprisingly frequent. Unsurprisingly, most of the developers who have done so have kept their actions to themselves feeling that far from being rewarded, they would be punished for their initiative. They may have a point. There are several stories of those who automated their jobs being fired because, after all, there was nothing left for them to do.

When you hear stories like that, it’s harder to be on the “it’s cheating” side. Take a look at the article and see what you think.

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Org-mode Is Easy

Posted on 2022-10-12 by jcs

Gavin Freeborn posted a video in which he argues that Org-mode is easy. The reason it’s easy, he says, is the same as I’ve often written: You don’t have to learn it all or even large parts of it to make effective use of it. It has so many aspects that it’s possible to treat them almost as disjoint applications. There’s the outlining functions, the TODO/agenda functions, the write once publish everywhere functions, the code block/literate programming functions and much, much more.

Serendipitously, Freeborn’s video offers proof of this, at least to me. He demonstrated some of the features that were most useful to him and those features are not the ones I find most useful. I don’t even use some of his “most useful features”. This despite the fact a huge portion of my Emacs work is done in Org-mode.

So, as I’ve said before, the way to learn Org-mode is to use one tiny aspect of it to solve a particular problem. Once you’re comfortable with that, use some other aspect to solve another problem. After a while, you’ll find that you’ve learned most or even all of Org. I’ve heard lots of people say they couldn’t get into Org or didn’t see the point but I’ve never heard someone who knows Org decide it wasn’t worth it. Believe me, it is worth it.

The video is 19 and a half minutes long so plan accordingly.

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A Formula for the nth Prime

Posted on 2022-10-11 by jcs

As some of you know, I was trained as a mathematician. I’ve always been a bit of a math nerd and read about mathematics even as a child. Long ago, probably when I was still in elementary school, I read that there was no closed form formula for calculating primes. That is, there was no formula that you could plug \(n\) into and get the nth prime as a result. That fact has been an article of faith for me for essentially my entire life. Except it isn’t true.

In 1964, C.P. Willans produced such a formula. Here it is:
\[p_n = 1 + \sum_{i=1}^{2^n} \left\lfloor \left(\frac{n}{\sum_{j=1}^i\left\lfloor\left(\cos\frac{(j-1)!+1}{j}\pi\right)^2\right\rfloor}\right)^\frac{1}{n}\right\rfloor\]
where \(p_n\) is the nth prime.

There are a couple of things to notice about the formula:

  1. It uses only elementary mathematical operations. The most complicated one is the cos function.
  2. It’s hugely computationally expensive. That first sum has an upper limit of \(2^n\), which grows very quickly and the inner sum has a factorial which is also computationally expensive for large \(n\).

The second thing is why the formula isn’t really very useful. It just takes too long to make the calculation for even moderately large \(n\).

Even more interesting is why the formula works. Primes, after all, are distributed randomly so the existence of such a formula is a surprise. The reason it works is the most surprising thing of all: it’s essentially a program that tests each integer for primality, producing a 1 if so and a 0 if not. When the (outer) sum is \(n\), you’ve found the nth prime.

That sounds complicated but it’s really simple. Eric Rowland has a video that explains the formula in very simple terms that any Irreal reader will understand. It’s less than 15 minutes and definitely worth watching is you have even a little bit of interest in these things. If nothing else, it’s an example of a simple mathematical formula implementing a program.

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Extract Captions From a Youtube Video

Posted on 2022-10-10 by jcs

Ag Ibragimov had a problem that many of us have experienced. He learned a term from a video but later couldn’t recall the term. We went back to the video to search for it but couldn’t find it. What to do?

Ibragimov realized that he was working too hard and that what he really needed to do was capture the close captioning from the video. This was meant to be a one-off to solve a specific problem so he didn’t do anything fancy. He used youtube-dl to grab the video and wrote a bit of Elisp to extract the actual text.

After a while he realized that it was generally useful and bundled everything up into an Emacs package. Since then he’s added timestamps to the output. He’s not yet pushed it to Melpa but perhaps that will come later when he feels the package has stabilized.

This package, like many, resulted from a small itch that Ibragimov scratched by leveraging an existing command line app and writing some Elisp to process the data that it retrieves. It was later that he realized that he could use it again for other videos and that it might be useful to others too. It’s something to remember when you consider whether it’s worth writing some code for a task that you could do manually. Maybe you can’t amortize your time with a single use but it’s also possible that you and others will find it generally useful.

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