Loving this list. One thing I would totally recommend though is to look at tools like DBT, as this supports a lot of these patterns out of the box (snapshots, materialized views, seeds for 'system tables' etc.). It also addresses the concerns with views and schema management.
So I looked up DBT - it seems to be a company where the first thing I saw on their website was "Gen AI."
That doesn't inspire confidence in the longevity of their offering - but i'm also unclear exactly what it is they are offering. Can you give the audience the pitch?
Sure, DBT (Data Build Tool) has been around for a while. It's a way to manage SQL (and also Python) data pipelines - the "T" in ELT. Home page for DBT Core is here https://docs.getdbt.com/ (there is also a hosted DBT cloud premium offering). There are some good books on Data Engineering with DBT - I particularly liked "Data Engineering with dbt: A practical guide to building a cloud-based, pragmatic, and dependable data platform with SQL" by Roberto Zagni.
One question that springs to mind is the in-browser "playground" and hosted coding use-case. I assume WASM will be used in that scenario. I'm wondering what the overhead is there.
I feel like ‘exactly’ is doing a lot of work in your comment and I am interested in the reasons that that word may not be quite the right word to describe these situations.
I'm going to implement some sort of tracking streaks as soon as possible.
Since you have many data points, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the level difficulty and on the clues that require external knowledge (such as "the universal donor is sitting at..."). Thanks again!
One problem will be deciding on when tomorrow is. If your work day starts at 9pm, you have lunch at midnight, do you then go home the next day? We could lose lots of complexity of timezones, but swap in the complexity of dates. Financial transactions and trading sessions could get really complicated fast.
so just to play out the thought experiment here, what you could get is a new vocabulary for time abstraction. AM/Morning, PM/Night, mid-day, Mid-night are all relative to the observer not consistent to the standard clock time. Your early morning in NYC is still my evening in Japan, but they both happen at 09:00MST (Metaverse Standard Time)on Earth Cycle 245 of 365. The concept of days of the week and months of the year would also be subjective to the location of the observer - not part of the official Meta-calander which is just the same 365 units of 24hrs wherever you happen to be. What they call day-time Tuesday in Botswana is part of two date units, for some people hour 17 is always in the morning, and these local facts would get normalized as habit over time. An interesting thought experiment perhaps for some future inter-galactic post space expansion civilization's standards body (ISO Technical Committee 2.34 x 10^14)
Although I get the appeal of getting rid of time zones and agreeing on one universal time zone, I am not sure if the pros outweigh the cons here.
Having it be the next day when you wake up is really intuitive and kinda practical. Having 9.00 mean "some time during the morning" all around the world is also quite comfortable.
I think from the perspective of a travelling human time zones are more practical than not having time zones, especially since your modern devices automagically change them anyways. Such an "automagic" change could not happen when 9.00 suddenly means "middle of the night".
For non-traveling folks that coordinate via the net it could surely have it's merrits (which is why we have UTC on servers?), but even there I could imagine software could help.
E.g. calender tools could just have a tool that allows scheduling for international participants. You enter the locations and it shows you the different day cycles next to each other — because after all isn't this the issue? Finding a time where it is roughly day-like for all participants of the event?
Using a universal time zone wouldn't really help you there, because you would still need to know what 9.00 means in some other part of the world.
Earth cycle 245 is one of the big problems in the modern world. When does it change over to 246? Do I wake up on the 245th but the date changes before lunch? What happens with billing systems, calendars, and what not?
Left/right, port/starboard, north/south are all in common use because we need to be able to talk about directions relative to different frames of reference. It’s just as true that we need to talk about time in multiple different frames of reference.
Or maybe you're just overestimating how much the average person needs to deal with cross-timezone events vs. things happening in the local timezone and things would be worse after all.
> What they call day-time Tuesday in Botswana is part of two date units, for some people hour 17 is always in the morning, and these local facts would get normalized as habit over time.
Isn't that in some ways just reintroducing time zones through the back doors?
I think it depends on the type of application, and how much code you want to reuse. Assuming this a fairly large scale app and long term maintainability is a consideration:
* If some of the code is likely to be reused with an associated website I would go for Electron. Using ReactJS.
* If an associated mobile app is also possible, I would take a look at React-Native, which have some embryonic desktop technology counterparts. This option can be combined with a webview.
* Worth also looking at Xamarin, especially if there's existing investment and skills in .NET (e.g. existing Windows app being migrated).
The best answer is to use a tool that saves in the format that the file was in originally. I think VSCode and some others do that. If the file only has 2-space indentation then TAB becomes 2-spaces. etc...
That said, assuming a greenfield the best case has to be to use tabs. This way if somebody has a preference to small indents then they can configure the TAB to render as 2-spaces - it becomes a render issue.
So, use a modern tool and it's a moot point.
P.S. not sure why Silicon Valley's Richard started talking about 8 space tabs. That would be crazy. The only time I've seen that is in a proportional font in a word processor.
This is actually the only truly rational defense I can come up with for my preference of spaces vs tabs. (The generic argument is that the code will look the way I want it to even when rendered by a tool where I can't control the tab width, but Github is the only real example these days.)
