Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

February 5, 2026

Why calling out people is important when they behave inappropriately

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 9:37 PM

The following showed up in my feed and I thought it was important that I share it as this post highlights a good point about why it is important to call out people during arguments/discussions about human rights. I never thought about it this way but after reading it, this makes perfect sense and I am going to use this going forward.

Screenshot of Post. Text is under the image in Blockquote
Why it is important to call out people about human rights

@sepuichritude

one thing I don’t think people realize is that in arguments about human rights, it’s not about trying
to persuade the other party. its not about them at all. they’ve already made up their mind.

it’s about persuading the audience.

if I call out my teacher on being homophobic I’m not trying to change his opinion. I’m trying to convince
any closeted kids in the room that they’re not the monsters he’s made them out to be.

if I argue with my aunt about how racist she’s being it’s not because I expect to change her mind. its
because I’m hoping to god my cousin’s kids hear and learn that maybe skin color doesn’t mean what she says it means.

people will try to hush you and say “they’re not going to change their minds, don’t bother” but its not about them. it was never about them

You see the thing is that if someone puts down a person because of stereotyping and no one objects to it then it normalizes that statement and that way of thinking. Over time that particular school of thought becomes accepted/normalized as the truth. The more people don’t object/call it out the more it gets mainlined and normalized. I have seen this with jokes about women in Tech, Indians being bad at English, Gay’s being evil and so on and so forth.

The other major issue is that if a person is being made fun of or being put down and no one objects, they will think that everyone there agrees with the statement. Which might or might not be true, but it will become true in the long run. As the saying goes, if there is one Nazi at a bar and is not immediately kicked out then it is a Nazi bar. The same is true for sexist or racist behavior/homophobia etc etc. Which is why we have communities enforcing Code of Conduct’s, companies having POSH and similar rules.

You might not be able to change a person’s mind but you can definitely show the person being picked at that they are not alone and not what the person picking on them is accusing them of being.

Thoughts?

– Suramya

February 4, 2026

Is it worth Contributing to Open Source with AI Scrapers using your work for training materials

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Tags: , , — Suramya @ 10:38 PM

I have quite a lot of work with Open Source Software (OSS) over the years which has resulted in two job offers and multiple opportunities to speak about OSS in various forums. I have even published some of my own work on my site as well. Nowadays with ‘AI’ scrapers hammering code repositories for content that is used to train their code generators in violation of the code licenses a lot of people have been pretty upset about it with multiple lawsuits being filed and unfortunately some of the developers have gotten tired enough that they have stopped publishing their code under OSS licenses.

The community is obviously divided about this as shown by the following post on Mastodon:

Screenshot of Mastodon post. Full text under the image in blockquote
Simon Willison on porting OSS code

@yoasif 🔗 https://mastodon.social/users/yoasif/statuses/115895264796629089
–
Simon Willison on porting OSS code:

> I think that if “they might train on my code” is enough to drive you away from open source, your open source values are distinct enough from mine that I’m not ready to invest significantly in keeping you. I’ll put that effort into welcoming the newcomers instead.

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/11/answers/

This feels very much like colonialism; take over all the code, drive the original developers away, and give the colonizers the code as a welcome present.

Basically, some people are asking Code Generators to stop scanning their code into their system otherwise they will stop contributing to OSS and on the other side we have people like Simon who think that this is a bad reason to stop contributing code to OSS. I am not going to talk about the quality of code that that code generators create and why it is a bad idea to use these generators because I have talked about that in multiple other posts.

Looking at just the question of “Is it worth Contributing to Open Source with AI Scrapers using your work for training materials”, I think the answer is yes (for me at least) and everyone has the right to answer this in their own way.

For me Open Source is about learning how things work and solving specific problems that I want to fix, now this can be in existing software already published as OSS or new code that I write and then share publicly. I am sharing it so that people don’t have to reinvent the wheel and can build on top of existing solutions (which is what OSS is all about). Is it fair/right that companies are training their LLM’s on my code and then extrapolating/building on it without credit? Of-course not. I think that it is fair that I (or any developer) gets credit for the work they put in building something.

However, I learnt quite a lot looking at code that others had shared for free as OSS and I want to keep that culture alive and give that same option to new comers that I had. We are going to need a lot of coders in the near future to fix problems that were created by ‘vibe coders’ and LLM’s and the best way to create that experience is to have them look at existing code so that they can learn from it. Both the good parts and in certain cases learn what not to do 😉 .

So in summary I would have to say that yes it is worth it. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts on this.

– Suramya

February 2, 2026

Programming: Unclear on the concept of code reviews

Filed under: My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 1:42 PM

There is an interesting disconnect in people about software engineering. They are unable to grasp that the industry/team exists to solve business problems, not to release changes as fast as possible (I mean we do want to release fast but not at the expense of solving actual problems) or to try out the latest in technology. This is why I have seen techies in companies get upset that they can’t upgrade the entire setup to use the latest and greatest (as of now) framework they just heard about. Business doesn’t care about any of that, they want the software to work reliably, have the features they want and be stable. If you have ever had to pitch a infra upgrade, addressing technical debt or system uplift (without new features) to senior management you know what I am talking about.

A good SLDC (Software Development Life Cycle) setup ensures that there is a solid code review process setup before a change is deployed into production. This allows a person (or persons) other than the developer to review the code and highlight any issues found. It also serves as a way to train junior programmers about best practices and more efficient ways to do things. I have come back from code reviews with pages of questions and better approaches to solving the problem I was addressing. Even now all my code still goes through code review. If a company doesn’t have a good code-review workflow then I would be very scared to use any products developed by them. In Git this review is initiated by creating a PR (Pull Request), once the changes are approved they are merged into the next release branch.

Programming is more than just writing code and pushing it to production. As I said earlier the goal is to solve business problems efficiently and without bugs. So when I see statements like in the screenshot below I get very scared because it shows just how unprepared/unknowledgeable some of the folks who are ‘vibe-coding’ or AI coding changes that are being pushed to production are.

software development in 2026 is going to require some to loosen up a little. code doesn't have to be as perfectly crafted the way we did it pre-ai. call it slop if you want, but if you're still demanding perfection on every pr while your competitors are shipping 'slop' that works...you're fighting from a disadvantaged position. shipping velocity matters more than perfection
software development in 2026 is going to require some to loosen up a little. code doesn’t have to be as perfectly crafted the way we did it pre-ai.

rye
@rywalker

software development in 2026 is going to require some to loosen up a little

code doesn’t have to be as perfectly crafted the way we did it pre-ai

call it slop if you want, but if you’re still demanding perfection on every pr while your competitors are shipping “slop” that works…
you’re fighting from a disadvantaged position

shipping velocity matters more than perfection

Even ‘Pre-AI’ no one has perfectly crafted code, which is why we have technical debt and temporary fixes that last years if not decades. That said, the main goal of the Code Review is to ensure that you are

a) Doing what you want to do correctly
b) You didn’t break any existing functionality
c) Didn’t introduce any new bugs
d) Are coding efficiently/following best practices.

Out of the four listed above A to C are critical. Most of the review process usually focuses on these three with the last one being given focus as and when time permits. There are times when you encounter ‘The Coding Evangelist’ (See: Types of Software Developers for explanation) who will make you miserable trying to perfect the code but that is usually a rare occurrence (at least in my experience over the past 27 years of coding).

But if you are optimizing for speed of production instead of legibility and maintainability that is a way to incur tech debt at scale. Which is a big problem for systems in production. People often fail to take into consideration the cost of “Keeping the Lights on”.

Sometimes people do argue in reviews about stupid stuff, one funny instance I remember is from a previous company where these two senior developers had an ongoing argument about how to format the code. Each one hated the other person’s preferred formatting and they had both actually created Macros in Emacs to change the formatting to their preferred style every time they edited the file. We could figure out who the last person to work on the file was by looking at the formatting.

Long story short, (good) Code reviews are absolutely required and essential for an organization to ensure that the code in production is as stable and bug free as possible. It doesn’t matter how quickly you are pushing code if the code doesn’t work the way it is supposed to or/and has bugs in it.

– Suramya

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