Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

There is a well known meme where people talk about how the questions they asked were ‘cringe’ and make fun of the questions people ask. One such example is the comic below that showed up in my feed. Here the refrain is that having to read all the questions that someone has posted on Google/ChatGPT about programming is equivalent to Torturing them because of the implication being that the questions were so basic that everyone should know the answer to them. I get that people are trying to be funny but there is a problem with these kinds of posts because it actively discourages people from asking questions, it builds the narrative that people who post ‘stupid’ questions are not smart and their questions are cringe. It actively promotes the imposter syndrome because people start thinking that they don’t know much when they have to search for ‘basic’ stuff.

Let the torture commence. Let’s reveal all the coding related questions you asked on Google and ChatGPT

Instead I prefer the XKCD approach called the 10,000.

In this strip, Randall presents a mathematical argument against the idea of making fun of people for their ignorance.

There are so many things that I know that others don’t, just as there are so many things that you know that I don’t know. This is because each of us has different life experiences/upbringing etc. Expecting everyone to know the same things as you do is super egoistical.

I have been a developer for about 25+ years now and still I look up syntax when I am coding. Knowing the proper syntax for a command doesn’t make you a programmer, knowing what command/logic to use is what makes a programmer. I can always look up the syntax but the basic logic to solve the problem is something that I have to come up with and that is what I usually test when interviewing people. I need people who can solve problems not someone who can regurgitate the syntax for a function in C++/Python.

When I was in high-school (10th Standard) my senior project was to create an address book where we used the locate command quite extensively to make the output pretty (this was in GW-BASIC). So in my preboard exams, during the viva I was asked to give the syntax of the locate command. I always got confused on the parameters for this function and couldn’t remember if it was LOCATE [row][,[col] or LOCATE [col],[row]. I guessed and gave the wrong order so the teacher told me that she doubted that I had coded the program as I didn’t even know the syntax of the command. I responded by telling her that I don’t need to remember the syntax because I can refer to the book when I need to know the syntax but the logic of the program is what I focused on and challenged her to quiz me on that. I remember she was pretty taken aback by this and I did get a good score on the viva but she told me not to be so blunt during the actual board exam viva’s.

I have sat in meetings where people have talked about concepts or used examples I had no clue about and sometimes I would interrupt to ask for clarifications and in other times I would make a note and do lot of research before the next meeting so I understood what we were talking about. I am not saying that people shouldn’t do research or put in effort before asking questions. I am saying that we need to be supportive of new comers into the field who don’t have the experience to know all the things that might be obvious to you. In the past I used to refer folks to the How To Ask Questions The Smart Way by Eric Steven Raymond & Rick Moen when I talked about how to ask questions. However as I have gotten older and more experienced I find that while the FAQ has some good points it is absolutely condescending and not really the right approach to asking questions. So Instead of that I now refer people to Julia Evan’s post on How to ask good questions.

How to ask Good Questions

Teaching people that it is ok to ask questions is an important part of being a mentor and training the next generation.

– Suramya

On August 10, 2023, HashiCorp decided to change the license for its products (including Terraform) from the open source under the MPL v2 license to a non-open source BSL v1.1 license, starting from the next (1.6) version. This change was met with widespread vocal opposition from the community and when HashiCorp refused to reconsider, the community decided to take action and forked the last stable version of Terraform into a new solution called OpenTofu (Yes really…) and almost immediately over 100 companies, 10 projects, and 400 individuals pledged their time and resources to keep Terraform open-source and the number is growing fast.

With more and more companies looking at alternatives, The Stack has published an interview with the HashiCorp CEO. I am having a hard time figuring out if this is a Troll piece in line with The Onion or an actual interview, because the quotes in the interview are mind boggling. From the interview:

HashiCorp’s CEO predicted there would be “no more open source companies in Silicon Valley” unless the community rethinks how it protects innovation, as he defended the firm’s license switch at its user conference this month.

Every company I have worked with over the decade has worked with Open Source software and companies and I don’t think a single one would make a statement like what he is claiming.

While open source advocates had slammed the license switch, McJannet described the reaction from its largest customers as “Great. Because you’re a critical partner to us and we need you to be a big, big company.”

Indeed, he claimed that “A lot of the feedback was, ‘we wished you had done that sooner’” – adding that the move had been discussed with the major cloud vendors ahead of the announcement.

“Every vendor over the last three or four years that has reached any modicum of scale has come to the same conclusion,” said McJannet.

Here’s my personal favorite:

He said the Linux Foundation’s adoption of Open Tofu raised serious questions. “What does it say for the future of open source, if foundations will just take it and give it a home. That is tragic for open source innovation. I will tell you, if that were to happen, there’ll be no more open source companies in Silicon Valley.”

Because foundations allow communities to continue with products they love and built even when corporate’s try to lock them in a closed garden, it is apparently a bad thing. Yes, it is a bad thing for folks who want to just take advantage of the community, enshittify the product while making money and ignoring the needs of the community. Open Source allows people to fork the product (which was built with Open Source contributions), keep it free and out of the greedy hands of corporate CEOs. That’s the beauty of Open Source and this article is a poor attempt to gaslight folks into believing that this is a bad thing.

– Suramya

One of the cardinal rules in computers is to “never trust the input” or put another way: “Never trust user input”. If you ever wondered what would happen if this wasn’t followed here’s a real world example that happened late last month (28th Aug) where almost every flights to and from the UK were delayed or cancelled after their air traffic control systems went down.

An analysis of the crash found that a French airline had filed a flight path in the wrong format to the National Air Traffic Services (NATS) and instead of rejecting the plan because it was in an invalid format as it should have done the entire system went down hard. This is a basic programming principle and I am not sure why their testing didn’t catch this massive vulnerability. Basically, it looks like anyone with access to file a flight plan can crash the entire NATS just by submitting a flight plan in the wrong format.

Apparently it is expected behavior as per NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe, who said that both Primary AND Backup systems responded to the incorrect flight data by suspending automatic processing “to ensure that no incorrect safety-related information could be presented to an air traffic controller or impact the rest of the air traffic system”

Nats chief executive, Martin Rolfe, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It wasn’t an entire system failure. It was a piece of the system, an important piece of the system.

“But in those circumstances, if we receive an unusual piece of data that we don’t recognise, it is critically important that that information – which could be erroneous – is not passed to air traffic controllers.”

Mr Rolfe said Nats has “safety-critical systems” and “throwing data away needs to be very carefully considered”.

To me it is unbelievable that anyone thought that crashing both the Primary and Backup systems was preferable to throwing away an invalid flight plan.

Sources:

• Evening Standard: An ‘unusual piece of data’ caused flight chaos – air traffic control boss
• Slashdot: French Error Blamed for UK’s Air Control Meltdown Which Left 300,000 Passengers With Cancellations

– Suramya