I’m Douglas Vaghetti, I write about programming and tech in general.
A better mental model for reasoning about Typescript types
I work in a pretty big Typescript code base on my day job. The one thing I see people struggling the most when learning it is the type system. Typescript types are rather special in that they exist during compile time but not during runtime. I believe it is a better mental model to think of them as type annotations than proper types like the ones you get in a language like Go or Java....
"You Don't Need to Trust Science Because You Can Test It." - but Can You?
Consider TV weather forecasts – Every day, someone will show up in your television and give you a prediction of what the weather is going to be like in your area over the next couple of days. Everyone knows weather forecasting is never 100% accurate. Sometimes it says it will rain, and it doesn’t. But they’ll mostly get it right so people listen to what the weather forecast says because it is useful....
We need platform regulation
It’s an everyday thing at this point. Amazon abused its position as a platform to use third party seller data to compete against them. Apple abuses its position as an application platform to compete with Spotify and other streaming services. YouTube abuses its position as a video platform banning content producers without offering any recourse. The list goes on. In a more traditional business, such as a factory, you have a set of suppliers that sell you goods you need, like steel and machinery....
Do blogs still matter?
I started this personal blog a bit more than a month ago. It has been a really interesting experiment. Some posts even made it to the front page of hacker news. Google analytics tells me this blog had about 46 thousand page views across all posts! Even with way more views than I was expecting, it’s been really hard to convert these viewers into a more regular following for the blog....
Marketers are censoring journalism and everyone is just fine with it
The internet can’t seem to get tired of complaining about how bad modern journalism is. There are lots of reasons for this perceived loss of quality, but there is one that I find specially worrisome that I don’t think is mentioned often enough: Modern journalism is being censored by marketing departments. How things were before Journalism has always been at least partially funded by advertising. But advertisers didn’t have as much power at least until digital advertising became a thing....