DEV Community: Robin Winslow

"You have lost": Owen Jones' searing message to the BBC

Robin Winslow — Tue, 20 May 2025 23:22:08 +0000

Originally published on my blog.

Yesterday, the courageous Gary Lineker was finally forced to resign from the BBC, after heroically staving off pro-Israel attacks for months.

And this morning, Owen Jones, who has thoroughly chronicled the BBC's anti-Palestinian bias since October 7th. published one of the most powerfully damning condemnations I have ever heard:

Owen's condemnation

❝ Here's a final message to those who have hounded Gary Lineker out of his job, (who are no doubt celebrating):

You have lost.

You have lost the battle for public opinion in the West, which long ago was defined by revulsion at Israel's murderous actions.

You know that even former cheerleaders of Israel are publicly turning against it as they realize the scale of the crime is impossible to defend.

You know that in time both the media and government will be forced to reflect the actual monstrous truth and to act on it.

And you also know, deep down, that this crime is too depraved, too extreme, too deranged, too shameless, too unapologetic, and too documented to get away with.

You know that there will be a reckoning — that those who supported this abomination will, within their lifetimes, face the consequences of their actions.

And you know that the judgment of history will be devastating.

All you have for comfort, in the here and now, is the scalps of the people you've deprived of careers, reputations and freedom, and the mass slaughter of Palestinians you don't even pretend to consider to be human beings.

You are monsters.

And in time that will be the consensus. Politically, and indeed, legally. ❞

- Owen Jones, 20th May 2025

🫡 👏

I'm a Bicester South "paper candidate" for the Green Party!

Robin Winslow — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 18:44:08 +0000

Originally published on my blog.

Hi everyone 👋

If you live in "Bicester South" (Langford Village, Graven Hill or Ambrosden), you'll see my name on the ballot paper on May 1st, for the Green Party.

I'm a "paper candidate", which means we aren't campaigning - I don't have the time. No-one is expected to have heard of me, & we strongly expect I'll lose. I'm just there so that people who want to vote Green can signal their support.

However, on the tiny off-chance that I did somehow win, I am committed to carrying out the role - so I thought I might as well put out one post about how I might be as a councillor:

Firstly, I have no experience in government or public service, so I'd very much be learning on the job. I'd try to approach everything critically as I learn, questioning things that should be questioned.

My day job is as a manager of a software team, so I'll probably look for opportunities to digitise or modernise whatever processes I see around me, hopefully to make local government work a bit more efficiently.

I believe in free speech and democracy, in everyone having a voice. I would support hearing from the invaluable voices of the community, and seek to have though conversations in the open.

I'm anti-austerity: I believe that society can only flourish when all members of our community are well looked after by well-funded local services. I would push for & support increased spending on public services in general - even though I'd have very little direct power over it.

I believe in economic equality: I'd prioritise fair pay and oppose the outsized influence of extreme wealth in government.

And even though it may not be popular right now, I believe that all forms of diversity make our society stronger. I volunteer for the Asylum Welcome charity in Oxford, and I would continue to stand up for the rights of migrants and minorities. A welcoming attitude to visitors, and a firm commitment to universal human rights, are proud pillars of my British identity.

There you have it - if you see my name on the ballot paper on 1st May, those things are what you'll be voting for if you put an X next to my name.

Have a wonderful evening ⭐

Robin

What's wrong with coding tests and how to do them right

Robin Winslow — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 23:33:49 +0000

Originally published on my blog.

Live coding tests are extremely common when hiring software engineers. And online coding tests with tight timeframes are just as common.

I'm far from the first person to mention how bad high-pressure coding tests are (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). But much like open-plan offices, high-stress coding tests seem to stubbornly persist despite clear research findings warning against them:

Interviewers may be filtering out qualified candidates by confounding assessment of problem-solving ability with unnecessary stress.
...
Our study raises key questions about the validity and equity of a core procedure used for making hiring decisions across the software industry.

And it's not just job candidate who aren't happy. Software developer jobs may be objectively the hardest roles to fill, with hiring managers also bemoaning how poorly many experienced developers perform on coding tests.

Ideas for improving coding tests

For the last couple of years in my previous role, there was a significant focus on hiring inside the company. I had the opportunity to research and think deeply about effective ways to hire good developers, and I have some thoughts.

Reducing pressure

The most obvious flaw with coding tests is that many of them put candidates under a lot of pressure. Different people will respond differently to different sorts of pressure, but there are two things that we can be pretty sure will cause some anxiety in many people:

Performing in front of an interviewer
Performing under tight time pressure

Testing a candidates' performance under a particular type of pressure could be perfectly valid if that was a clear requirement for the job. I would argue that for almost all development teams, this is not a key requirements. And if it is a requirement, it probably shouldn't be. A high-pressure working environment should be an undesirable temporary state for a software team that they should be working to resolve as quickly as possible, and hence, there's very little value to making this a key requirement for permanent employees.

If you think about the actual process of programming, very little of it is high-stress. It's usually a solitary activity where you have and need a lot of time to consider the shape of a problem and try out many different solutions. The sort of person who is good at this type of problem solving may very likely be the exact opposite to the sort of person who performs well under stress.

Studies show that anxiety hugely effects performance. I believe this is a key reason why many senior developers often fail coding tests, and therefore why companies find "good candidates" so hard to find.

Therefore our goal should be to try to reduce any possible source of anxiety when testing software engineers. To achieve this, I would recommend only using at-home technical tests that developers can do in their own time without a tight timeframe.

This doesn't completely negate the use of standard coding test tools like HackerRank or DevSkiller, but since both require setting a time limit (I think), I would suggest making this time limit something extra-generous like 1 day or more, instead of the much more common hour-or-two time limit.

Targeting the right skills

The next obvious question is what sort of exercises should we be setting to find the candidates we really need?

An extremely common practice is to set challenging algorithmic problems, like the "balance a binary tree" cliche. These sorts of tests are also the most hated.

It's incredibly rare that an engineer will need to solve complex and novel algorithmic problems in their day to day job. This means that these assignments will likely also cause a lot of anxiety, as candidates will be immediately know that this isn't something they have much experience doing.

A tricky algorithmic brain-teaser is very unlikely to be the best way to find the engineers we really need. So what is?

Many tests will check for deep programming knowledge - for example, a Python test might test someone's knowledge of **kwargs or the GIL. However, I would still argue that even deep testing of programming ability shouldn't be our primary driver, especially in more senior developers.

As developers get more senior, their job tends to involve more and more things that aren't pure coding: mentoring, code reviews, stakeholder communication, architectural discussions, culture building etc. Therefore a developer will likely be sharpest at actual programming when they're somewhere between mid-weight and senior, and from then upwards their programming skills will take a back seat.

This isn't to say that we shouldn't be testing for technical knowledge. On the contrary, it means we should think very carefully about hiring for really valuable technical experience as opposed to esoterica that can be easily googled when needed.

These actually useful skills will look different for every team, but they may include:

how they choose to structure their code
how they design their interfaces
how they make trade-offs between different sorts of performance
whether their code is readable and accessible to other engineers

It's also worth considering the skills you're testing around the actual challenge. As there are many soft skills that are important in software engineering, if we can incorporate these into the test then so much the better. For example, asking them to submit a pull request will test not only the code, but also:

their use of Git and GitHub
their communication in describing pull requests
potentially even how they discuss changes on a PR, whether they get defensive etc.

Making efficient use of time

Another key reason why people hate coding tests is that they ask engineers to invest a lot of time for a job they likely won't get anyway.

I certainly don't have a silver bullet for this one. It's natural that employers want to do as much vetting up-front as possible to avoid a costly bad hire, and the more of that effort they can push onto the candidate the better for them, so they can spend their limited resources on pushing more candidates through the pipeline. And it's natural for the candidates to not want to do that work for free.

It would be great if employers paid candidates for their time, and some do, but most employers are unlikely to ever do this unless they have to. Ultimately this is just a power struggle that depends on the job market and who is more desperate.

But given that it's such a sort point, there is a real risk that great candidates will be put off by how expensive your hiring process is. So we should do all the up-front work we possibly can to reduce the time cost on both sides for each candidate.

This means thinking deeply about the most efficient way to test the skills we really care about. We should also consider where in the hiring process we need to test these skills. It's clearly going to be more palatable to candidates if they're asked do a lot of work once they're further through the hiring process and therefore more likely to actually get the job.

We should also do anything we can to reduce any set-up costs for the assignment.

Recommendations

Taking all these points into account, my preferred type of technical tests would be centred around PRs into an open-source GitHub repository. For example, I really liked the assignment I did a while back for Deepset AI.

It's also important that the work you get them to do is something very close to the work they would actually be doing in the job.

By doing a test within an actual project on a code hosting platform, you get to test the engineer's skills within that platform, in the version control technology, in how they communicate when submitting code. If you like you can have some discussions about the code right there in the platform.

This is about the closest you can possibly get to watching a prospective developer doing their actual job.

If you don't want to take up too much of their time, instead of having them create a PR themselves, you could have them review an existing one. This should be pretty time efficient, but still tests a lot of their knowledge. You could even do a code review as an early stage in your hiring process, and then have them submit their own PR at a later stage in the process.

The big picture

Okay now I've made my recommendations, I'd like to explore the broader attitudes and philosophies behind all this a bit. If you've made it down this far, perhaps you have an appetite for a little bit more exploration.

How did this happen?

A big looming question over all this is: How did we get here? Why are we in this state where so many hiring processes are so chronically broken?

I believe this all stems from a sort of tech exceptionalism, an idea that the point of hiring developers is to find the true geniuses, the worthy ones, in a sort of initiation ceremony.

Today's tech leaders were the bullied, four-eyed, scrawny geeks of the 80s and 90s. Back in the 90s and early 00s, there was a real feeling that these hackers and tech wizards were changing the world for the better by rejecting all the old precepts of the past. Mixed with a slight feeling of revenge against their cooler, tech-illiterate schoolmates, this led to this idea that software engineers were a superior breed, extra intelligent, and of course this worldview carried its own mythology.

All this landed into a western culture that was already fairly obsessed with IQ. That is, obsessed with the idea that some people were born with an innate superiority, and discovering which people were superior was a worthy goal.

To me, this is the only way in which these high-pressure algorithmic brain-teasers make sense in a hiring process - if you believe that you're searching for superior people who will be good at brain teasers and therefore good at everything else.

The antidote

Of course this worldview isn't at all accurate. The IQ test is not a very good predictor of most other skills. There are many many different sorts of "intelligence", and using generalised tests as a stand-in for actually assessing these skills directly is not only ineffective, but it will introduce a lot of bias.

The best way to assess people for a job will always be to get as close as you can to letting them actually do the job. Coding tests, as with all sorts of hiring, will be most effective if they tries their best to test for what's actually needed in the day-to-day job.

My favourite leftist, economics and tech podcasts

Robin Winslow — Sat, 04 Nov 2023 09:58:00 +0000

Originally published on my blog.

I listen to a lot of podcasts these days. I listen on my headphones while doing the washing up or in the car on the way to pick up the kids from school and nursery. I find them very comforting.

I'm both a techie and a leftist, and I use podcasts as an antidote to the misguided neoliberal establishment voices that saturate western society. For some reason, I've always been more interested in hearing conversation about serious topics rather than light entertainment, and usually where they can teach me new perspectives or insights. So I look for a few specific things in podcasts:

No partisanship: Although my podcasts skew significantly to the left, I'm quickly put off by opinions that are clearly biased towards one party or side, and bashing the other side simply for their alignment. No "Pod Save America" here.
Heterodox views: I prefer podcasts that bring me new perspectives, especially where they push against the established wisdom.
Courage of conviction: I don't want podcasts to pull their punches or temper their position - if their reasoning leads to a conclusion, go all the way there. Stand there. Be consistent.
Well researched and defensible: This is especially important because of the heterodox nature of my preferences: I won't put up with podcasts that get it wrong very often at all. This isn't just about the stated facts but also the broad tone and positioning. This excludes, for example, "The Joe Rogan Experience" from my list.
Global: I'm not at all nationalistic, and nationalism generally really puts me off. So I look for podcasts that also bring me global perspectives that are often significantly different from the perspective of national media.

I'm quite proud of my podcast feed, which I've strictly curated over many years. I think they very often bring me high quality and unusual perspectives.

Every one of these podcasts varies from week to week, and I'd also love to publish summaries and recommendations of individual episodes that I find particularly ground-breaking. I hope I'll do that soon.

But for now, I'm going to publish the list of the very best podcasts in my regular diet, in the hope they might also be helpful to someone else out there:

Deconstructed

I liked Deconstructed when it was hosted by Mehdi Hasan. At that point it felt like a more irreverent version of, and the lesser counterpart to, Intercepted, and generally followed its anti-imperialist, lightly conspiratorial tone.

But since Ryan Grim took over, Deconstructed has entered another league. He brings his deep journalistic experience and extensive network to bear in some truly groundbreaking reporting like his interview with Imran Khan. He brings challenging perspectives from a truly global understanding of politics, and he interrogates and explores many assumptions of leftism.

Ryan's style is much more sober and straightforward than Mehdi's was. Each episode is different and usually surprising. Some are only decent, but many other episodes are truly exceptional.

Macrodose

I'm interested in economics, and especially heterodox economics theory. Macrodose, James Meadway offers just about the most sensible summary of economic developments I have ever seen. His perspective is solidly routed in facts on the ground, often cutting through the nonsense of mainstream opinion with some completely undeniable truths.

Although this is labelled as "economics", the stories James tells are very well explained in simple terms and always tied directly to real-world stories. He takes a particular interest in the economics of climate change. I would recommend this podcast even for people who have no interest in or knowledge of economics itself.

His 15 minute summaries are incredible insightful, but he also conducts longer form interviews and discussions which are always incredibly insightful.

Politics Theory Other

PTO is a little less diverse in its voices than some of the other podcasts here - the host Alex Doherty brings on various guests, but particularly Richard Seymour has appeared a bunch of times. Amazingly enough, though, Richard seems to be a genuinely authoritative and uncompromising voice on many aspects of leftist politics.

It's rather more academic and dense in its style than the other podcasts on here - some people might be put off by the overly academic language. But it's nice to hear leftist politics expressed in this detached and sober way, rather than the heightened, outraged style that is so common.

I was particularly impressed by Richard's early summary of the politics around the brutal Hammas attack on Israel and Israel's resulting slaughter of the citizens of Gaza.

Eat Sleep Work Repeat

A former VP at Twitter, Bruce Daisley has been running this podcast on work culture for a number of years. It's naturally focused on the tech sector, although not limited to it.

The guests on ESWR are often truly exceptional, and give lots of different perspectives on how work can be better structured to better look after workers and improve work life in general.

Some More News

Okay I'm cheating a bit here. Some More News primarily a YouTube channel, but it's also provided as a podcast and I often listen as a podcast. It's a political comedy show, somewhat in the vein of Last Week Tonight, but more weird, more irreverent, more leftist and more boar-obsessed.

Of all the podcasts on the list, this is the closest it gets to light entertainment. Although only if you find divisive political topics "light".

The podcast feeds for Some More News actually mix in audio versions of the Some More News videos with recordings of the Even More News podcast ("the first and only news podcast" - actually a podcast this time). I also like that a lot.

Intercepted

The flagship podcast from The Intercept, Intercepted is consistently anti-imperial in its focus. Headed up by founding editor Jeremy Scahill, it very much follows his interest in exposing America's war crimes.

Although the tone of Intercepted is conspiratorial, with theme music by "DJ Spooky", its content is always solid. More recently, Jeremy seems to have stepped back slightly from centrally leading the podcast, with Murtaza Hussain also being a fairly central voice. Murtaza always has very strong and sober perspectives.

Intercepted is more predictable than Deconstructed, but still provides incredibly insightful reporting, mostly on issues of global politics and abuses of power by governments and multinationals.

Tech policy press

It's not easy to find consistently good political analysis within the tech sector, but Tech Policy Press is the closest I've found. It's not always as challenging to the received wisdom as I would like, but it does often platform some fairly radical perspectives.

There are some other podcasts about tech policy that I sometimes listen to, but I don't consider them quite high-quality enough to warrant their own specific recommendation in this list. They include Your Undivided Attention and Tech Dirt, which are both a little too sensationalist and don't feel super-objective; The Changelog which has some really solid interviews, particularly around open source, but is annoyingly laden with large paid promotion segments; and Late Night Linux which is fun but not really at all serious, and I wish they'd do more news commentary.

On the media

I have a keen interest in journalism, communication and bias. On The Media is one of the least radical shows on this list, but it consistently offers solid and introspective analysis about the world of journalism, even if it is usually fairly US-centric.

Other podcasts

Here are some other podcasts in my feed that didn't quite warrant a specific recommendation:

538 politics podcast - a heavily statistics- and polling-based view of US politics
The echo chamber podcast - Irish leftist podcast, very human conversations about the ravages of society
Ted Radio Hour - Summaries from TED talks on various topics
It's been a minute - Good conversations with experts about topics in the zeitgeist. More focused on voices from people of colour.
Fresh Air - Terry Gross interviews people on various pop culture topics

So that's the list. I hope it might be helpful to anybody out there who has similar interests to me.

The degrading of big tech

Robin Winslow — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 14:28:20 +0000

Originally published on my blog.

I just had a thought - or maybe it's more accurate to say that a months-long thought process just crystallised into something. So I'm going to do a quick stream-of-consciousness post about it and hope it's useful in some way and isn't pure brain-crack.

I'm sure I'm not the only one feeling the effects of ~~Twitter's~~ X's enshittification, followed by Reddit's . People mostly younger than me probably feel the same about TikTok, a story which, along with that of Amazon, helped Cory Doctorow solidify the term. Even before Twitter was bought by the Muskrat, ~~Facebook's~~ Meta's downfall was strongly predicted (and continues to play out before our eyes), and I personally feel Google is going through a slower, decades-long enshittification since about 2010.

My initial perspective on this was filled with schadenfreude. X is quite clearly imploding (albeit a bit slower than some anticipated), and is already a shadow of its former self and in obvious decline, losing the richest man in the world at least tens of billions in the process, directly through his micro-mismanagement. That's satisfying.

And it's not just schadenfreude: Given the horrible shit he's pulled - laying off thousands, forcing draconian working hours etc. - I desperately want those management tactics to fail as obviously as possible so other business are less tempted to follow suit. And they are quite obviously failing, even despite the propaganda efforts of the big tech monopolists.

On top of that, I am of course against monopolies. So, theoretically, it's a positive development for ex-Twitter users to be diversifying into Mastodon, Bluesky or Threads.

The problem with this positive narrative is that these platforms had become important public services. The one I feel most keenly is the loss of Twitter as a reliable central hub for brands. Toxic as it was, I still used to be able to rely on Twitter as a place to complain about bad company practices and have a good chance of getting an official response from the company, or simply ask for support and have a better chance of a response than through the company's official support channels. I used to be able to search Twitter to watch the development of social movements, and rely on it to find communities of activists.

Nowadays, you can rely on brands being on X less and less, and even if they are there you can't rely on getting a response. On top of that, I simply don't want to use X 'cos it makes me feel icky. I use Mastodon as an alternative, which I love. But the Fediverse doesn't yet have the penetration to make it anywhere near as reliable as Twitter used to be.

The same sort of thing is true of Reddit. Reddit was such a source of internet-community-truth for people that they used it instead of Google - which is also a testament to how much less effective Google's search engine is nowadays for discovering good results than it used to be. Nowadays, following their great mod purge, there has been a huge dampening of the community and impoverishing of the content, with people experimenting with various alternatives like Lemmy.

In the long term, I hope this is a positive development. I hope we learn our lessons, that ActivityPub and Bluesky's AT protocol resolve their differences and standardise, that over time people realise that the Fediverse is the answer. I hope we get to an online social world that is both standardised and decentralised - i.e. where you can reliably follow any person or brand on any platform through a shared public protocol.

But that will take years or decades. In the mean time, we have lost and continue to lose a huge amount. These platforms weren't just manipulative monopolies, they are also the fabric of society. And as they unravel, we are all poorer. Our ability to communicate and participate in democracy is greatly degraded.

I suppose the conclusion I'm building to is that, in a healthy society, this would be regulated. Yes, we shouldn't be letting these monopolies develop in the first place. But once that have developed, and they become effectively privately owned public infrastructure, they then shouldn't be allowed to do real damage to their platforms without public oversight.

Unfortunately the obvious analogy might be to the "too big to fail" banks in the financial crisis. But it doesn't have to be that way. Following the financial crash, the administrations chose to give lots of money to the banks, with very few strings attached. But they didn't have to do that. They could have created public funds to help people, or better yet to nationalise the banks like in the 1930s.

Basically there are lots of options for the state to step in and mitigate the damage, and there are plenty that don't directly benefit the monopolists. I suppose what I'm saying is maybe we should consider these bastards to be "too big to fail", but the state should just respond to it better than Obama et al did.

Inspecting the order data available to Shopify's Flow app

Robin Winslow — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 13:43:45 +0000

Originally published on my blog.

This is quite specific, so I don't know if it will be useful to anyone. But I really have to blog about it in a vain attempt to justify the amount of time I've spent on this.

I'm helping out a friend with his Shopify store for buying fancy prescription sports glasses. He wants to automatically send an email to his suppliers whenever an order is submitted, containing all the relevant information for them to fulfill the order.

The solution he's found for this uses the free Shopify Flow app. This app lets you set up workflows to do things in response to events - in this case, "Send internal email" in response to "Order created". But I'm sure it's generally useful for much more use cases I don't know of.

The template for the email is written in Flow's custom editor, and uses Liquid. So you can use liquid to add any of the shop, order or order.lineItem data to the email. However, it's pretty confusing to try to build up a mental picture of all the fields that are available to you and what they might contain for any given order. There is a handy browser which will tell you all the available variables, but it's a little slow and cumbersome to click around, and it's not easy to copy/paste names out of it.

I'm sure anyone who is trying to do this same thing would have the same challenge of experimenting and experimenting with different data, tweaking for hours and then going through the slow process of submitting test orders over and over again.

So it is incredibly helpful to have an example representation of what all the available Liquid variable contain. I had initially assumed that this would be as simple as doing something like:

<!-- If only this worked -->
<pre><code>
{{ shop | json }}
{{ order | json }}
</code></pre>

And submitting an order to get an email with a full representation of the information structure for an order. Unfortunately this doesn't work because these are in fact complex objects that make expensive API calls in the back-end in response to getters.

Helpfully, this is explained in detail in the Shopify Flow documentation, even though this took me a while to find:

Caution

You can't output a list/array or object in Liquid by calling the list or object directly, such as entering {{ order.lineItems }}. This limit is put in place because GraphQL can return excessive amounts of data, which would cause your workflow to fail. In addition, when new fields are introduced, it could break some workflows.

Instead of calling lists and objects directly, you should loop over list and include only the fields that you want.

Instead, if you want to list out all the data you have to manually write out each of the properties you want, which is a huge amount of work.

Helpfully, the documentation provides the code to list out all the order.lineItems content in JSON. However, it doesn't do the same for order or shop objects.

So I've just spent a good while writing out an email tempalte for Shopify Flow that will list out much of the interesting information from the shop and order objects, along with all the lineItems data.

As always with all of my personal code, feel free to copy it and use it however you wish:

<h4>Shop</h4>

<pre><code>
{
    "billingAddress": {
        "address1": {{ shop.billingAddress.address1 | json }},
        "address2": {{ shop.billingAddress.address2 | json }},
        "city": {{ shop.billingAddress.city | json }},
        "company": {{ shop.billingAddress.company | json }},
        "coordinatesValidated": {{ shop.billingAddress.coordinatesValidated | json }},
        "country": {{ shop.billingAddress.country | json }},
        "countryCodeV2": {{ shop.billingAddress.countryCodeV2 | json }},
        "formatted": {{ shop.billingAddress.formatted | json }},
        "formattedArea": {{ shop.billingAddress.formattedArea | json }},
        "id": {{ shop.billingAddress.id | json }},
        "latitude": {{ shop.billingAddress.latitude | json }},
        "longitude": {{ shop.billingAddress.longitude | json }},
        "phone": {{ shop.billingAddress.phone | json }},
        "province": {{ shop.billingAddress.province | json }},
        "provinceCode": {{ shop.billingAddress.provinceCode | json }},
        "zip": {{ shop.billingAddress.zip | json }}
    },
    "contactEmail": {{ shop.contactEmail | json }},
    "currencyCode": {{ shop.currencyCode | json }},
    "description": {{ shop.description | json }},
    "email": {{ shop.email | json }},
    "id": {{ shop.id | json }},
    "metafields": [
        {% for field in shop.metafields %}
            {%- if field.key == "api_secret" %}{% continue %}{% endif %}
            {%- if forloop.first != true %},{% endif %}
        {
            "namespace": {{ field.namespace | json }},
            "key": {{ field.key | json }},
            "value": {{ field.value | json }},
            "description": {{ field.description | json }},
        }
        {% endfor %}
    ],
    "myshopifyDomain": {{ shop.myshopifyDomain | json }},
    "name": {{ shop.name | json }},
    "productTypes": {{ shop.productTypes | json }},
    "productVendors": {{ shop.productVendors | json }},
    "publicationCount": {{ shop.publicationCount | json }},
    "setupRequired": {{ shop.setupRequired | json }},
    "shipsToCountries": {{ shop.shipsToCountries | json }},
    "taxShipping": {{ shop.taxShipping | json }},
    "taxesIncluded": {{ shop.taxesIncluded | json }},
    "timezoneAbbreviation": {{ shop.timezoneAbbreviation | json }},
    "timezoneOffset": {{ shop.timezoneOffset | json }},
    "timezoneOffsetMinutes": {{ shop.timezoneOffsetMinutes | json }},
    "transactionalSmsDisabled": {{ shop.transactionalSmsDisabled | json }},
    "unitSystem": {{ shop.unitSystem | json }},
    "url": {{ shop.url | json }},
    "weightUnit": {{ shop.weightUnit | json }},
}
</code></pre>

<h4>Order</h4>

<pre><code>
{
    "billingAddress": {
        "address1": {{ order.billingAddress.address1 | json }},
        "address2": {{ order.billingAddress.address2 | json }},
        "city": {{ order.billingAddress.city | json }},
        "company": {{ order.billingAddress.company | json }},
        "coordinatesValidated": {{ order.billingAddress.coordinatesValidated | json }},
        "country": {{ order.billingAddress.country | json }},
        "countryCodeV2": {{ order.billingAddress.countryCodeV2 | json }},
        "firstName": {{ order.billingAddress.firstName | json }},
        "formatted": {{ order.billingAddress.formatted | json }},
        "formattedArea": {{ order.billingAddress.formattedArea | json }},
        "id": {{ order.billingAddress.id | json }},
        "lastName": {{ order.billingAddress.lastName | json }},
        "latitude": {{ order.billingAddress.latitude | json }},
        "longitude": {{ order.billingAddress.longitude | json }},
        "name": {{ order.billingAddress.name | json }},
        "phone": {{ order.billingAddress.phone | json }},
        "province": {{ order.billingAddress.province | json }},
        "provinceCode": {{ order.billingAddress.provinceCode | json }},
        "timeZone": {{ order.billingAddress.timeZone | json }},
        "zip": {{ order.billingAddress.zip | json }}
    },
    "billingAddressMatchesShippingAddress": {{ order.billingAddressMatchesShippingAddress | json }},
    "canMarkAsPaid": {{ order.canMarkAsPaid | json }},
    "canNotifyCustomer": {{ order.canNotifyCustomer | json }},
    "cancelReason": {{ order.cancelReason | json }},
    "cancelledAt": {{ order.cancelledAt | json }},
    "capturable": {{ order.capturable | json }},
    "clientIp": {{ order.clientIp | json }},
    "closed": {{ order.closed | json }},
    "closedAt": {{ order.closedAt | json }},
    "confirmationNumber": {{ order.confirmationNumber | json }},
    "confirmed": {{ order.confirmed | json }},
    "createdAt": {{ order.createdAt | json }},
    "currencyCode": {{ order.currencyCode | json }},
    "currentSubtotalLineItemsQuantity": {{ order.currentSubtotalLineItemsQuantity | json }},
    "currentTotalWeight": {{ order.currentTotalWeight | json }},
    "customerAcceptsMarketing": {{ order.customerAcceptsMarketing | json }},
    "customerLocale": {{ order.customerLocale | json }},
    "discountCode": {{ order.discountCode | json }},
    "discountCodes": {{ order.discountCodes | json }},
    "displayAddress": {
        "address1": {{ order.displayAddress.address1 | json }},
        "address2": {{ order.displayAddress.address2 | json }},
        "city": {{ order.displayAddress.city | json }},
        "company": {{ order.displayAddress.company | json }},
        "coordinatesValidated": {{ order.displayAddress.coordinatesValidated | json }},
        "country": {{ order.displayAddress.country | json }},
        "countryCodeV2": {{ order.displayAddress.countryCodeV2 | json }},
        "firstName": {{ order.displayAddress.firstName | json }},
        "formatted": {{ order.displayAddress.formatted | json }},
        "formattedArea": {{ order.displayAddress.formattedArea | json }},
        "id": {{ order.displayAddress.id | json }},
        "lastName": {{ order.displayAddress.lastName | json }},
        "latitude": {{ order.displayAddress.latitude | json }},
        "longitude": {{ order.displayAddress.longitude | json }},
        "name": {{ order.displayAddress.name | json }},
        "phone": {{ order.displayAddress.phone | json }},
        "province": {{ order.displayAddress.province | json }},
        "provinceCode": {{ order.displayAddress.provinceCode | json }},
        "timeZone": {{ order.displayAddress.timeZone | json }},
        "zip": {{ order.displayAddress.zip | json }}
    },
    "displayFinancialStatus": {{ order.displayFinancialStatus | json }},
    "displayFulfillmentStatus": {{ order.displayFulfillmentStatus | json }},
    "edited": {{ order.edited | json }},
    "email": {{ order.email | json }},
    "estimatedTaxes": {{ order.estimatedTaxes | json }},
    "fulfillable": {{ order.fulfillable | json }},
    "fullyPaid": {{ order.fullyPaid | json }},
    "hasTimelineComment": {{ order.hasTimelineComment | json }},
    "id": {{ order.id | json }},
    "legacyResourceId": {{ order.legacyResourceId | json }},
    "merchantEditable": {{ order.merchantEditable | json }},
    "merchantEditableErrors": {{ order.merchantEditableErrors | json }},
    "metafields": [
        {% for field in order.metafields %}
            {%- if forloop.first != true %},{% endif %}
        {
            "namespace": {{ field.namespace | json }},
            "key": {{ field.key | json }},
            "value": {{ field.value | json }},
            "description": {{ field.description | json }},
        }
        {% endfor %}
    ],
    "name": {{ order.name | json }},
    "note": {{ order.note | json }},
    "paymentGatewayNames": {{ order.paymentGatewayNames | json }},
    "phone": {{ order.phone | json }},
    "poNumber": {{ order.poNumber | json }},
    "presentmentCurrencyCode": {{ order.presentmentCurrencyCode | json }},
    "processedAt": {{ order.processedAt | json }},
    "refundable": {{ order.refundable | json }},
    "registeredSourceUrl": {{ order.registeredSourceUrl | json }},
    "requiresShipping": {{ order.requiresShipping | json }},
    "restockable": {{ order.restockable | json }},
    "returnStatus": {{ order.returnStatus | json }},
    "riskLevel": {{ order.riskLevel | json }},
    "sourceIdentifier": {{ order.sourceIdentifier | json }},
    "shippingAddress": {
        "address1": {{ order.shippingAddress.address1 | json }},
        "address2": {{ order.shippingAddress.address2 | json }},
        "city": {{ order.shippingAddress.city | json }},
        "company": {{ order.shippingAddress.company | json }},
        "coordinatesValidated": {{ order.shippingAddress.coordinatesValidated | json }},
        "country": {{ order.shippingAddress.country | json }},
        "countryCodeV2": {{ order.shippingAddress.countryCodeV2 | json }},
        "firstName": {{ order.shippingAddress.firstName | json }},
        "formatted": {{ order.shippingAddress.formatted | json }},
        "formattedArea": {{ order.shippingAddress.formattedArea | json }},
        "id": {{ order.shippingAddress.id | json }},
        "lastName": {{ order.shippingAddress.lastName | json }},
        "latitude": {{ order.shippingAddress.latitude | json }},
        "longitude": {{ order.shippingAddress.longitude | json }},
        "name": {{ order.shippingAddress.name | json }},
        "phone": {{ order.shippingAddress.phone | json }},
        "province": {{ order.shippingAddress.province | json }},
        "provinceCode": {{ order.shippingAddress.provinceCode | json }},
        "timeZone": {{ order.shippingAddress.timeZone | json }},
        "zip": {{ order.shippingAddress.zip | json }}
    },
    "subtotalLineItemsQuantity": {{ order.subtotalLineItemsQuantity | json }},
    "tags": {{ order.tags | json }},
    "taxExempt": {{ order.taxExempt | json }},
    "taxesIncluded": {{ order.taxesIncluded | json }},
    "test": {{ order.test | json }},
    "totalWeight": {{ order.totalWeight | json }},
    "unpaid": {{ order.unpaid | json }},
    "updatedAt": {{ order.updatedAt | json }}
}
</code></pre>

<h4>Line items</h4>

<!-- From https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/shopify-flow/reference/variables#complex-data-objects-in-shopify-flow -->

<pre><code>
{
    "lineItems": [
        {% for li in order.lineItems %}
            {% if forloop.first != true %},{% endif %}
        {
            "contract": {
                {% comment %}rest of contract omitted{% endcomment %}
                "id": {{ li.contract.id | json }}
            },
            "customAttributes": [
                {% for ca in li.customAttributes %}
                    {% if forloop.first != true %},{% endif %}
                    {
                        "key":{{ ca.key | json }},
                        "value":{{ ca.value | json }}
                    }
                {% endfor %}
            ],

            "discountAllocations": [
                {% for da in li.discountAllocations %}
                    {% if forloop.first != true %},{% endif %}
                    "allocatedAmountSet": {
                        "presentmentMoney" : {
                            "amount": {{ da.allocatedAmountSet.presentmentMoney.amount | json }},
                            "currencyCode": {{ da.allocatedAmountSet.presentmentMoney.currencyCode | json }}
                        },
                        "shopMoney": {
                            "amount": {{ da.allocatedAmountSet.shopMoney.amount | json }},
                            "currencyCode": {{ da.allocatedAmountSet.shopMoney.currencyCode | json }}
                        }
                    }
                {% endfor %}
            ],

            "discountedTotalSet": {
                "presentmentMoney" : {
                    "amount": {{ li.discountedTotalSet.presentmentMoney.amount | json }},
                    "currencyCode": {{ li.discountedTotalSet.presentmentMoney.currencyCode | json }}
                },
                "shopMoney": {
                    "amount": {{ li.discountedTotalSet.shopMoney.amount | json }},
                    "currencyCode": {{ li.discountedTotalSet.shopMoney.currencyCode | json }}
                }
            },

            "discountedUnitPriceSet": {
                "presentmentMoney" : {
                    "amount": {{ li.discountedUnitPriceSet.presentmentMoney.amount | json }},
                    "currencyCode": {{ li.discountedUnitPriceSet.presentmentMoney.currencyCode | json }}
                },
                "shopMoney": {
                    "amount": {{ li.discountedUnitPriceSet.shopMoney.amount | json }},
                    "currencyCode": {{ li.discountedUnitPriceSet.shopMoney.currencyCode | json }}
                }
            },
            "duties": [
                {% for duty in li.duties %}
                {% if forloop.first != true %},{% endif %}
                {
                    {% comment %}rest of duties omitted{% endcomment %}
                    "id": {{ duty.id | json }}
                }
                {% endfor %}
            ],
            "fulfillableQuantity": {{ li.fulfillableQuantity | json }},

            "fulfillmentService": {
                "callbackUrl":{{ li.fulfillmentService.callbackUrl | json }},
                "fulfillmentOrdersOptIn": {{ li.fulfillmentService.fulfillmentOrdersOptIn | json }},
                "handle": {{ li.fulfillmentService.handle | json }},
                "id": {{ li.fulfillmentService.id | json }},
                "inventoryManagement": {{ li.fulfillmentService.inventoryManagement | json }},
                {% comment %}fulfillmentService.inventoryManagement - omitted {% endcomment %}
                "productBased": {{ li.fulfillmentService.productBased | json }},
                "serviceName": {{ li.fulfillmentService.serviceName | json }},
                "shippingMethods": [
                    {% for sm in li.fulfillmentService.shippingMethods %}
                        {% if forloop.first != true %},{% endif %}
                        {
                            "code": {{ sm.code | json }},
                            "label": {{ sm.label | json }}
                        }
                    {% endfor %}
                ],
                "type": {{ li.fulfillmentService.type | json }}

            },
            "fulfillmentStatus": {{ li.fulfillmentStatus | json }},
            "id": {{ li.id | json }},
            "image": {
                "altText": {{ li.image.altText | json }},
                "height": {{ li.image.height | json }},
                "id": {{ li.image.id | json }},
                {% comment %}li.image.metafield omitted{% endcomment %}
                {% comment %}li.image.privateMetafield omitted{% endcomment %}
                "width":{{ li.image.width | json }}
            },
            "merchantEditable": {{ li.merchantEditable | json }},
            "name": {{ li.name | json }},
            "nonFulfillableQuantity": {{ li.nonFulfillableQuantity | json }},

            "originalTotalSet": {
                "presentmentMoney" : {
                    "amount": {{ li.originalTotalSet.presentmentMoney.amount | json }},
                    "currencyCode": {{ li.originalTotalSet.presentmentMoney.currencyCode | json }}
                },
                "shopMoney": {
                    "amount": {{ li.originalTotalSet.shopMoney.amount | json }},
                    "currencyCode": {{ li.originalTotalSet.shopMoney.currencyCode | json }}
                }
            },

            "originalUnitPriceSet": {
                "presentmentMoney" : {
                    "amount": {{ li.originalUnitPriceSet.presentmentMoney.amount | json }},
                    "currencyCode": {{ li.originalUnitPriceSet.presentmentMoney.currencyCode | json }}
                },
                "shopMoney": {
                    "amount": {{ li.originalUnitPriceSet.shopMoney.amount | json }},
                    "currencyCode": {{ li.originalUnitPriceSet.shopMoney.currencyCode | json }}
                }
            },

            "product": {
                {% comment %}rest of Product omitted{% endcomment %}
                "title": {{ li.product.title | json }}
            },

            "quantity": {{ li.quantity | json }},
            "refundableQuantity": {{ li.refundableQuantity | json }},
            "requiresShipping": {{ li.requiresShipping | json }},
            "restockable": {{ li.restockable | json }},

            "sellingPlan": {
                "name": {{ li.sellingPlan.name | json }}
            },

            "sku": {{ li.sku | json }},

            "taxLines": [
                {% for tl in li.taxLines %}
                    {% if forloop.first != true %},{% endif %}
                    {
                        "priceSet": {
                            "presentmentMoney" : {
                                "amount": {{ tl.priceSet.presentmentMoney.amount | json }},
                                "currencyCode": {{ tl.priceSet.presentmentMoney.currencyCode | json }}
                            },
                            "shopMoney": {
                                "amount": {{ tl.priceSet.shopMoney.amount | json }},
                                "currencyCode": {{ tl.priceSet.shopMoney.currencyCode | json }}
                            }
                        },
                        "rate": {{ tl.rate | json }},
                        "ratePercentage": {{ tl.ratePercentage | json }},
                        "title": {{ tl.title | json }}
                    }
                {% endfor %}
            ],
            "taxable":{{ li.taxable | json }},
            "title":{{ li.title | json }},

            "totalDiscountSet": {
                "presentmentMoney" : {
                    "amount": {{ li.totalDiscountSet.presentmentMoney.amount | json }},
                    "currencyCode": {{ li.totalDiscountSet.presentmentMoney.currencyCode | json }}
                },
                "shopMoney": {
                    "amount": {{ li.totalDiscountSet.shopMoney.amount | json }},
                    "currencyCode": {{ li.totalDiscountSet.shopMoney.currencyCode | json }}
                }
            },

            "unfulfilledDiscountedTotalSet": {
                "presentmentMoney" : {
                    "amount": {{ li.unfulfilledDiscountedTotalSet.presentmentMoney.amount | json }},
                    "currencyCode": {{ li.unfulfilledDiscountedTotalSet.presentmentMoney.currencyCode | json }}
                },
                "shopMoney": {
                    "amount": {{ li.unfulfilledDiscountedTotalSet.shopMoney.amount | json }},
                    "currencyCode": {{ li.unfulfilledDiscountedTotalSet.shopMoney.currencyCode | json }}
                }
            },

            "unfulfilledOriginalTotalSet": {
                "presentmentMoney" : {
                    "amount": {{ li.unfulfilledOriginalTotalSet.presentmentMoney.amount | json }},
                    "currencyCode": {{ li.unfulfilledOriginalTotalSet.presentmentMoney.currencyCode | json }}
                },
                "shopMoney": {
                    "amount": {{ li.unfulfilledOriginalTotalSet.shopMoney.amount | json }},
                    "currencyCode": {{ li.unfulfilledOriginalTotalSet.shopMoney.currencyCode | json }}
                }
            },

            "unfulfilledQuantity": {{ li.unfulfilledQuantity | json }},

            "variant": {
                {% comment %}rest of variant omitted {% endcomment %}
                "title": {{ li.variant.title | json }}
            },

            "variantTitle": {{ li.variantTitle | json }},
            "vendor": {{ li.vendor | json }}
        }
    {% endfor %}
    ]
}
</code></pre>

Or find it on my GitHub.

How to build and customise ModernCV on Ubuntu 23.04

Robin Winslow — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 11:25:07 +0000

Originally published on my blog.

ModernCV is a customisable LaTeX CV template for creating your résumé.

You can edit it directly and for free on Overleaf, but the version on there is not as customisable as the full source code. So here I'm going to write down how to download, build and customise the original source code on Ubuntu, as I do it.

Prerequisites

First, install LaTeX on Ubuntu:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y latexmk texlive-latex-extra texlive-fonts-extra git

The pages we're installing are:

LatexMK: A smart compiler for LaTeX documents. It wraps and makes use of pdflatex. It's better than using pdflatex yourself because it will manage any recompiltions and further steps automatically.
texlive-latex-extra: This contains the etoolbox package, which is needed for most things including ModernCV.
texlive-fonts-extra: This contains fontawesome5, used by ModernCV.
Git: You need this to clone ModernCV, if you don't have it.

Build the template ModernCV

Now clone the ModernCV project and build the template CV to check it's working:

git clone https://github.com/moderncv/moderncv  # Get the code
cv moderncv  # Enter the project
latexmk -pdf ./template.tex  # Build the template

If it succeeded, you should see something like this at the bottom of the output:

Output written on template.pdf (6 pages, 351459 bytes).
Transcript written on template.log.
Latexmk: Getting log file 'template.log'
Latexmk: Examining 'template.fls'
Latexmk: Examining 'template.log'
Latexmk: Found input bbl file 'template.bbl'
Latexmk: Log file says output to 'template.pdf'
Latexmk: Found bibliography file(s):
  ./publications.bib
Latexmk: All targets () are up-to-date

And if you open up template.pdf you should now see an example CV for "John Doe".

If you get errors in compiling the PDF, firstly try running it again, or try deleting the directory, cloning it again, and then running if again. If that fails, try copying any error messages into Google to see if you can discover if you can fix the error by installing more texlive packages. It's possible installing textlive-full may help.

Customise the CV

To customise the CV for your own purposes, you should first copy template.tex to make your own .tex file for your CV, and then open that file and start editing it.

cp template.tex yourname.tex  # Make a copy
code yourname.tex  # I like to use VSCode for editing, but you do you

The file has liberal comments to explain to you how to make changes to it. You may want to change the settings at the top of the file for the font size, font style, margins, colour etc.

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper,sans]{moderncv}        % possible options include font size ('10pt', '11pt' and '12pt'), paper size ('a4paper', 'letterpaper', 'a5paper', 'legalpaper', 'executivepaper' and 'landscape') and font family ('sans' and 'roman')

% moderncv themes
\moderncvstyle{classic}                            % style options are 'casual' (default), 'classic', 'banking', 'oldstyle' and 'fancy'
\moderncvcolor{blue}                               % color options 'black', 'blue' (default), 'burgundy', 'green', 'grey', 'orange', 'purple' and 'red'
%\renewcommand{\familydefault}{\sfdefault}         % to set the default font; use '\sfdefault' for the default sans serif font, '\rmdefault' for the default roman one, or any tex font name
%\nopagenumbers{}                                  % uncomment to suppress automatic page numbering for CVs longer than one page

% adjust the page margins
\usepackage[scale=0.75]{geometry}
\setlength{\footskip}{149.60005pt}                 % depending on the amount of information in the footer, you need to change this value. comment this line out and set it to the size given in the warning
%\setlength{\hintscolumnwidth}{3cm}                % if you want to change the width of the column with the dates
%\setlength{\makecvheadnamewidth}{10cm}            % for the 'classic' style, if you want to force the width allocated to your name and avoid line breaks. be careful though, the length is normally calculated to avoid any overlap with your personal info; use this at your own typographical risks...

Then the first thing you should probably do after that is go down to where it says "John Doe" and change it to your name:

\name{John}{Doe}

Once you've made a couple of changes, try building and opening your CV:

latexmk -pdf ./robinwinslowmorris.tex
xdg-open robinwinslowmorris.pdf

I'm not going to explain all of how to edit the .tex file, as it's mostly explained inline. You can also learn more about LaTeX format on Overleaf or on freecodecamp.org.

Victims and abusers

Robin Winslow — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 22:06:54 +0000

Originally published on my blog.

The literature on supporting victims of domestic abuse is unequivocal about condemning abusers. E.g. this from Reducing the Risk's "supporting friends and family" page:

Don’t focus on trying to work out reasons for the abuser’s behaviour – only they are responsible for this, and there is no valid or acceptable reason.

Apart from this being human instinct, I think there's also a very good strategic reason for this stance: At the extreme end, victims of abuse are often in real mortal danger, and so the top priority is clearly for them to protect themselves, usually by escaping from the abuse. Couple this with the gaslighting that's usually happened, meaning the victim doubts their own experience or ability to stand up for themselves or survive on their own, and it's easy to see why it can be very helpful to cast the perpetrator as a heinous villain to convince the victim to escape.

If we step back a bit, though, this perspective doesn't seem like it scales very well to all situations. In many cases, domestic abuse isn't life-threatening. There may be other things tying the abused to their abuser - genuine, justifiable concerns, like children. Or the abused might simply have more sympathy and care for their abuser than the villain narrative allows for.

Often, anti-abuse literature will fall into a perspective I find quite unconvincing. The overall excellent video 10 Relationship Red Flags of Abuse by Psych2Go explains how physical violence is often an advanced stage in a cycle of abusive behaviours. A couple of things it says I want to highlight, which are pretty common in anti-abuse literature:

At 1:42: Number 4: Forces you to take responsibility for their feelings. The abuser will use this tactic as a form of manipulation.

At 2:58: Number 7: A bad temper. The abuser might have a short fuse or just blow up over something that doesn't look like a big deal to anyone else. This isn't just a symptom of having anger issues: It is also yet another form of manipulation. The goal of this is to scare the victim into being subservient and obedient by doing anything they can to stop their abuser from getting angry.

Now, these are controlling, abusive behaviours, and they are absolutely not acceptable. And as I say, if your goal is purely to convince a victim to protect themselves, the true motivations of the abuser aren't relevant, only the fact of abuse is relevant.

However, the statements "use this tactic" and "this isn't (just) ... anger issues" paint a picture of a coldly calculating psychopath, strategising about the best way to control their victim. I feel that in all but a few cases, and in my personal experience, this is not the case at all.

I believe many abusers are scarcely more in control of themselves than are their victims. They are damaged, fragile people, usually with learned, instinctive behaviours in response to childhood trauma. As the adage goes: Hurt people hurt people.

When abusers push responsibility for their feelings onto their victims, it's not a "tactic", it's because they're too insecure and fragile to take responsibility for anything themselves. When they lose their temper in unreasonable ways, yes it has an undeniable controlling and abusive effect, but it's not manipulation, it's them losing control.

It's important to understand that this in no way reduces how abusive this behaviour is. It is every bit as abusive, unacceptable and damaging, and victims still have every bit as much reason to escape. In which case, you might say, why bother pointing out that abusers aren't necessarily scheming to abuse people? What difference does it make?

Well, I think it's a very important distinction for a number of reasons:

Abuse often goes unreported is because victims fear the consequences of reporting it. Their abusers are often people close to them that they care about, and they don't necessarily want to see them punished. If they felt their abusive loved one might be treated with sympathy and offered help, they might be much more likely to report the abuse.
Abused people often take a long time to realise they are being abused. This is because the narrative of abuse feels so far from their mundane-seeming daily experience. I therefore feel that the more extreme you make the narrative, the harder it is for abused people to apply it to themselves. And asking them to believe that their partner is deliberately scheming to imprison them is a pretty extreme narrative, where the actual truth might be easier to believe.
What if the victim genuinely doesn't want to or can't leave the relationship? If you're going to do anything other than escape entirely, it suddenly seems pretty important to understand the exact causes of your abuse. And simply using the line "it's unforgiveable, there's no acceptable reason" is likely to be of limited use. If instead, you can start to understand the psychological underpinnings of the abusive behaviour (while always unequivocally avoiding blaming the victim) then there may actually be a slow, painful path to improvement. And in some cases, this might be the only option.

Principles for platform engineering

Robin Winslow — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 00:12:29 +0000

Originally published on my blog.

I've learned a lot about how to build a good engineering team in my time at Canonical. An important piece of this was a term I ran into about a year ago, although it's definitely been around significantly longer than that: Platform engineering.

Platform engineering is the deliberate design of an "internal developer platform" (IDF) to support developers in performing tasks to support the development and deployment of their projects. And, to me, it's a really essential component of good DevSecOps practice, to deliver projects in the most reliable way.

I've been reading a lot more about platform engineering recently, and mostly as an exercise to myself to solidify this knowledge, I'm going to write down some principles of good platform engineering:

Invest in the platform: If you develop a platform that falls into disrepair or is abandoned entirely, you will have done more harm than good. Don't steal good developers for the creation of the platform without replacing them - instead fully staff a new team to support the platform.
Solve developer needs: Start from key functions that the engineers actually need solved. Don't imagine use-cases, and don't create an overly general platform. Help out the developers. Test with developers. Ask for their feedback.
Start small: Don't try to solve everything at once. Find the most impactful place to create a platform enhancement and do that first, in isolation. Evolve from there.
Create golden paths: The most powerful part of platform engineering is the ability to create default paths for the most common use-cases that work out of the box.
Focus on usability: It's essential that the platform be simple, straightforward, easy to use. Use usability principles to make a well-described and pleasant interface.
Empower developers: Be very careful not to overly obfuscate or restrict developers' exposure to the underlying technologies. Platform tools should be deeply configurable, and, if possible, should act as progressive enhancements of the existing tools. Developers should be able to bypass the platform tools if needed.
Encourage contributions: While platform tools should be owned by a platform team, input and contributions should be encouraged from engineers and operations. It's best to operate in an open source model (InnerSource commons).
Avoid silos: Platform engineering is a strategy for Dev(Sec)Ops, so its whole purpose is to create cohesion and overlap between developers, operations, security etc. This needs to be baked into the mission of platform development.

Tech fantasies and impostor syndrome

Robin Winslow — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 22:49:12 +0000

Originally published on my blog.

I'd be curious how old-school engineers feel, but to me it seems like software engineering has unique epistemological challenges.

This is because software is immediately complex, and there are really no theoretical limits on its potential complexity. Computer code is all about instructing computer chips to run what amounts to many thousands or millions of instructions. That's the point of computers. And it's incredibly easy to throw in an extra loop and add another ten thousand operations.

That, coupled with the fact that no part of software is empirically visible: all instructions are sent to an opaque and unseen microchip.

Of course there are touch points where code is shared, reviewed, can be reasoned about together in real terms. But for the most part, any given line of code has only been looked at by a handful of people, or often a single person. And a whole codebase is vanishingly unlikely to be understood in its entirety by even a single person. Let alone a whole technology stack.

The implications of this visibility problem are huge, this is why computer science is a thing and observability is such a hot topic. Since it's incredibly hard to know exactly how any given program was written, we have to instead observe and study the behaviour of our programmes as if they were an unknowable black box.

I believe this lends anything to do with computers - software development, machine learning, high-frequency trading, hacking - an immediate mystique. And this mystique carries with it a very large number of negative consequences for the industry and the world.

In my experience, there's usually a level of pretence in those who work in tech. They have to exhibit competence over and confidence in domains that are almost entirely intangible and theoretical. Often, the person who appears the most technically competent is the person most willing to speak confidently about the reality of domains that we can all only picture in our heads.

And I believe this in turn makes impostor syndrome rampant in the software industry. Since it is, in practical terms, impossible to fully understand the domains within which we're all working, it would be a very unusual person who genuinely has 100% confidence in their ability. We're surrounded by fantasists desperately trying to convince everyone around them that they know exactly what they're doing, but we couldn't possibly actually think that of ourselves, and so we must be impostors.

People respond to impostor syndrome in different ways. Personally, my impostor syndrome used to manifest as an attempt to bluff my way through it, to appear superior to others so they wouldn't dare call me out. I think this is probably quite a common response, especially in men. Other people respond by withdrawing and becoming more timid, nervous to take any action.

This can very easily lead to a toxic mix. People lying about how well they understand their products, all trying to keep their head above water by trying to prove they know the unknowable more than the next person. People over-promise, desperate to exhibit their competence. They get themselves into messes of complexity and then when they can't deliver they shift the blame around.

And for more senior people in organisations this problem is exacerbated from both ends: They both have more responsibility over unknowably complex tech, and they are further from the actual implementation. So they make unfounded promises based on even less knowledge, based on high level assumptions about what should be possible, and then have no choice but to pass the pressure to deliver down to the engineers below them.

There are of course remedies to this. These are good practices in work in general, in human interaction in general, but because of the unique epistemological challenges of the tech industry, I believe they're absolutely essential in tech:

Under promise: Try to understand everything you can as deeply as you can, but then overestimate your ignorance. Imagine all the things that could go wrong and then add some extra space beyond that. Introduce scepticism early about your ability to meet targets where there's any uncertainty.
Have contingency plans: Think about what will happen if you don't deliver on a target, and take that possibility seriously. Decide what you would do in that situation.
Collaborate: Where possible, work together with other people. Do pair programming. Share the way that problems have been solved, and solve them together.
Over-communicate: Write down as much as possible about the process of doing the work. Share decisions and discussions widely.
Keep solutions small and simple: Given the ease with which complexity can spiral out of control, out of concievability, in tech, the more you can break down work, the more you can deliver small, atomic units, the more likely to are to be able to deliver predictably.
Be humble: Talk very openly about the things you don't know. Encourage others to do the same.
Believe people: If someone tells you something is hard, believe them. If anyone ever says something "should be easy" call it out.
No blame, systems thinking: When something goes wrong, do not blame individuals for it. If you see others doing it, call it out. If you allow blame to be thrown around, people will respond by putting up walls of pretence. So instead, focus on what system can be put in place to avoid that thing going wrong again.
Demo: Share and demonstrate work as deeply as possible. Get as technical as possible in describing the work.
Gather evidence, make things tangible: Do everything you can to create clarity over what the software is doing:
- Write a concise set of clearly understood high-level tests that can really exhibit the health of a project.
- Create a small number of key dashboards displaying health metrics for the software, and make sure people see them regularly in their daily work.
- Know what impact given pieces of work are expected to have and check the work afterwards.

These are just some ideas, but overall the important thing is to encourage transparency, honesty, humility and understanding. Realise that the team is going on a journey of discovery together, and they need to be supportive to achieve success.

When is Kubernetes getting HTTP/3?

Robin Winslow — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 16:21:02 +0000

Originally published on my blog.

The standard for HTTP/3, RFC 9114, was published as a proposed standard in June 2022. This is significant:

A Proposed Standard specification is stable, has resolved known design choices, has received significant community review, and appears to enjoy enough community interest to be considered valuable.

(RFC 7127: Characterization of Proposed Standards)

But for some reason I don't hear as much chatter about HTTP/3 as I used to HTTP/2 at a similar stage. I'm impatient for it though. It is significantly faster, and although I can't find any actual energy benchmarks, the massive reduction in round-trips should mean it's significantly less energy intensive.

My site is already on HTTP/3, courtesy of CloudFlare, whom I believe are running the nginx-quic custom build of NGINX. This immediately brings HTTP/3 to around 20% of the internet, according to Cloudflare. However, of course, this is only from the edge to the client. Most of the sites behind Cloudflare's cache will not be on HTTP/3.

Apart from that, Wikipedia says that Caddy (0.1%), LiteSpeed (5%) and Microsoft IIS (3%) all support HTTP/3 out of the box. But one particularly tech stack is conspicuously absent here: Kubernetes.

For example, ubuntu.com (which I work on during my day job) still doesn't support HTTP/3. This is because getting it into Kubernetes seems to be taking a while. It sounds like it won't land until NGINX merge it into their stable release.

Cloudflare claimed:

Our current target for completing the code merge into the NGINX mainline branch is the end of 2021, after which it will be a full part of the NGINX mainline branch and NGINX Plus in subsequent releases.

But there have been a couple of updates, one in the comments under their blog post:

Tony Mauro: Product Management tells me that we hope to fully support QUIC and HTTP/3 by the end of 2022. Note that this is not a promise :-)

And another on the Kubernetes issue:

stalkerg: HTTP/3 has some issues with SSL implementations it's why difficult to add it into NGINX. Basically, the responsibility between SSL lib and HTTP server became is dramatically different because we should support UDP protocol QUIC.

I don't have more information than this right now, but hopefully it'll get stabilised, merged, and then included in Kubernetes before the end of 2023. 🤞

GPT could centralise power online like nothing we've seen

Robin Winslow — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 16:44:54 +0000

Originally published on my blog.

When I was doing my Computer Science degree in around 2005, I passionately believed in the huge potential of the internet for the growth of humanity and democracy.

I thought that it would open up the voices of many millions of people who would otherwise have been voiceless, suffering in the dark. It would shine a light on many dark areas of human society, and involve everyone in the global conversation about the future direction of humanity.

The centralisation of the internet

Since then the internet has experienced some growing pains, to put it mildly.

Instead of everyone having a website, as was the initial vision, big tech monopolies have created walled gardens to control and manipulate people’s speech. Facebook were complicit in genocide, Cambridge Analytica may have influenced key political decisions like Brexit and the 2016 US presidential campaign.

To a large extent, decisions Google make in the YouTube recommendation algorithm have more impact than any individual speech. The beautiful garden of human online creativity is being manipulated and funnelled to serve the interests of a few profiteers.

One key place we can see this playing out is the fight over “zero click searches”. For many years now, Google has abused its monopoly position as the de-facto search engine to keep people on Google.com and prevent them jumping off to other parts of the internet. They steal content from websites and repackage it as their own right there in the search results, so you never need to go to find the real source, and you never need to give them any credit or gain for producing the content. Content producers online are begging for the scraps that fall from Google’s table.

This is the state of the world today. But things are about to get a thousand times worse.

Enter GPT

GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, and is the leading large-scale language model. It can analyse and learn from huge expansive data-sets, and then generate unique natural language following the patterns in the training data.

In June 2020, GPT-3 splashed onto the scene, and GPT-4 is expected in the next few months.

(Aside: I try to avoid using the term "artificial intelligence" to describe GPT because it is categorically not Skynet or iRobot, and those narratives tend to distract us from useful analysis.)

GPT-3 has so far give rise to, most notably:

GitHub Copilot, a generator of programming code
DALL-E, a GPT-based “diffusion model” for generating images
And now, ChatGPT, currently an open public beta for a chatbot to generate verbose answers to prompts

Since the launch of the ChatGPT public beta, we’ve seen many examples, both incredibly impressive and deeply worrying, about what it can do. It will also straight-up lie - but this article isn’t about ChatGPT’s defects.

GPT is quite clearly revolutionary. This technology to automate creating deeply natural-sounding and often accurate and informative content will change the world. The real question is, how will it change the world. Who will it benefit?

Are OpenAI good or evil?

OpenAI, the creators and owners of GPT and DALL-E, were set up in 2016 with a clear mission:

to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

In their introductory blog post, they introduced OpenAI as a non-profit company who would share their products “freely” with the world (emphasis mine):

… it'll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest.

We're hoping to grow OpenAI into such an institution. As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. We'll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies.

Oh my how that all changed in 2019. From Wikipedia:

In 2019, OpenAI did not publicly release GPT-3's precursor model, breaking from OpenAI's previous open-source practices, citing concerns that the model would perpetuate fake news. OpenAI eventually released a version of GPT-2 that was 8% of the original model's size. In the same year, OpenAI restructured to be a for-profit company. In 2020, Microsoft announced the company had exclusive licensing of GPT-3 for Microsoft's products and services following a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI. The agreement permits OpenAI to offer a public-facing API such that users can send text to GPT-3 to receive the model's output, but only Microsoft will have access to GPT-3's source code.

As soon as OpenAI created something of worth, it was immediately coopted by the biggest tech monopoly out there, and turned into a profit machine. The march to profit from GPT now looks like an unstoppable juggernaut.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft’s plans to invest and extract profit from OpenAI came to light. It is rumoured to be investing a further $10 billion on the understanding that it will get 75% of the profits until the money is paid back, and thereafter will own a 49% stake in the company. This of course puts OpenAI heavily in debt to Microsoft and forces them to monetise as quickly as possible.

And like clockwork, 3 days later OpenAI announced plans to monetise ChatGPT by providing a paid-for API for using it within applications.

Microsoft’s plan for world domination

OpenAI’s links to Microsoft go way back.

Reid Hoffman was one of the principal founders of OpenAI in 2015. Very shortly after that he sold his company LinkedIn to Microsoft, and promptly joined Microsoft's board.

Here there's an interesting twist in my research. ChatGPT tells me that even prior to 2016, Hoffman was an advisor to M12, Microsoft's strategic investment fund, and that he was involved in other strategic investments. But ChatGPT doesn't provide references, and I can't find the information elsewhere.

When Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018, much of the commentary assumed that their strategy was mostly to cosy up to the open source community and get developers on side. But then in 2021 they introduced GitHub Copilot, a code generation tool built on GPT, using their "exclusive" licensing from 2020 and trained on source code from GitHub (which is effectively all the public source code in the world).

Copilot is now, inevitably, the target of a lawsuit, with more almost certain to follow. The tool generates programming code by "learning from" existing code hosted on GitHub. Code which almost always has a licence attached with specific usage terms, which Copilot ignores. Microsoft's argument will likely be that the product of the GPT algorithm is unique, and no different from a human reading something and then producing unique works. But even if this argument holds up, Copilot has been shown to regurgitate existing code almost verbatim.

GitHub's annual revenue has jumped from $200-$300 million at acquisition to over $1 billion in 2022. This is largely due to business subscriptions for "GitHub Actions" cloud services. But with Copilot's code generating capabilities now only available via paid subscription, it's possible this revenue will jump significantly this year. It seems pretty likely that it was this exact plan that motivated Microsoft to acquire GitHub.

So what might Microsoft's plans be for ChatGPT to motivate this reported $10 billion investment?

ChatGPT, the interface to the internet

The copyright fights over GitHub Copilot are probably just the warm-up act for what’s to follow with ChatGPT and DALL-E.

If you spend some time using ChatGPT, its weaknesses quickly become clear. It’s often inaccurate, overly verbose, overconfident, caveat-laden and often oddly vague. But there are a couple of things it clearly excels at:

Generating unique examples of common formats (e.g. a job cover letter, instructions for well-known problems)
Collating and summarising well-known information

It’s the latter example here that I think forms the most obvious use-case for ChatGPT.

The de-facto way of finding information up to now has been Google search. But Google’s search is looking more and more dated. With the ever growing amount of content online, the lack of innovation in the search engine, and the constant pressure of companies trying to game the algorithm, it’s become extremely hard to find anything esoteric or nuanced on Google.

ChatGPT really feels like it could step in to take Google’s mantle, potentially providing Microsoft with a way to unseat Google as king of the internet. Although Google are of course working on their own rival language model.

But if this happens, the implications would be huge. If a ChatGPT-like service became our main interface to the world’s information, it would mask and exploit the web’s data like never before. Far beyond Google’s current “zero click searches”, ChatGPT explicitly refuses to reveal its sources. It repackages data in an opaque way, to provide an alluring service that completely disempowers and trivialises the actual producers of the original content.

In this world, what incentive is there for anyone to create original content online? What happens to the voices of all those people trying to take part in human discourse, in shaping the future of the human race?

I truly believe that this, or something like this, is Microsoft’s ultimate plan. And it seems like a powerful possibility that they will succeed. And if they do, what will become of the internet?