Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mark_l_watson 1312 days ago
That was a fun read. BTW, I bought both Kondo’s original tidying book and her tidying for work book.

I have been looking at ways to simplify my software stacks while transitioning to “retirement.” For me this is often just pushing complexity to web infrastructure managed by corporations (but always with an easy migration path). Examples:

Lisp dev: I have been using Common Lisp for 40 years. I am eyeing more minimal languages like a Scheme implementation or Racket. I have flirted with the idea of Emacs Lisp but this would be a huge learning curve for me.

Deep learning, and general Python: I am a big fan of Google Colab. I haven’t powered up my at home GPU rig in months. For local Python dev, for little projects I have mostly moved away from PyCharm and VSCode, moving back to Emacs + python-mode.

When I must set up a web app, I am almost all in on GCP, sometimes Hetzner, never AWS for my own stuff.

I will probably drop programming languages that I don’t often use now like JavaScript, Haskell, Clojure, Smalltalk, and Java.

1 comments

Thanks, I really enjoyed writing it!

And yeah, as I talked to everyone for the article, it really seemed that minimalism was relative to where you were, and could often show up these days in using managed services. Such is the power of the cloud, right?

I didn't go there, but I think lots of things like serverless and edge workers and stuff like that could fit into this discussion as well.

I would like to make a suggestion: put your Mastodon or Twitter handle in your HN profile. I was going to follow you on social media, which is how I get links to reading material.
Ahh, good call. They're both on there now.