Tom Oram

@tomoram.bsky.social

Passionate about all aspects of software. Lead Consulting Engineer at Armakuni.

Claude: “These calls are cargo cult code - copied from somewhere without understanding they’re unnecessary.” Yes Claude, it was you that copied them!

Claude Code estimates work in the opposite way to how humans do it: > Would you like to proceed with option 1, it will take 2-3 hours? Yes ..5 mins later > Done

Have had Claude Code generate quite a few authorisation rules that look great on first glance but contain significant flaws when studied. I certainly foresee a lot of companies ending up with these kinds of scenarios in the near future.

What’s the thinking on comments in code when using agents manipulate the codebase? The agents add comments and I’m inclined to remove the ones that don’t seem to add value (i.e. most), but I do wander if the context helps future agent interactions?

Trips to the office are a great chance to get a bit of fun coding. Today I’m pairing with Claude Code on a bit of Idris. Claude definitely knows Idris better than me but we are both struggling a bit.

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One powerful aspect of mob programming that I don’t see mentioned much is that if the whole team is working on one thing then they must choose (or be given) the most important thing to work on - prioritisation is naturally pushed front and centre.

The basics of OpenTelemetry are nice clean and straightforward, however, wading through the piles of information around which specific attributes to include isn’t a whole lot of fun (not least because 90%+ of them are marked as being in development).

OTLP: Open Telemetry Protocol OLTP: Online Transaction Processing My brain, tongue, and typing fingers dislike the fact that both of these abbreviations exist.

Two parenting tips for people with a 4 year old: 1. Get construction toys with real tools like screwdrivers. Real tools are so much more fun and engaging than plastic toy ones. 2. Don’t let your child have a real screwdriver, they will take things apart!

My general rule is that if there's a certificate in it, it's not Agile. The very notion of a certificate is based on a faulty premise: that Agile is a fixed process, and if you learn and do that process, you will be Agile. That's just wrong. 1/5

I extracted two sub packages out of a larger one today. I only did it to improve code organisation, however, it had a very positive effect on the overall design because the new boundaries made it much clearer where things weren’t quite right.

Trying to install Podman Desktop on Windows for the first time. The onboarding process is pretty nice so far, with clear guidance on what you need to do to enable required features.

Lost an hour today bashing my head against why the Flink Kubernetes Operator was failing to create a deployment; it turned out that I had deployed a newer version of Kubernetes which I guess isn’t currently supported.

Having event properties in C# that throw when you try and add more than one handler with += seems like a weird choice. Being an event suggests that you can add multiple handlers but then you can get caught out unexpectedly at run time.

A challenging problem is bait for a software engineer, however, when a book says: “Here is a big long list of all the complicated problems you might eventually need to solve, but first start with a simple solution and get it working first.” That last part is the most important.