Travis Fantina

For the past 25 years, 71% of my life, computers have been a daily thing for me. When I was a teenager I spent countless hours drawing, animating, and “programming” ActionScript in Flash, later those energies were channeled into editing films in Final Cut Studio, building websites tinkering with HTML, CSS, and PHP.
Much of my university work was done on the computer and yet I still came home, sat down, and “forced” myself to learn Ruby and Rails. Although, forced is not the word it was fun. Yes it was hard and frustrating but the reward was worth it, the dopamine hit of figuring something out made the hours of frustration worth it. For nearly seven years now I’ve made writing Ruby, Elixir, JavaScript, and others my career, I’ve done it all day long, and still had an insatiable desire to work with these technologies oitside of work. Of course having a wife and children, volunteering, and living some semblance of a “balanced” life always slowed my pace. I didn’t finish as many side-projects as I wanted, learn as many new languages as I wanted, open-source contributions were virtually non-existent but to the extent life allowed I was using the computer in one way or another almost all the time. If it wasn’t programming, it was writing, or making art. I think it would have been unfathomable for me to conceive of a career not centered around a computer.

Within the last six months this has shifted dramatically. I clock out on Friday at 4 or 5 and I’m happy if I don’t have to open the lap-top until 8 AM on Monday morning. Three day weekend? All the better. My total lack of enthusiasm actually hinders pursuits totally unrelated to programming or the web, I’ve been working through a first draft of a novel for a while; since it’s on my computer, I have no real desire to work on it on the weekends. I’ve joked with my wife about getting a typewriter so I can do some creative writing.

What shifted? AI. AI has made my job as a programmer totally meaningless, but it’s not just my fun job where I get to solve problems. It also means that I take a lot less enjoyment in discovering and using other people’s software. Whether or not it was built with AI is sort of academic at this point, knowing that it could be taints the entire idea for me. Sure there are some incredible apps out there still being written by hand by talented developers who are, in most cases, ethically opposed to AI (as they should be) but it doesn’t really matter. AI has proven too good at creating great apps easily and cheaply, code and therefore the programs it compiles to is just fairly meaningless.

Years ago when the enigmatic Rubyist Why the Lucky Stiff abruptly quit programming he parted with some words which have haunted me my entire career:

programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more.

I couldn’t help but think about that quote anytime I questioned whether or not I was doing something meaningful with my life. However, I used to be able to tell myself, I’m not building something beautiful, curing cancer, or making art but I’m making useful tools that people use to get their job done. Moreso, I’m fortunate, I’ve gotten to work for non-profits, government organizations, sustainable packaging companies and I think the secondary effects of my work actually have made an impact in the world.
These days, increasingly clients can just ask an AI “make a cool marketing website to educate people about recreating safely in the mountains and avoiding avalanches” it means that all my efforts are not only going to be “replaced… in a year” as Why said. Not perhaps “replaced by superior ones” but replaced by ones that we have collectively called “good enough” to the point were companies and organizations are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on “tokens” to do this when they used to spend that on “developers”.

What am I even doing now? What am I for? More broadly, if the internet is going to be produced by AI agents, I don’t see any reason to hang out there.

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at BEAM Europe in October. Would love to see you there and/or if your in the greater Haarlem area, happy to meet up!

Tickets are on sale now over at https://codebeameurope.com/ . Drop into my session if your interested in looking at how Ruby/OOP patterns can sneak into Elixir code bases when first adopting Elixir and how to refactor/avoid these.

It just clicked; I can not stand block based editing. I’ve been looking for a replacement for Bear Notes (love Bear but the combination of paying for access to my own iCloud and my eventual desire to switch off of Mac is necessitating some changes). Shopping around I stumbled across a sleek promising looking app I was almost sold then I realized I wasn’t looking at markdown. Then came the dreaded line “block based editor” nooo! I find block based editing to be so cumbersome and brittle. Blocks are always flowing into one another, any time I want formatting I have to open some weird command pallet.

They are sleek, I’ve flirted with Notion many times over the years, but I always come away feeling like I’m playing with a toy rather rather than a workhorse. Gutenberg, WordPress’s block editor, has made editing content on WP an incredibly joyless experience it’s no wonder most installs I’ve seen have some plugin to disable it.

Dear Dash Docs, You are incredibly useful as an offline documentation viewer for the languages I use… I paid once and the product does everything that I paid for and continues to be a delight. Please stop asking me to upgrade; which, from what I can tell gives me the same features I already paid for with the added bonus of paying a yearly subscription.

Thanks!

I don’t follow the WWDC at all but this is a great write up morrick.me/archives/…

AI, and so much “technology” - or we’ll say services (ie. Uber Eats) seem designed to “take the friction” out of our daily lives; you don’t need to hail a cab, you don’t need to go to the record store, you don’t need need to talk to another person, you don’t need to leave your house- for anything, ever.

What are we doing? When you take all that “friction” out of your life, you may find that those individual points of connection and sometimes frustration were the things that punctuated a fulfilling life. What keeps you so busy that you can’t pick out the ten best photos from your last trip to send to a friend? What keeps you so busy that you can’t draw a beautiful picture? What keeps you so busy that you need an AI to give you ideas for how to spend time with your kids. What is this saving you from? What are you going to do now that you’ve freed up all that time?

I recall about 15 years ago it was fashionable for people who thought they were important to only wear one outfit to free up mental energy to make “big decisions”. I’ve always been skeptical of someone who had too much going on mentally to pull out a pair of pants; but now this thinking seems to permeate every facet of our lives. Don’t let finding the right book stand in your way, ask an AI, or have GoodReads select your next book! Hell, don’t let reading the right book stand in your way, just get it summarized by ChatGPT and say you read it!

In the technology world, where I spend my days, Elixir v1.20 was just released. It’s exciting to have the gradual type system now fully baked into the compiler, which was the result of years of research and effort from the Elixir core team and a group of academics. One of the most insightful comments on this release came from a user on Lobste.rs:

This post is an occasion to advertise for long-term public-funded research… We benefit from this work, collectively, thanks to the bright people working in public service, the academic values of sharing our work as widely as possible. (source)[https://lobste.rs/s/wq1csk/elixir_v1_20_released_now_gradually_typed#c_2eppte]

I’ve seen Guillaume Duboc and Universite Paris Cite cited on Elixir related papers for years but never made the direct connection between taxpayer dollars and the work being done at a public research institution in France. Taxes cover a lot of tangibles: infrastructure, services, healthcare (in most first world countries), but there are intangibles that are less focused on keeping you safe and healthy today looking, instead, to the future by funding education and innovation. A new typing system for a “niche” programming language may not seem like an earth moving innovation, and perhaps not. Yet none of this research happened in a vacuum, researchers talk cross disciplinary thinking happens, and it leads to real outcomes for real people. My work is going to be improved, directly, because of the work that was impart funded by the French Government for Duboc’s research.

For me this is a microcosm, there are countless impacts of greater importance brought about in my life through publicly funded research. Often the thread from funding, to research, to proof, marketability and production is far too circuitous to point too in a causal kind of way. Life saving drugs, better public health outcomes, breakthroughs in engineering: this is why have a “society” and I believe it’s all well worth funding!

Of course “funding” gets thrown around by a lot of different groups and interests. The real magic; however, is public funding. It’s transparent, the results are there, for anyone. I’ve read Duboc’s paper; good luck reading whatever research a private company like OpenAI or Anthropic is producing!

Sad to hear about the death of Marc Johnson; he was an incredible skateboarder who I grew up watching. Perhaps more than any other skater; he was the epitome of being incredibly talented and hardworking but also never taking things too seriously just having a blast being different and weird. His skating was like a cocktail of Mullen’s technical abilities and Gonz’s weirdness.

Still an insane part:

www.youtube.com/watch

It’s encouraging to see heads of state around the world condemning the video of Itamar Ben-Gvir taunting detainees; but they don’t get it. The international community’s abject failure to act during the genocide of the last two and a-half years has taught Israel and Israeli leaders that they are 100% immune. If there have been literally 0 consequences for the deaths of over seventy thousand civilians and the total destruction of all hospitals and universities then what do these leaders with their “strongly worded” condemnations expect is going to happen?

Early December, 2023, I had a rare night by myself walking around the city. Picking something up from on the West End followed by a meeting past Olympic Village; generally a transit worthy-distance but I had over an hour to kill and the night was warm. Not unseasonably warm, but comfortable. It had been raining all day; not a steady downpour, just the fine mist that seems to vacillate between fog and rain. Walking along the waterfront the streets glistening with the sheen of the rain, trees were still, halos formed around the pricks of streetlights. My feet carried me effortlessly through Yaletown toward False Creek. Walking through a city helps to create a mental model in a way that a car or transit does not; not only do you learn the geography, it also has the odd effect of shrinking the city. Somehow things that once seemed quite far away feel close. Cutting across parks, allies and walking paths that route you around congested streets. You’re apt to get lost a few times but it’s a worthy trade to know the city.

The lights around me seemed to dim as I entered a park along the water; pricks across the inlet and a glow behind me. Along the promenade coming from the opposite direction, a father and a young boy leisurely made their way across the street and along my path. They looked happy, the boy was skipping, and the father was encouraging him in some kind of game. Laughing and talking the two made their way past me and I felt such an overwhelming sense of calm. I thought of my own child, my daughter at home, likely already asleep, had we not done something like this that very afternoon? Would we not the next afternoon? In that brief moment I felt like this was the place I belonged most in the world.

My thoughts turned to other fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, walking together. My mind went back to the fathers who may have spent their nights looking for food or shelter for their children. The genocide in Gaza was in it’s second month, most media hadn’t yet started referring to it as such. I was constantly preoccupied by the fear, the sadness, the anguish that a civilian population was feeling as their homeland was, yet again, besieged and everything they had ever known, worked for, dreamed of was decimated in front of them. Are the children who survive the lucky ones?

This contrasting sense of calm and rightness that I felt on my walk and the emotions I had been having for the previous two months. Feeling at home on the waterfront where the only sounds I heard were a young boy and his father laughing, the slight dinging of boats in the harbour, the lapping of the waves. I felt hopeful for the first time in weeks, I was hopeful that if this boy and his father were enjoying a laugh together on a quiet night; hopefully children elsewhere were doing the same. Perhaps even amidst the chaos in Gaza a young boy and his father there were laughing and having fun making their way back “home” whatever that looked like at the time. War is dehumanizing, it has no regard for the dreams of youth, the anguish and the joy of a mother going through labour, the first steps taken, the last few years spent with grandchildren. War and the men who make it don’t consider these things. We are human, we are all human, and even in the midst of a devastating war, a conflict, genocide, ethnic cleansing whatever you call it people will claw back whatever humanity they can.

People living under occupation, growing up in war zones, are resilient people with an impressively stubborn resilience that builds rather than diminishes over years, decades, and generations. No one should have to live like that, but those who do have a determination to live, a determination to claim their land and to protect it that I can’t being to understand. This resistance comes in many forms; acts of “terrorism”, acts of courage, and sacrifice; these are the ones that make the news. Humanity without resistance will lead to extinction but resistance without humanity has nothing to save.

I began to circle the ramp up the Cambie Bridge, the view from up there was spectacular. Science World’s lights had just, finally, been turned back on and were glittering off the inlet. The calm serenity of the night did not leave me; I don’t remember a single car on the bridge as I walked across. The sun had long set but a lite fog rose from the streets as if the moon took over the shift from the sun and continued drying things out. Someday I hope to feel that peace again, I hope everyone does.

My daughter uses the same backpack I did 30 years ago! Hail to the once great, and again trendy Jansport.

I also love that she’s adorned it with some finger knitting!