AL Object ID Ninja

Zero-configuration, dead-simple, lightning fast, no-collision object ID assignment for multi-user repositories

No collisions, ever: Real-time, conflict-free ID assignment that always gives every developer a guaranteed unique object ID.
Lightning-fast: Get your conflict-free object IDs instantly, with IntelliSense integration.
Zero-configuration: No setup, no onboarding, no settings — you work exactly like before, and it silently keeps your IDs clean.

From the blog

Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal

Programming is not a 20th century invention. Ideas behind what we call programming have existed since at least the 9th century. The very term "algorithm" comes from the name of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a mathematician born around 780 somewhere in modern-day Uzbekistan. The first computer program was written in 1837 by Charles Babbage, even though for a long time Ada Lovelace has been credited for having been the first programmer. Her contribution, a paper from 1843, was far more profound, though: she understood the potential of abstraction - symbol manipulation that goes beyond pure arithmetic. By 1880s Herman Hollerith devised how to store data in machine-readable form, and the first reconfigurable behavior device - the plugboard - was invented, also by Hollerith, back in 1906.

By mid-1940s programming was already a real thing. Scientists wrote algorithms in symbolic notation and coders translated them into binary code. When Kathleen Booth came up with an idea of an assembly language back in 1947 things started to heat up. First assemblers started to appear that automated this job, and as the anecdote has it, in 1953 von Neumann - having discovered that one of his assistants built an assembler - was furious: why waste a valuable scientific instrument on clerical work a human could do?

It never got any better.

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What to do in the age of code printing

Over the past 5 months, I've delivered 8 workshops, 17 sessions, one podcast, and participated in more discussions about AI and its capabilities than I can count. Most of those included some talk around how we should approach this AI power marching into our offices - and I won't say here "AI power taking our jobs" because that's so totally not what I want to talk about or what I fear in any way. Want the lousy part of my job? Have at it!

Yesterday waldo posted the "the waldo way" blog post where he touches on a clash of two stream of thoughts: one group of people says we should build my-way-or-highway scaffolding that every developer in the company uses; another group says we should empower every developer to build their own scaffolding and use it to being a far more efficient version of themselves.

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From beep to empty seat: the six levels of self-driving code

Back in 2016 I bought a new car, and one afternoon on the motorway it did something that made the hair on my arms stand up.

I was driving home, traffic was light, and I clicked the thing on. And the car just... drove. It held the lane on its own. Gentle little corrections, left, right, following the curve of the road like it had done it a thousand times. My hands were still on the wheel — the car insisted on that, it would beep at me and sulk if I let go for too long — but they weren't doing anything. They were just resting there. Almost useless.

I had been driving for twenty years at that point. Two decades of the thing being mine to do — the steering, the watching, the tiny constant negotiation between me and the road. And here was a machine, in my own car, doing it while I sat there like a passenger in my own life. It was wonderful. It was also a little bit terrifying, in the way that wonderful new things often are. I remember thinking: this is it, the floor shifted under me, and it didn't even make a sound.

I didn't know it back then, but I had just met Level 2.