Arthur Milchior's personal blog

I've heard that it's really hard to get into big-tech companies. That, since they pay top salaries, they can be very selective in who they hire. I'll plainly admit that it's not my experience, and offer a different narrative.

And while I admit I believe I understand more or less why it occurs, I still find it counter-intuitive that it was easier for me to find software engineer job at Amazon and Google^[1], than to join smaller French companies.

AnkiDroid successfully converted its entire project from Java to Kotlin. In this first AnkiDroid dev blog post, we’ll explain our goal, our methods, and what remains to do.

Our goals

The main goal of the migration is to improve developers' experience. Kotlin code is easier to read, write and review than Java. Anki AnkiDroid is 13 years old. If we are still here in 13 years, we hope that the time spent during this migration year will be entirely saved. We also hopefully will decrease the number of bugs and get more readable codes using Kotlin features, such as better nullability check, scope function, and high-order function over collections.

Here is the extra goals we discovered along the way:

• git history should still allow us to track the origin of each code line.
• Each commit should compile
• New contributors should be able to help us easily
• Kotlin migration should not introduce bug

Don't review while driving

I don't believe I have to state it's a horrible idea, that nobody should review flash cards while driving. Actually, I had not even considered that anyone would do it. But someone did. Actually, according to some redditor who do it :

I can guarantee you at least 50% of the Anki-using people in my medical school class (myself included) have done Anki while driving, whether stuck in a traffic jam on the way home or at an obnoxiously long stoplight.

And, as I answered:

You know what. I've been contributing to Anki ecosystem in one way or another for the past 5 years. This post is the very first time someone was able to make me reconsider whether it was a good choice.

Programmers, we love having our code colored, bold, and so on, to get a quick overview of the code structure. Highligh does a really great job, however up to now, I have not seen anybody successfully using it in Anki and AnkiDroid. This is now done. Please, user of iOS let us know whether it works too

People I meet regularly think that I am non-binary and queer. I have to say, the more time passes, the more people assign me as woman - especially when wearing a mask for COVID. I have already written a post (in French) about why I am a man. I want to talk here about why I don't see myself in the word "queer".

A friend of mine offered me to co-create a queer open-mic. I said I didn't see myself in that word, to which she asked "Do you have impostor syndrome?". Here it made sense: "Do I really belong in this scene?". But I thought her more general question very interesting.

I find it funny how mentioning that something is done for plausible deniability diminishes it but not extinguish it. Here is an example of plausible deniability that should not exists for entirely logical beings, but will still exists if you will too. I suspect you may appreciate it. Hopefully for  […]

For years, I wanted to write about what the aspiring rationalist community meant to me. Seeing a lot of people criticizing it, sometime with argument I agree with, often with ones which does not represents the reality I've seen, I made a twitter thread about it. Threads are helpful because I find it more acceptable to write whatever comes through my mind randomly, which makes it easier to write than a blog post. I'll translate and post it here too.

I had an interesting definition problem of late. I was wondering whether contributing to the Anki community was selfish, or even egoistical.

By itself, the answer is not important, those are only a word, but I believe the question to be of interest nonetheless.

A lot of people want to create collaborative deck for Anki. In September 2018, I had already made quite a few add-ons, and some people contacted me thus to discuss collaborative decks. It has always been in the back of my head since. I'm going to try to write down every thoughts I had and why it seems quite complex.

In this post, I expect to show you why it may be difficult to create a seemingly simple program. In particular, to do it well. I'll show case with the last program I wrote, an add-on for Anki. More precisely, the most wanted add-on for anki, according to the vote of users of anki's subreddit: being able to resize image in the editor. This seems to be a simple add-on; after all, resizing by dragging corner has been done in every editing software for decades^[1]. In this post, I intend to document all of the things which made me loose time when I created the add-on "Resize image" for anki. I also created a video showing how the add-on works.