Sam Cooper

comic strip at the other end of the link, click it!

10 years old and maybe never more relevant than in contemporary software development

www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/2...

Floating-point numbers are weirder than you think…

ivan.canet.dev/blog/2025/11...

Abusing a semicolon to save a line of code is not something I'd normally do in Kotlin! But in the book I really want the examples to stay short so they don't interrupt the flow of the text too much.

For succinctness, the star of the show here is Kotlin's also() function, though!

Rate my Fibonacci! 😄

After some improvements suggested by one of the book's tech reviewers, I think this code example from Chapter 10 of 📚 Kotlin Coroutine Confidence strikes a neat balance between brevity and readability.

What do you think? How would you write it?

👉 pragprog.com/titles/...

Okay, maybe I do want to brag 😄

It happened on Medium: October 2025 roundup SEO stats, spooky reads, and what publication editors featured

I don't want to brag, but they mentioned my book before they mentioned Obama

Few things scare me more than someone telling me they’ll just “buy the book on Amazon” 🫠

😈 Working on my new LinkedIn bio. "I love to respond to AI messages, but only if they correctly show me a seahorse emoji."

Let the chaos begin 🐴 🐎 🐠 🐟 🐡 🦈 🪸 🐚 🐙 🦑 🦐 🪼 🧜‍♀️ 🦄 🐢 🐬 🐳 🐋 🐊 🦭 🐌 🪻 🪷 🪹 🪺 🐾 🪼 🐚 🪸 🐠 🐟 🐡 🦈 🦑 🐙 🦐 🐴 🐎 🦄 🐉

knowyourmeme.com/mem...

"Two networks are better than one," says Vodafone, telling me I can now get service from both Three and Vodafone, thanks to their merger.

I don't suppose they can see the irony in their choice of wording.

Instead of trying to green cars so much why don't we just invest in trains. city trains. under ground trains. above ground trains. trains between cities. trains between countries. TRAINS

THE PEOPLE CRAVE TRAINS

Thanks @stackoverflow.blog.web.brid.gy for mentioning my article in last week's newsletter—and congratulations on 300 issues!

Nice link description, too: "Dotting your i's and crossing your t's matters even in Kotlin." Can't believe I didn't think of that one! 🤦

stackoverflow.blog/newsletter/i...

YouTube video by ACCU Conference How Do You Tame the Async BEAST with Kotlin and JavaScript? - Sam Cooper

Trying to summarise all of asynchronous programming and structured concurrency in fifteen minutes would be kind of insane.

So of course, that's exactly what I decided to do when I spoke at ACCU York last month. 😄 I think it went okay!

youtu.be/VJC1BJ2ZDEM

Writers are nothing if not well versed in the art of telling their writing software why its punctuation and grammar suggestions are incorrect.

Thanks so much, I'm really glad you enjoyed it!

I do find LLMs occassionally useful, but the "You're absolutely right!" is gonna kill me one day.

It looks like a really lovely place! Might have to try and find if I ever manage to visit France again, I need an excuse to explore outside of Paris

I thought of the GeoWizard video right away and figured you probably posted this as a similarly misleading location.

So I ruled out Japan and figured the next most likely for you was just France.

Searched for "japanese garden france" and scrolled till something matched.

Is that cheating? 😄

Really beautiful photos, especially the first one!

YouTube video by GeoWizard Tricky and Misleading: "Out Of Place" (Custom Map) [PLAY ALONG]

Damn, this reminds me of an actual GeoWizard video where it's a Japanese garden but it's not in Japan: youtu.be/BJ-bEId-7yQ?...

His was Hawaii. Yours is... Nantes?

Actually... I say "inefficient" because some chests might never be opened, but on reflection, you better believe I'm hunting down and opening every last one of those things

In many video games, when I loot a chest, the value and level of the loot is fixed, but the specific selection of items is randomised.

It would be inefficient to populate every chest up front, so maybe the contents are only determined when I open the box.

Schrödinger would have liked that, I bet.

Makes me worry what new emojis we might see next…

The Country That Broke Kotlin Logic vs language: how a Turkish alphabet bug played a years-long game of hide-and-seek inside the Kotlin compiler

⚡ Hackernews Top story: A years-long Turkish alphabet bug in the Kotlin compiler

Unit Tests Aren’t Tests, They’re Sensors A good unit test doesn’t need to check whether the code works, just whether it’s changed

Yes! Tests are for future-me scratching my head about what went wrong. Their whole purpose is to point me in the correct direction. I waffled about it a while ago: sam-cooper.medium.com/9574e7b8b7c7

I really like your idea of formalising test quality declaratively so tests can be linted for this!

On LinkedIn I try to have a policy that if you try to sell me gen AI I will unfollow/mute. But that's becoming increasingly difficult as people whose posts I usually respect and enjoy start jumping on the AI crapwagon 😢

Less exciting answer than you might think. The proposal for the emoji mentions that in an office environment, comparing someone to a potted plant is a humorous way to describe them as useless. Their source? Urban dictionary...

www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/182...

🤔 I seem to be on the front page of Hacker News 🤯🤯🤯

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4555...

The Country That Broke Kotlin Logic vs language: how a Turkish alphabet bug played a years-long game of hide-and-seek inside the Kotlin compiler

The Country That Broke Kotlin https://lobste.rs/s/l6yqm8 #kotlin

Kotlin Weekly #480 has just been published! - mailchi.mp/kotlinweekly...