Finding the Sweet Spot

We're developers. We love code. We're developers. We hate code. "No code is better than no code". We have developers. They are a great resource. We have developers. They are a terrible expense. Each developer is unique. Developers are a commodity. A long time ago, when I was a "programmer/analyst" for a major advertising firm, …

Teams and Jerks and Everything!

Just saw this post. It had to be shared. <-- (that's a link right over there. Click it! Click it!) Read it. Really. Read it!

“Adversarial Programming”

I am not talking about having two coders, each of which is trying to destroy the other's life and career, being chained together and forced to pair. What I am talking about, though, is an idea to add to the list of pairing/mobbing options that exist. One of the typical rules observed in any multi-programmer …

Just an intro…

I've written code on these and these and these and these. I wrote some SL/I (a dialect of PL/I), where the semicolon was spelled ".,". Made a living in Algol. Even wrote some APL code. I have a copy of "The C Programming Language" (not the ANSI C EDITION). Procedural? Check. OO? Check. Homoiconic? Check. Immutable? Check. Functional? Check, check. I like …

Today’s Aphorisms (2017-10-04)

Create value or create language by which your colleagues can create value. It's all value. "People > Process" means just that. It's unambiguous. Narrow contexts compose a hell of a lot better. Saying "we'll simplify later" is the worst kind of technical debt. Complication eats effort. And yields nothing. Dealing with complication is like paying …

Locality Matters (2017-09-07)

One of the things that can make our codebase somewhat difficult to work with (making defects much too easy to create) is that we often lack locality of concept. (Hmmm. Sounds like something Gold would say. But what the hell does it mean?) Code both does things and decides how things are to be done. Is this …

Getting It Write the First Time (2017-08-20)

We write code. That's what we do. Well, that's not entirely correct. We solve problems. We provide solutions. When we can do it without code, we declare it a win. But most of the time we write code. How do we write code? We don't chisel it into stone. We don't have to pull individual …

“The Database” (2017-08-20)

Once upon a time there was "The Database". It was all-encompassing and it was good. It provided a current snapshot of reality. It was "the data". It was "the state of things". It was the "source of truth". It was spoken of with reverence. A tribe of humans called "DBAs" spent their considerable waking hours …

Immutability, Purity and All Kinds of Stuff FTW (2017-07-14)

Immutability I'm going to show you a little bit of code (don't worry about the language, it might not exist)... Then I'm going to ask you a question, OK? Cool!     x = 1     y = 2     ...     ...     ... (Yes, I'm not going to show …

Name Things! (2017-06-23)

One of the best Computer Science jokes (okay, go along with it for now...) goes like this: There are only two hard problems in CS: Naming things Cache invalidation Off by one errors We've gone great lengths to mitigate the effect of the last of these. Rarely do we use index-based, perhaps nested, loops to …