So. This is hard for me to approach. The circumstance of my radicalism began when I was but 5 years old. At age seven, under pressure, I became aware that some adults were dumb-asses. By the sixth grade, age twelve, I saw most things around me lies. I encountered people I thot were good and just behaving not good and not just. I was fully radicalized then. Around that time I stumbled upon the poem "desiderata". It was a popular […]
Desiderata: On Motives See Full Post
Software development is a temporal activity: it takes place over time. Any temporal activity can be shown as a series of snapshots. This is a way of "speeding them up", usually for the purposes of analysis or instruction. It’s a kind of "as if" thing. For some kinds of thinking, we can just elide, ignore, or lightly annotate the face that the activity takes time to happen. There’s nothing inherently sinful about these "as if" visions, but sometimes, when their
The Hardest Problem In The Geek Trades See Full Post
So, apropos the earlier muse that was fairly muddled about the hardest problem in the geek trades today… I can’t think of a better way to describe what I do as a geek than to speak as if we were playing one of those wild modern world-building games. Lately, i’ve been playing Oxygen Not Included, but there are lots of them. The most famous are probably the Civilization and Age Of franchises. In these games, whether smooth and real-time or
The “Software For Money” Game See Full Post
If u think the semaphore mechanism in your library works, then test to the level of setting the semaphore. If u think it doesn’t work, then u need another library or o/s. Testing across threads is for people who are testing semaphores. If u think that your JSON transport works — from your UI’s perspective or your backend’s perspective, then test to the level of feeding it JSON. If u think it doesn’t work, then u need another library. Testing
What TDD Tests Prove See Full Post
When you think back to first generation Hamurabi, and then play Oxygen Not Included, or Civilization or any of the other current world-builder games, you see the power of steady accretion of improvement. Do you know that all of this has happened well within my lifetime? I played Hamurabi in 1979, killing time in the one and only computer class i’ve ever taken (and did not complete). From taking my figures and interpolating a partial differential equation and spitting its
Take A Minute To Just Marvel: GeePaw on Coaching See Full Post
A Simple Optimization Problem Hey, it’s GeePaw! Got a little optimization issue for you. Let’s look at some code. It’s easy stuff, so I’ve just used pseudocode here. Take a look. The program starts by entering a loop that runs 50 times. Inside that loop, it calls the Read method. It then enters another nested loop, this time for 100 times. And in that inner loop, it calls the Scan method. Finally, we exit both loops, and we call the
Optimizing A Program (And Programming) | Video See Full Post
Okay, fine. Geeks and geekery it is. What do these words point at for me, and why do I use them? You know, asking this, there’s no way in hell i’m gonna answer without wanting to share my decidedly minority views about language. You just know that. Please be advised that I know that these are not mainstream views. Please further be aware that I’m quite familiar with mainstream views, and have made a conscious decision that I don’t agree
Geeks And Geekery: Why I Use These Words See Full Post
Continuing last night’s wobbly muse on graceful and awkward collaborators… In the light of day, I think I see four possible responses to the situation when your new code depends on an awkward collaborator or collaboration: Ignore it (possibly just for now). Write your test anyway and suffer the expense. This is a legitimate judgment, tho one the hardcore among us have to be dragged kicking and screaming towards. Don’t automate a test for it. Again, entirely legitimate, and actually
Awkward and Graceful 2 (A Recovery) See Full Post
Software Programs can be understood as (potentially huge) orchestras playing in concert. Depending on your level of abstraction, you might imagine systems, subsystems, layers, packages, objects, or even functions as the individual players. (Aside: Folks often make major distinctions in these abstractions, but to my touch, they feel all the same thing, just with ever larger labels on ever subsets. and at bottom, 100% of it is Von Neumann architecture code.) For the purposes of this conversation, I’ll be thinking
Awkward and Graceful Collaborators See Full Post
Five Underplayed Premises Of Test-Driven Development (Transcript) Hey, it’s GeePaw! I’m here to tell you today about five underplayed premises of Test-Driven Development. These premises form the kind of fundament under which almost all TDD proceeds. And when I say that I’m a TDDer, I almost always mean I am operating inside the little ring formed by these five test-driven development premises. Let’s check them out. We’re In This For The Money The first premise of TDD is what we
Five Underplayed Premises Of TDD | Video See Full Post
