February 2020

My Direction Forward

Here’s a thing that happens: "We tried your advice by not trying your advice except partly where we did what we want but gave it your labels and it didn’t work and therefore you are wrong." Now, if you’ve given that advice for many years, and followed it in your own endeavors, and you, your teams, and many others have succeeded with it, what are you to make of such a statement? Well. Let’s not hedge, the world has too […]

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Kontentment And Human Arcs

Aight. I been away from programming for a couple of months, but there was a reason I started talking the other day about the kontentment project: I’m wanting mucho change in it. For a talk I’m giving, I want the ability to draw human arcs, with the same ease with which I can draw human lines. So I set out today to get that in. Human straight lines start with a line segment AB. Pick two random locations on that

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Frames in the Software Trade: An Example

We’ve talked about frames adding up to worldviews adding up to cultures, but it all feels pretty vague in its possible importance. We need some informal sense of how this works in practice. In the immortal words of Brian Marick, "an example would be handy right about now." Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of frequently cycling code through the source vault. People practicing CI do this several times a day. In "git" terms, they both pull/merge/push, depending on language

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The Kontentment Project

I am in a mood of 1) wanting to geek out a little, and 2) wanting to concretize some key ideas from change-harvesting for my fellow geeks. To do that, I need to give you a sketch of the kontentment project, a desktop app I wrote and use in making videos. The source for kontentment is here: Kontentment – GeePawHill on GitHub I don’t particularly recommend you download it or try to run it. You won’t need to for these

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The Cost of Changing Microtests

The “How I Work (Test-Driving Mix)” drew some questions and comment. How I Work (Test-Driving Mix) Here’s one: a respondent says, “If I write a lot of small tests and I change how a feature works, I have to change or throw out all those microtests, which is a lot of work.” (The respondent proposed an answer for this problem, and it’s not a bad one, but raises some other questions we might get to later.) The one-liner response: “For

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How I Work (Test-Driving Mix)

A while back, I wrote a muse about how I work focused just on the coding I do. Today I want to talk about how I test during that process. How I Work – Just Programming Mix | GeePawHill.org The same caveat applies as before: This is not intended as prescription. I am happy, believe me, to tell you what to do. But that’s not what this is. This is just what I do.  Meta: I don’t separate testing from

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Discipline: A Short Rant

People use the word "discipline" reasonably often when they talk about the software trade. I tend to avoid that word, and I wish more folks followed me in that policy. Most of those folks are not meaning anything untoward. They might easily use "orderly", "consistent", "persistent", "systematic", and so on, instead of "discipline", and as I say, I wish they would. "Discipline", in other parts of the forest, is an ordinary part of the vocabulary of extrinsic motivation by punishment

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Programming Interviews For Dummies

Programming Interviews For Dummies. I know it’s a horrible world out there, and there’s so much more bad than this. Still, it saddens me, on several vectors at once. Okay, well, I’ve had four people ask me about this, and I happen to have this soapbox sitting right here, so what the hell. Before anything else, there’s the series titles, and I’m going to make a joke: I always wanted to write "Low Self-Esteem For Dummies!" and see how many

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