Programming

Readability And Scannability

I distinguish quite strongly between “readability” and what I call “scannability”. I think that our trade’s pedagogues, even our very good ones, conflate the two, and in so doing inaccurately describe programming and ineffectively prescribe remedies. Maybe the way to approach the idea is through your experience of seeing. Humans — most vertebrates, in fact — rely heavily on "seeing". The fabric of our experience is richly visual. A large portion of our neocortex is given over to it. Its […]

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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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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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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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TDD & The Lump Of Coding Fallacy | Video

Hey, it’s GeePaw, and if you’re just starting to look at TDD, refactoring, the modern technical synthesis, we need to start with a couple of minutes about the Lump Of Coding fallacy. You’re a working geek: you spend your days coding for money to add value to your company. And one day some random schmoe like me comes up to you and says, hey friend you really ought to try TDD, because that value that you’re adding, you could have

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Optimize Collaboration, Not Meetings

There’s a lot of internet out there about meetings. Sturgeon’s law applies here. There’s some good advice, tho, too. Where I come from’s different. What I see, as with so many other topics, is how hard we try to fix problems our assumptions created. There are a lot different ends to which folks want to apply meetings as means. Three common ends are the "orders meeting", the "report meeting", and the "decision meeting". In an orders meeting, we’re there so

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