Fast Cheap Good

June 5, 2013

In the distant past (1950’s or so), project managers and engineers came up with what is known as the project management triangle: fast, cheap, or good; pick two. While software engineering can be very different from mechanical, it does at least share the same project management setup. Quality software designed cheaply will be late, cheap software released early will be poor in quality, and quality software released on time will be expensive.…more

Stop Surprising Me Ubuntu

June 4, 2013

There are almost as many design principles as there are articles about them. But my two favorites are the Principle of Least Surprise, and You Ain’t Gonna Need It. The Principle of Least Surprise, is one of the design principles of the language Ruby, specifically in the context of “the principle of least surprise after you learn Ruby very well.” And all good systems have the property that they do not surprise experienced users, but great systems do not even surprise inexperienced users.…more

Introducing Butler.el

May 3, 2013

I’m a big fan of reducing barriers to increase adoption and compliance. One of the largest examples for me in the past few months was when I tried out Eclipse for Python Development. The most important plugins for me (other than Python and Git) were the Jenkins and Jira plugins. Quick access to my tasks and instantaneous in-editor feedback about job status increased the likelihood that I would respond to failed builds or fill out tickets correctly.…more

A New Addiction

April 30, 2013

Well, I have officially started collecting watches. My first decent purchase was a few months ago, but I’m counting it as a collection now because I have more pieces than is functionally required, which arguably is 1 in the cell phone era. Why collect watches? Well, first of all they’re modern Mens jewelry. Mens fashion has changed remarkably little in the century, especially compared to Womens'. So with suits that may stay “in style” for 2-6 years depending on the cut, men only have a few places to go to express their style: shoes, watches, ties, and cuff links.…more

Binding vs Assignment

April 30, 2013

A coworker of mine was recently running into problems with the following snippet of Python code, and turned to another functionally oriented developer and myself for help. funs = [] for i in ["a" "b"]: def internal_function(): return i funs.append(internal_function) print funs[0]() print funs[1]() At first glance, one would expect this to print “a” then “b”. But much to my surprise (and my coworkers frustration), it was returning “b” both times.…more

Size Matters

April 23, 2013

About 6 months ago I started to look for a new language for hobby projects. I wanted something practical, yet fun. I managed to limit the criteria down to: Functional Good community Growing acceptance This automatically eliminates a lot common languages, like Python, Ruby, and Java. After my Common Lisp job, I knew that a sane compilation system/target were an absolute must, so I looked at Scala first. On the surface Scala seemed a real winner: growing fan base, increasing commercial adoption, functional, and targeting the JVM.…more

Octopress

April 22, 2013

I’m currently in the process of changing my website over from Wordpress.com to Octopress on Github pages. There are two things driving me from Wordpress.com: control and price. Wordpress is fine if you are either a big PHP afficianado, or are afraid of web programming in general. It’s quite easy to install themes and plugins without any knowledge of what this means. However, this only is true if you’re self-hosting Wordpress.…more

Java Doesn't Deserve Half the Shit We Give It

January 22, 2013

It’s very popular among programmers to diss Java on Reddit and Hacker News. But Java really isn’t that bad of a language, and I really think there are other reasons why people hate it. While we like to pretend that programming language choice is purely about practicality, there is a very large social aspect to it. Nobody wants to admit to liking Cobol or VBA, and being at the forefront of a new, exciting language can bring a type of prestige in programming circles.…more

Right vs Useful

January 3, 2013

I spend a fairly decent amount of my time thinking about how my mindset and world view affects my decisions and actions. In the past few months I’ve found that how I evaluate these mindsets has begun to change; I used to be mostly concerned with whether or not a mindset was correct, but now I’ve started to think about whether or not it’s useful. Determining whether or not a mindset is correct is rather tricky philosophical ground, as it requires some sort of platonic “reality” to compare it against.…more

Learn What You Don't Like

December 10, 2012

There’s really nothing worse than someone who has lived their life surrounded by people who agree with them fully. People who live this way have confidence that precedes their knowledge, and will treat contradictory knowledge as an attack on their in-group and world view. While the above mentioned effect is generally most common in religion and politics, it crops up sometimes in engineering in the so called “holy wars”. Linux vs.…more