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.org (the project) and not using Wordpress.com (the commercial website using Wordpress.org). On Wordpress.org you’re stuck using a limited number of (mostly for pay) themes and plugins, and are restricted from inserting HTML, JS, or CSS into your website. …
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. Thus to some degree, our choice of programming language reflects on how we wish to see ourselves. Haskell programmers think of themselves as highly skilled mathematicians, python users think of themselves as massively productive, etc. …
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. But for the sake of argument, let us say that a “correct” mindset matches the most unbiased observations of the world we can make, or logically follows from a set of axioms that are relatively well accepted. Good examples of correct mindsets are “Not lying on my taxes reduces the chance of getting in trouble”, and “driving according to traffic laws means I won’t get a ticket”. …
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. Mac vs. Windows, Emacs vs. Vim, etc. The more similar the items in question, the more intense the debate. …
Hands and Feet
December 1, 2012
When I was a teenager I worked at a large amusement park in the games department, which I guess technically means I was a carnie. One of the more interesting games I worked at was the rope ladder; in order to win the game contestants had to climb up a rope ladder set at a 45 degree angle and attached to swivel points at the bottom. Unsurprisingly I learned to climb it easily (free tries and boredom does wonders for learning), but I witnessed very few winners. …
Reaction to Kill Your Heroes and Comments
November 29, 2012
Will Larsen had a nice post about what he calls Hero Programmers. Put simply, his theory is that some projects end up in a state where they count on massive effort by a select few heroes on the team. The problem is that this upsets those who aren’t heroes, burns out the heroes, and still won’t save an ailing project. What was particularly interesting to me was some of the responses on Reddit. In particular one quote from “name_was_taken” stands out to me: “Fire the developers who are useless.” …
The Myth of the Lone Hacker
November 22, 2012
Most programmers start off their career relatively idealistic, and often marvel at the power of little used programming languages. For me, this language was Common Lisp, which I got to work with professionally. At first I believed that Lisp still had the power to revolutionize programming, but after a few years of work I realized exactly why Lisp ended up in the position it is now: community. Every programming community has a few core beliefs, both explicit and implicit, that shape the language, the libraries, and its users. The Haskell community believes that errors should be caught by the compiler as often as possible, and Ruby believes in the principle of least astonishment. The Lisp community suffers from a belief that I call the Myth of the Lone Hacker. …