I went to see two shows last week – on Tuesday, the Beastie Boys at Rams Head Live in Baltimore, on Thursday, Elvis Costello at Wolftrap in VA. The Beastie Boys show was a bit of a fluke. It had been announced the week before, and though I love Rams Head Live, it’s a relatively [...]
As a programmer, one thing that has always interested me is the different approaches and motivations of my colleagues. As someone with a liberal arts degree, I’ve never exactly thought of myself as an engineer, even though software programming as a whole is often characterized as a field of engineering. I understand why too; there [...]
About five years ago, someone made a comment that really stuck in my mind. Now, I hate to give them credit for this; I felt at the time he was trying to have exactly that effect, and perhaps was even hoping that some credit or other acknowledgment, such as this, would be forthcoming down the [...]
The Ruby on Rails folks made the following announcement about a new product, called Rails Metal, the other day: Rails Metal is meant for things like the Campfire poller service, which is doing hundreds of requests per second and needs to be really fast and is at the same time really simple (2 database calls [...]
Malcolm Gladwell has a new book out, and though I probably won’t be reading it, I’m sure many people will be. Part of the reason for this is just boredom. He’s been writing for a while, and though he’s certainly an interesting read, at a certain point anything becomes dull. But there’s another reason why [...]
I saw this post on concepts that every developer should know. In general I think it’s a good list, and I like many of the recommendations. In particular, I agree with the citation of Robert C. Martin’s book for knowledge of interface design (and I would add overall object-oriented development practices). I’m a big fan [...]
Having back surgery is a great opportunity to get in touch with one’s TV. As I’ve spent a good part of the last two months lying on a relatively slender (by virtue of cluttering every item I might ever need within a 12 inch radius around me, so as to remove the need to move [...]
Of the many labored analogies between our profession and others, one that comes up occasionally but perhaps not as frequently as it should is the comparison of our work with that of doctors and medical professionals. And I’m not trying to work in some joke about our failures not ending up in the morgue. It’s [...]
This post examines the underlying factors that have brought the concept of multi-language programming to the forefront.
I’ve spent some time this afternoon thinking about the New Yorker’s very controversial Obama cover cartoon. What got me thinking about it was this opinion piece in the New York Times. The central points of this piece are that the cartoon fails because: The viewpoint being satirized (Obama is a terrorist) is not sufficiently mainstream [...]