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 […]
Readability And Scannability Read More »
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
My Direction Forward Read More »
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
Kontentment And Human Arcs Read More »
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
Frames in the Software Trade: An Example Read More »
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
The Kontentment Project Read More »
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
How I Work (Test-Driving Mix) Read More »
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
Discipline: A Short Rant Read More »
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
Programming Interviews For Dummies Read More »
Well, Change-Harvesters, I want so badly to connect up the dots from these previous muses about the topic and tie them back to the concrete realities of professional software development. But I can’t. Yet. I can’t yet. We have just a little further to go. When we talked about "if all you have is a
Frames: Build, Race, and More Read More »
The central concept of a dynamic unity is change-harvesting: make a change, harvest its value, use that value to make another change, over and over, change after change, world without end. We spoke the other day about how tools shape problems. "If all you have is a hammer, all you will see are nails." It
Change-Harvesting: The How Read More »
