Recently at the Lambda Lounge, we spun up a study group for the classic text Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (aka SICP) – thanks to Ken Sipe for the push! For many years this text was used for the introductory course at MIT (and other institutions).
I read SICP in my first CS class [...]

Last week was a good week for the team. We’ve been trying to nail down a bunch of feature design work for the next release and it’s been dragging and dragging for weeks now. I don’t say this to fault the team at all – things got disrupted over the holidays, some of [...]

Just a small plug for a nice paper by my favorite CS prof Ronald Loui called “In Praise of Scripting”. It’s getting pimped over at Lambda the Ultimate at the moment. He always wanted us to write our AI assignments in Gawk… :)

Just read Jeff Atwood’s fantastic post The Ultimate Code Kata, which reviews many great ideas for improving your craft. There is much goodness there.
I was reminded of two of my heroes in less digital disciplines, Bird and Coltrane.
You can be forgiven for expecting me to talk about Charlie Parker, but actually I [...]

I went to dinner last night with a bunch of other speakers from the No Fluff tour and had a great time. One little interesting tidbit of conversation was about shared flow state. As programmers, we’re all familiar with solo flow state when you’re in the zone, writing code. We were talking [...]

I got an interesting email from a young developer today asking for my advice. I’m quite flattered that someone thinks my advice is worth a damn and since flattery will get you everywhere, here goes…
The question (slightly redacted for confidentiality):
My role in the company is to lead the development of a big project here [...]

I was just listening to the first podcast for the still forming stackoverflow site. It’s a joint venture between Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror and Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software.
It’s a little long and rambling but kind of interesting. Guys, an hour is too long! 30-40 minutes is a [...]

Jeff Atwood posted today about Core Wars. He mentions the articles in Scientific American about them. I vividly remember reading these when I was in 4th grade or so. My parents read Scientific American back then so I assume they gave me the articles.
I remember being just fascinated at a [...]

I happened across the post Why coupling is always bad / Cohesion vs. coupling, which of course set off my bullshit meter immediately (as does anything with the terms “always” or “never”). I think Vidar makes some good points and I generally agree with a lot of what he says, but I find it [...]

Eric Burke posed a challenge for next week to post the longest human-coded method.
I mentioned in his comments that you can use JavaNCSS for this. Just in case that wasn’t quite enough detail, here’s a brief sketch of how to do so. You’ll need to make some tweaks for your environment [...]

This was my favorite commit comment of the week:
Make loop far less infinite.

I was reading Wired’s article/Q&A with Ridley Scott while brushing my teeth this morning and found it pretty interesting. It’s triggered by the upcoming re-re-release of Blade Runner (the “final cut”). For purely accidental reasons, Blade Runner was never an important movie for me. I got interested in it a lot later [...]

I was just reading Joel’s blog on the Excel bug that displays the wrong value (100000) for certain floating points numbers very close (but not equal) to 65535. Display bugs suck. Apparently there are exactly 12 possible bad values (out of the very large number of possible floating point values).
I’ve tracked down quite [...]

During my last post, I had a few thoughts on domain-specific languages, too. Languages like Ruby and Groovy have really led the way in the last few years in a renaissance for embedded domain-specific languages.
I think for certain problems, DSLs are a beautiful solution. I find it hard to get excited [...]

Cedric has a nice post up defending design patterns. I have personally been quite vocal in criticizing several popular patterns lately (see Singleton, Template Method, and Visitor), so I guess I bear a partial amount of the heat. I’ve tried in my posts (despite their inflammatory titles) to point out not really why [...]