For the who are paying a little attention to Querki (but not following querki-project): the first major phase of the QL language is finally finished. A little while ago, I introduced bound values, and last week I was finally driven to add local function definitions. That brings us to the point where I've implemented all of the read-time functions that are in ( Read more... )

... when your internal monologue goes something like this:

"A-ha! Yes, that looks like the right solution to the problem."

(Smug.) "Oh, I like that -- it's pretty innovative, and I think it's even a good user workflow."

(Dismay.) "Oh, crap -- that means I probably have to write an effing patent..."

ETA: folks, I appreciate that you're trying ( Read more... )

Anyone interested in the design of software (or anything, really, but particularly software) really should take a read through this short but correct articleIts point is simple: software is often designed for (in the telling of the famous physics joke) perfect spherical users, who are all cooperative and well-intentioned towards each other. ( Read more... )

[For the programmers]

Here's a delicious little security alert about a vulnerability in eBay, which potentially allows malicious vendors to steal your eBay credentials and such. I recommend reading down to the details -- the JSF**k hack itself is kind of brilliant ( Read more... )

• Time to track down the bug: 3 minutes
• Size of the fix: 1 line
• Time to add enough pieces to the new test harness to *validate* the fix: 8 hours

It's necessary, and it'll pay off in the long run, but *man*, I had forgotten what a pain in the ass it is to build a good Selenium-based harness. On the plus side, this little fix required adding a lot ( Read more... )

[For the programmers -- this is a pretty technical intermediate-level "mistakes to avoid" lesson. Likely useful to folks who are learning programming, and ruefully amusing in a headdesk way to the experienced programmers.]

Today's fire-drill for Querki was a bug report (from alexx_kay, who has my deepest thanks for pointing it out) that, under certain ( Read more... )

While theoretically about software, I strongly commend this post from siderea to *non*-programmers, since that's the main intended reader. It isn't technical at all -- rather, it's an exploration of how software actually gets written, and why that process isn't at all like you probably expect. Especially recommended to any non-programmers who need to ( Read more... )

For the programmers: I highly recommend this recording from a webinar the other week. It is the Deputy CTO of Typesafe explaining -- well, a whole lot of stuff. Rather than being about nuts and bolts, he spends about an hour covering the *rationale* behind the Typesafe stack ( Read more... )

I mention Akka and the Actor paradigm of programming here from time to time. If you'd like a little more info about the Akka ecosystem, I commend this blog post, which nicely breaks down the major components of Akka and what they each do. It's not very long, and is a good way to get a sense of how this all fits together...

I've been saying for the past eight months or so that it's time to stop programming in JavaScript and accept that it's basically assembly language. Turns out that I'm far from alone -- Brendan Eich (the creator of JavaScript) is now supporting the notion that JS is largely a compiler target now. The *really* interesting part is what comes next: ( Read more... )