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The election was no one person's fault
I've recently identified a failure in my own thinking and thought I'd share ( Read more... ) -
Honest question: What do Republicans want?
Most of us live in news bubbles these days, where our perceptions are slanted one way or the other based on the media we consume. My bubble is Democratic/technocratic/humanist and it leaves me fuzzy on those on the other side of the aisle. I was realizing that I don't know what the positive drivers are for Republicans, and was hoping someone could ( Read more... ) -
How do you stay current?
Question: What do you do to stay current with (the world | your career | your friends | etc)? What do you read / practice / etc?
Background: As a programmer I'm constantly chasing the state of the art curve, and it's constantly moving out from under me which leaves my skills less marketable. The news (politics, world events, etc) usually ( Read more... ) -
Spaghetti law
There's a term in programming, 'spaghetti code'. It's not a compliment. It refers to messy, disorganized code that is difficult to follow and uses bad practices such as GOTO commands instead of proper subroutine calls. Spaghetti code is a nightmare for anyone who has to come along later and work with that code. I have just been reminded that ( Read more... ) -
Deliberate practice, how and why
There's a term, "Deliberate Practice", that gets thrown around in my circles a fair bit. I recently went and read the original paper by Ericsson et al.
As with most academic papers, there's quite a bit of fluff in it -- e.g., the entire "Brief Historical Background" section, which has no bearing on the actual facts discovered by this study. If ( Read more... ) -
Pointless algorithm questions and cowardly interviewers
Tech interviews frustrate me. Well, actually, interviews frustrate me.
I just had a phone interview (audio only). The guy asked me a lot of questions about my background. I answered them as honestly as I could, and I'm not sure if the result was positive. The conversation went something like this:
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How not to advertise for a programming job
I'm in the middle of jobhunting for programming work, and I just found the following ad. I'd like to review it in the hope that the tens of thousands of people () who (a) read this blog and (b) are responsible for writing ads for technical jobs might learn something ( Read more... ) -
Fairly amazing email conversation I just had
There's a startup advertising through my social graph; they sounded somewhat interesting and I'm looking around for work, so I reached out. I explained my CV and asked some questions about the job. Here's the ensuing conversation; it's condensed a bit, but all of their words are direct quotes.
Them: Our ideal person wouldn't need a salary.
Me: ( Read more... ) -
Kickstarter == chocolate!
Minor bit of solicitation here: I'm hoping to send people to a friend's Kickstarter where the rewards are chocolate: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tracywolf/cable-car-cakes-and-chocolatesMy friend Tracy Wolf does chocolates that are better than any professionally-made chocolates I've ever had. A few years ago I asked her to teach me / ( Read more... ) -
Impressions on El Capitan
I've been using OSX 10.11 (El Capitan) for a month now. Before this I was using OSX 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard). Here's how EC stacks up.
Summary: Wait a few months or a year before upgrading. Hopefully Apple will get some of the issues ironed out.
( Read more... )