Sneak Attack: Understanding Engineers—Feasibility

Back to flipping out...

Sneak Attack: Code Critique as an Interview Tool

Back to flipping out...

Words to code by

More generally, complicated code is a sign that you don't understand your program well enough to make it simple. — Code Complete, Second Edition

I don't think I've ever seen a better, more succinct rule of thumb for programmers. If you ever find yourself looking at a chunk of code and wondering what it does, you should ask yourself if there is any possible way to simplify it. Almost every time I've ever had a feeling that a block of code is too complicated but left it as is (for whatever reason), I've regretted that decision later.

P.S. I haven't forgotten about the updates I promised in The Education of a Programmer, but it turns out that writing a post that does justice to the source material is non-trivial. I've spent at least three times as much time writing and erasing and rewriting the first update as I did on the reading/exercises I was going to post about.

Back to flipping out...

Sneak Attack: Continuous Integration—What Should I Automate?

Back to flipping out...

Sneak Attack: Software Secret Weapons—The Last Java Garbage Collection Guide You Will Ever Need

Back to flipping out...

Why Ninja Always Beat Samurai

Ninja don't have an alias for seppuku.

Back to flipping out....

G-Client and Special Sauce

I'm posting this from the friendly confines of G-Client, a suite of emacs clients for accessing Google Services. It's quite nifty, although you should pay attention to the comments if you are using it independently of its parent project, emacspeak; there is a gotcha with the stand-alone package, although I hear it has been resolved with the latest in svn.

Actually, ignore that last paragraph. I wrote this post 4 times in G-Client, and never once managed to post it successfully. Once, I made the mistake of saving a draft version, and emacs switched modes on me. The other three times, I finished writing and used C-c C-c to (supposedly) submit the post for publication, but emacs seemed to just spin out into infinity or something. So combining the fact that the distributed tarball didn't work out of the box with the fact that even after I fixed that problem the editing and submission process is flaky, I can't recommend G-Client to anyone right now. The idea is fascinating, though, so I'll continue to follow developments, and if it does work out, I'll be sure to let you know. Until then, it looks like it's back to FF + It's All Text! for now.

Back to flipping out...