Yesterday I was invited to do an interview with the man behind Erlang Punch, Mathieu Kerjouan. Mathieu is a truly great programmer, an absolutely excellent interviewer, and it was a lot of fun to get to do something task-focused with him like this. He asked some pretty broad questions about Erlang as a language, as […]
Tag: complexity
Excerpts from Chat: Discovering Structure and Grokking the True Nature of a Problem
This is an excerpt from a private chat with someone about code and I think it expresses something universal about programming, mathematics and engineering or any discipline where iterative development is necessary to manage complexity and discover simplicity. …about a bit of code where I haven’t quite grasped what needs to happen, or the core […]
James Mickens: Life as a Developer
Below is a somewhat whimsical talk given by James Mickens last year titled Life as a Developer: My Code Does Not Work Because I am a Victim of Complex Societal Factors That are Beyond My Control. (If you recall, Mickens is the guy who did the insane/awesome Monitorama talk about the cloud a few years […]
Mental Overhead
I haven’t had any reason to write assembly by hand for quite a while, but the other day a deep hardware geek friend of mine asked for an opinion on an instruction set for an architecture he is working on — and of course that means using his assembly instructions directly. I had forgotten what […]
Object-Relation Mismatch: Comparing Strawberries and Sunglasses
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately writing a rather large suite of business applications. The original customer was a construction company which needed a replacement for their estimation system. Then the same customer needed a facility pass management system to make the insane amount of bit-shoveling/paperwork involved in getting security clearances for workers […]