Code and Whatnot

Lately I’ve been referring to Design Patterns and Refactoring quite a bit for architecture help & inspiration. Both books have taugh me quite a bit, but I often encounter patterns and refactorings that I’ve used before or that had already made themselves obvious to me. I still feel enriched, though, when I encounter […]

Now that Wikipedia has spoken articles, not much is left to separate it from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We have a huge, mobile workforce cataloging a good chunk of human knowledge. The resource has become, in my regard, impossibly awesome already — just like the Hitchhiker’s Guide of Adams’ books.

myself: you sick still?
Jack: yeah… caught a good one
myself: nice
myself: i purposely didn’t visit you
myself: and i was feeling iffy by the end of yesterday
myself: so i drank straight bourbon while i worked last night
Jack: lol
myself: bourbon has helped me fend off many a cold
myself: you just have to rehydrate before you go to bed
Jack: […]

Dennis Forbes’ short article criticizes the practice of putting candidates through grueling tests on esoteric subjects. I’ll quote here:

Few professions demand that experienced practitioners, with a CV stuffed with academic and professional accomplishments, complete humiliating skill tests (usually scatter-shot testing whether the applicant happened to recently bone up on an esoteric area of a […]

Sam has all the setup info you need in one place. I love how-tos, however over-specific or obscure. They make google searches like “how do I set up everything necessary to develop Java on Mac OSX” more successfull.

$user = new User($userID);
An oxymoron. If I have the user’s ID, it’s not likely to be a new user, is it? There’s a disconnect between the lifespan of an object and the lifespan of the entity it represents. If I’m not creating a new user, that is, the user I’m dealing with […]

I’ve been reading through Building Scalable Web Sites, by Cal Henderson, and he makes a useful distinction between speed and scalability. For instance, PHP is comparatively slow. If you really want it to run fast, write your program in C or some such. However, PHP applications can rather easily be made to […]

Yesterday was the second fortnightly Geek Night at my house. Geek Night is gathering of computer geeks. So far, I’ve been inviting anyone I know who spends any decent portion of their time at the command line, coding, or watching tail like it’s prime-time television. In the future, I think I’m going […]