Jan 28, 2015The James TestA simple way to estimate how interested I’ll be in a given project. It’s a checklist; for each item, if the project fits the description, add the associated points. Points can be negative. I will work face-to-face with peers: +100. On my own, I get demoralized, bored, edgy, stressed, and…3 min read3 min read
Jan 25, 2015Understanding the ELFI wrote an ELF binary which, when run, prints itself on standard output: $ ./quine > quine2 $ md5sum quine quine2 5d24b05850f451b5b1e1a87a7c5d57c3 quine 5d24b05850f451b5b1e1a87a7c5d57c3 quine2 It doesn’t “cheat” by reading its own file. Instead, it uses how ELF binary files are loaded into memory. To explain how the program works…15 min read15 min read
Oct 25, 2014Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor(Btw, I recently launched Everyday Data Science, an interactive course on data science. You’ll love it.) Wikipedia, if you haven’t heard of it already, is the world’s biggest software project. At almost a billion lines, it’s twice as large as healthcare.gov. It’s coded in a homegrown Turing-complete programming language, and…6 min read6 min read
Oct 23, 2014Software developers are not depressed (but everyone else is)I often see stories associating software development with depression and other mental health issues. A lot of people saw a 2013 talk by Greg Baugues in which he talks about his bipolar disorder and the possible suicide of one of his co-workers. There are a lot of posts talking specifically…3 min read3 min read
Oct 11, 2014Your first-class functions don’t make you functionalI’m sure you’ve heard the following claim before: “finally, language L has first-class functions; now we can do functional programming!” But first-class functions are simply not relevant, and here’s why. A language L is “functional” to the extent that a “function” defined in L is actually a mathematical function. The…1 min read1 min read
Oct 6, 2014I want problems, not solutions!We live in a world obsessed with solutions. Every article or paper claims to be a solution to something. We award merit to an idea to the extent that it solves a problem. Sometimes we even call something a ‘solution’ without ever stating what the problem is that it is…4 min read4 min read
Oct 6, 2014The price model shapes the productYour software company is driven by financial incentives. Your price model for the end user is simultaneously an incentive model for your company. Bad incentives can impel you to make bad software. Here are some ways that your product pricing can incentivize you to make bad software. Charging for support…1 min read1 min read
Sep 28, 2014Nix by examplePart 1: The Nix expression language (Btw, I recently launched Everyday Data Science, an interactive course on data science. You’ll love it.) Nix is a package manager. ‘Nix’ is also the name of the programming language that it uses. The language can actually be used independently, without any package management at all. Here I show the…26 min read26 min read
Sep 19, 2014Orphaned file detectionHow many old files in your repository could be removed without breaking anything? A significant number, if your repository is non-trivial. Humans are terrible at garbage collection, because orphaning doesn’t break test suites and doesn’t show up in code review. …2 min read2 min read
Sep 14, 2014Git log spelunker(A proposal) Below is a graph of git activity on a fairly large project. Does it look intimidating to you? It does to me, despite using git every day for years. The problem is that these graphs just show everything. Traversing this graph is like using Google Maps at maximum zoom to…5 min read5 min read
