The “Quick” Question

And why we need to stop asking them.

“Oh, hey, I have a quick question for you.”

Hearing that fills me with an impending sense of doom.

Your code is just your code.

It is not your life.
It is not who you are.
It is your code.

Some of your code is concise and clear.
Some of your code is muddy.

Anyone Can Get a Black Belt

I’ve always thought that if you were practicing martial arts, getting a black belt was the pinnacle of your career. As it turned out, I was wrong. And while I was reading about different ranking systems I realized how much we, computer programmers, could learn from traditional…

naively programming

I was looking for an old story of mine on our internal Medium and stumbled upon another story, an experiment I tried a few months ago. Realizing that the experiment ended up being a success, I decided to re-package it for the big Medium.

C++ is Russian literature

And pretty much everyone dies

From the interview with Jodi Picoult:

The one genre I absolutely cannot stand is Russian literature. You need genealogy charts to just figure out the characters, every novel is a…

Programming is a nightmare

An American novelist Philip Roth once said that “writing isn’t hard work, it’s a nightmare.” After I read that, I realized I felt the same way about computer programming. Below is his full quote except I replaced writing with programming.

Heaven and hell

Suzuki told an old Chinese folk tale about the difference between heaven and hell. In hell everyone has very short arms. They sit around tables full of sumptuous food, trying to eat with very long chopsticks, but they can’t get the food in their mouths because chopsticks are too long and their arms…

Technical Debt

An email

The other day, an Informatics student from the University of Edinburgh sent me an email with questions about technical debt in JSHint. I replied to his email. Then I remembered I have a collection that looked like it was the perfect fit for that reply.