I am a decent programmer. I know a decent amount of computer science theory, I can type correct code fairly easy. I don’t let my classes expand too much. But I still struggle some with math, and I have a tendency to have too many cross-dependencies in my code.I used to think I was an awesome programmer. One of the best. After I made a game in the first programming lesson in school, I got told to don’t bother showing up for the rest. I was the one who taught all my friends what big O notation is and how it’s useful, or why hashmaps can have an effective constant speed if us...

I'm not an economist by training, but I've spent a long time observing markets, and I've often wondered what the great economic thinkers of centuries past (Marx, Smith, Keynes, others) would say if they were alive today and could witness the transformations that have been caused by mass media (radio, TV, print) and the Internet. The Internet, in particular, has had a transformative effect that will doubtless be studied for hundreds of years to come.One of the things that can be said about pre-Internet markets is that most markets permit the emergence of two or three major winners (a primary wi...

Those who know me are aware that I’ve been following play framework, and actively taking part of it’s community, for a couple of years.Playframework 2.0 is right around the corner, and it’s core is programmed in Scala, so it’s a wonderful opportunity to give this object-oriented / functional hybrid beast a try…Like many others, I will pick a very simple script to give my first steps…Finding an excuse to give Scala a tryWith a couple of friends we are on the way to translate play framework documentation to spanish (go have a look at it at http://play...

I’ve written a lot of blog posts in the past about pair programming and the advantages that I’ve seen from using this technique but lately I find myself increasingly frustrated at the need to pair 100% of the time which happens on most teams I work on.From my experience it’s certainly useful as a coaching tool, as I’ve mentioned before I think it’s a very useful for increasing the amount of collaboration between team members and an excellent way for ensuring that knowledge of the code base is spread across the team.On the other hand I no longer see it as the...

I've been using MacVIM as my editor of choice for a couple of years now, yetin many ways I still feel like a beginner. Every day I am learningmore and more about my editor, but it takes a conscious effort to become proficient withan editor like Vim. Here's why I make that effort.Editors are something that are very personal; they have to fit with your ownwork flow approach to programming. If you have ever stopped to think about it,the way each person goes about editing text is quite different. I frequentlypair program with colleagues and I find it amazing, and sometimes frustrating,to see how o...

Lately the ideas for a parallel, shared memory JavaScript have begunto take shape. I’ve been discussing with variousJavaScript luminaries and it seems like adesign is starting to emerge. This post serves as a documentation ofthe basic ideas; I’m sure the details will change as we go along.User ModelThe model is that a JavaScript worker (the “parent”) may spawn anumber of child tasks (the “children”). The parent is suspended whilethe children execute, meaning that it will not process events or takeother actions. Once the children have completed the pare...

While reading Hacker News posts about JavaScript, I often come across the misconception that Ruby’s blocks are essentially equivalent to JavaScript’s “first class functions”. Because the ability to pass functions around, especially when you can create them anonymously, is extremely powerful, the fact that both JavaScript and Ruby have a mechanism to do so makes it natural to assume equivalence.In fact, when people talk about why Ruby’s blocks are different from Python‘s functions, they usually talk about anonymity, something that Ruby and JavaScript share...

I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day. She wanted to try putting together a weekend "hackathon" just to see what we could build. It would be one of those fun things where we just start tinkering and see what comes out of it.Somehow, this conversation got to the topic of libraries, programming languages, and frameworks. Then it got a little weird.I guess the current "shiny" thing is still more-or-less Ruby, and particularly when used with Rails. Oh, I suppose there's also the whole node thing, in which you write things in Javascript and run them server-side with v8. ...