Admitting that may be career suicide, or possibly it will cost me dearly because 'software engineers' are raking in the big bucks these days, but the fact of the matter is that I'm a programmer. It's what I do best and it is the job title that I associate with most because it feels as though the biggest chunk of me will always be most likely to blurt that out when people ask me what my job is. That I like to program definitely helps.So instead of choosing some fancy title for what it is that I do because that might possibly make me a bit more money I chose to embrace it, and I have yet to regr...

The last couple of years more and more people have been moving towards Agile development. These techniques aren’t new, most we’re devised in the 80s or 90s. But finally these days programmers and (more importantly) business consultants, architects and clients have learned to love and embrace Agile development.Evolving requirementsIt has now become common knowledge that you can’t write down all the requirements before you start the project. These requirements have to be written down in an evolutionary matter. In short cycles/sprints we build pieces of the pro...

No, it’s not Knuth’s “The Art of Programming”. I’m talking about quite an easy-to-read (compared to TAoP) book, which, in fact, does not require any engineering or mathematical background from the reader.I am talking about C. Petzold’s “CODE”. It is a truly remarkable book about how computers work. Let me explain why I think this book is so awesome.The book starts from the very beginning, from explaining what code is, bringing several examples, like Morse code and Braille’s system. It then goes on to explain how ele...

Consider this user interface for a car:The goal of these interfaces is to make you operate something, and operate it efficiently and safely. The grooves and clicks and limits constrain the range of motion and the number of choices. The visual look heavily hints at how to actively use it. They are usually not hard to learn. More importantly, the learning curve plateaus. Once you learn how to drive a car, there’s not much progression after that. Boundedness is an important property of these interfaces, by design.Now look at this “user interface” f...

1. Inability to reason about codeReasoning about code means being able to follow the execution path ("running the program in your head") while knowing what the goal of the code is.SymptomsThe presence of "voodoo code", or code that has no effect on the goal of the program but is diligently maintained anyway (such as initializing variables that are never used, calling functions that are irrelevant to the goal, producing output that is not used, etc.)Executing idempotent functions multiple times (eg: calling the save() function multiple times "just to be sure")Fixing bugs by writing code that ov...

Python is the best language in the world for interacting with the web, and I'm going to show you why.This article will give an extremely high level overview of how to use python for the web. There are many ways you can interact with the web using python, and this post will cover all of them. This includes python web scraping, interacting with APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and running your own python web site using python server software. There are many ways to do all these things in python, but I'm going to show you how to do it the right way using the most modern te...

About a year ago I worked on a very interesting project which involved creating a unique world with all its history, people, physics, metaphysics and so forth. I like fictional worlds that are thoroughly created and I have always marveled at people like Tolkien or Richard Garriot who go such great lengths and even create languages for their worlds. I have since many years felt that it would be awesome to create my own language and I’m probably not alone in feeling that.When I started studying linguistics and computational linguistics many years ago I learned a lot about the behavior of ...

Odds are, you don’t use a functional programming language every day. You probably aren’t getting paid to write code in Scala, Haskell, Erlang, F#, or a Lisp Dialect. The vast majority of people in the industry use OO languages like Python, Ruby, Java or C#–and they’re happy with them. Sure, they might occasionally use a “functional feature” like “blocks” now and then, but they aren’t writing functional code.And yet, for years we’ve been told that functional languages are awesome. I still remember how confused I was when I first ...