The Ben Franklin Effect Have you ever started looking for something, let’s say your wallet, and been fairly certain that it wasn’t in your house? You started looking in all of the most likely places and progressed with increasing glumness to less and less likely landing spots. Perhaps you eventually wound up in the crawl…
Recently, I posted my incredulity at the idea that someone would go to the effort of writing unit tests and not source control them as a matter of course. I find that claim as absurd today as I did then, but I did happen on an interesting edge case where I purposely discarded a unit…
Profitable Free Time If you’ve ever been invited to interview at Google or you simply keep up with the way it does things, you’re probably familiar with Google’s “20 percent time”. According to HowStuffWorks (of all places): Another famous benefit of working at Google is the 20 percent time program. Google allows its employees to…
Over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself working within a framework where I’m writing a lot of SQL. Most specifically, in the code I’m writing a lot of WHERE clauses related to optional user search parameters. As a simple example, consider a search over “customer” where a user could filter by a part of…
There are a lot of ways in which you can do two or more things at once and succeed only in doing them very poorly, so I’m always in search of a way to do multiple things at once but to actually get value out of both things. As a programmer with an ever-longer commute,…
