Heavily Commented Code: The Awful Empathy Imagine a feeling–that empathy you get when you’re watching someone fail in front of an audience. Perhaps its a comedian relying on awful puns and props or a person in a public speaking course that just freezes after forgetting some lines. Ugh. It’s so awkward that it hurts. It’s…
“No plan survives contact with the enemy” –Helmuth von Moltke the Elder Bureaucracy 101 Let’s set the scene for a moment. You’re a workaday developer in a workman kind of shop. A “waterfall” shop. (For back story on why I put quotes around waterfall, see this post). There is a great show of force when…
For this Friday, I thought I’d do something a little more lighthearted and, in the tradition of bad television (or Robot Chicken’s satire thereof) post some programming bloopers. These are actual things that I’ve personally seen in source code as opposed to some kind of specific sampling of CodeSOD from the Daily WTF. Doing this…
Oracles In Math When I was a freshman in college, I took a class called “Great Theoretical Ideas In Computer Science”, taught by Professor Steven Rudich. It was in this class that I began to understand how fundamentally interwoven math and computer science are and to think of programming as a logical extension of math….
Quick and Dirty? “We’re really busy right now–just copy that customer form and do a few find and replaces. I know it’s not a great approach, but we don’t have time to build the new form from scratch.” Ever heard that one? Ever said it? Once, twice, dozens, or hundreds of times? This has the…
