Posts tagged with Engineering
The Overwhelming List Argument
I call it the overwhelming list argument™. It’s a rhetorical device that I see used to try to present something as more grandiose and complicated than it actually is. The technique is simply list out properties about the subject…
Embracing Language Variety
Programming language debates are the religious wars of software development. Much like the xkcd comic on the futility of standardization, attempts to unify or consolidate our existing landscape of languages – and libraries and frameworks – usually just compound the diversity. For…
Somebody Else’s Crappy Code
Recently, I’ve been tasked with adding features to a product and codebase that I did not write. This of course happens all the time; if the code is at all useful, it will be extended and evolved by an…
User Interfaces by Programmers, v2.0
We programmers love our settings. The old stereotype of control- and toggle- filled settings screens, each neatly corresponding to a variable in the application, has an uncomfortable if dated truth. We love having precise control over every single parameter, even…
Review: Career Superpowers
Self-improvement books – at least the ones I read – fall into two categories. There are those who claim to unmask universal truths via research and corroboration across many different sources, and the rest draw from personal anecdotes to provide lessons.…
Software Eating Software Engineering
A few days ago, a question was asked on Hacker News: What is the future of the programmer? I had briefly agonized about this before, in context of contrasting how I came into computing in my childhood and what analog…
