I was talking with a coworker recently, who described how bad design just pisses him off. He can’t stop his brain from picking an app apart and figuring out what does and doesn’t work. Bad design offends him, as though someone had intentionally decided to seed their lawn with broken glass. The world is a complicated, busy […]
Category Archives: Performance
As I’ve moved into my new operations role, I’ve been continually struck by just how much everyone around me knows. They all seem like polymath geniuses, weaving together a dozen different knowledge domains to come to startlingly insightful diagnoses of intractably obscure problems. Coding a clever algorithm is all very well and good, but that doesn’t get […]
It’s hard to believe it’s already past the middle of July, that summer’s half gone, and that you’re two-thirds of the way through your internship. You might not realize it, but the next couple of weeks are a critical period during which much of the career value of the internship can be gained or lost. […]
There’s something simultaneously inspiring and incredibly disheartening about following the tweets of a professional writer like @nkjemison. Here’s a well-respected author with a half dozen books in print, and you’d like to believe that she just sits down whenever she likes, bangs out a couple of perfect pages, then goes off to whatever larger-than-life stuff authors do […]
If you’re anything like me, you probably have one or more anti-science, anti-rationalist bêtes noires. Maybe you like to rage against the creationists and what they’re doing to our schools. Or gripe about the global warming deniers and what they’re doing to our planet. Or fume about the crazy anti-vaccination nuts and what they’re doing to […]
Shame stops you from merging code you know is crap. It drives you to turn working code into maintainable code, and fix bugs that only you (and your users) know exist. It makes you work harder because you know you haven’t been giving your best effort. It tells you when you’ve screwed up, and pushes you to put […]
[Trigger warning: though not in detail, this post mentions triggering situations] The Matrix The answer is out there, Neo. It’s looking for you… and it will find you… if you want it to… – Trinity When you go to work, people act professionally toward you. If someone disagrees with you, you hash out your differences and figure out how to […]
Every day for the last five and a half years I’ve gotten into my car and driven the 40 miles from home to work. And though Boston is known for its bad traffic, the commute has clearly been getting better over time (five years ago, leaving the house after 6:15 AM was an invitation to a two hour commute – […]
I was sitting at my desk, waiting for a meeting to begin. Across the row, one of my colleagues worked away, and since the meeting couldn’t begin without him, I knew that I could safely keep working until he got up to go. I suddenly realized what I was doing. Really? I was just going […]
There’s a big difference between a master mechanic and the guy at Jiffy-Lube who knows how to change your fluids; assembly language, C, C++, Java, and Lisp programmers; command line and GUI users; kernel programmers and Linux users. I’ve been using various flavors of *nix for the better part of 30 years, but as I […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 