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 […]
Category Archives: Performance
Some people just can’t catch a break. It’s never their fault, but things just seem to go wrong around them. Projects spin out of control, bug counts skyrocket, hardware breaks, people quit. Whenever you look at a specific problem, there’s always a good reason – the scope was increased, the agreed-upon technology turned out to […]
It turns out, car theft is a bulk business. There’s a whole ecosystem around it – the thief, the chop shop, the fences, the salvage yard – there can be a lot of people involved, which means that the individual profit is smaller than you’d think. And so, professional car thieves have to work in […]
Intern interview season is upon us, and last Friday I had the opportunity to sit on a panel discussing how to maximize the value of an internship. There were a couple of points I thought were interesting, and so I share them here for your reading pleasure. Why we intern In my mind, there are […]
I’ve been thinking (again) about what it is that makes some coders special, and have come up with the following idiosyncratic, completely unscientific, my-employer-does-not-endorse-my-views classification. It should go without saying (but won’t) that not only is this graph not to scale, but that it’s a pretty scary power function as you move up the pyramid. […]
My wife and I were recently talking about one of our mutual friends, a researcher in a “soft money” position. This means that instead of getting paid by the university from general funds, she’s responsible for bringing in the money for her salary, research team, facilities, etc., through writing grants. This has become increasingly difficult over […]
A quick thought experiment. I’d like for you to imagine the best version of yourself. Not the rich you, or the more attractive you. Not the version of you that went to a different school, grew up in a different country, made different choices. This isn’t the version of you that had different opportunities, or […]
You’ve seen this before, perhaps even lived it. A new person starts at the company, and from day one, she’s on fire. Everything she touches turns to gold: her projects magically complete ahead of schedule, she’s able to pull the thread on long-standing intractable problems until they’re worked out, everyone enjoys working with her, and […]
Learning a language is hard. In addition to grappling with a new grammar, bizarre pronunciations, unfamiliar vocabulary, and in some cases an alien writing system, you also have to build an entirely new set of skills. Chief among these is the ability to memorize massive amounts of completely random data. No matter how smart you […]
Paradigms matter. The Pythagorans killed the discoverer of irrational numbers because they didn’t fit within their world view. The Romans had a numerical system that was actively antagonistic to arithmetic, and made no significant mathematical discoveries. The Arabs, on the other hand, had much the same numerical writing system as we use today, developed the […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 