New Programming-Centric Blog

I've decided to start a second blog, where I will post only about programming-related topics, and I will leave my other blog (http://ironfroggy.blogspot.com/) for any of my non-programming posts. I think this will help me in the long run. Too often, when I want to post something, I wonder if its too geeky or too non-geeky, so obviously there is an issue there.

So, I'm trying to make a career move. I'm tired of programming being a hobby; I want it to be a career. Right now, I don't even have a career. I only have a job. This choice comes at an interesting time with a reason that both gives me more reason for this Big Move, and more to worry over about doing so. My wife is pregnant, and our first child is due in May. When Caelan is born, I want to be here with my wife and my son! Of course, that means I will be worrying about supporting a child, now. Although I can make more money doing this, the stability of it is not as secure as a normal job. I've got my first contract right now, but I can't go full-time with this yet. I'm working out the details of a possible medium-term second project, and if I get this I may make the plunge.

So, in this first job and the one I'm pitching right now, I am using the nifty stuff from Divmod. Some great stuff, and wrapping my head around it is (kinda) fun! I'll be posting some "just so you know, without all the trouble I had" as I go.

Comments

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer. One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful...

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro...

Developing Upwards

Search This Blog