Writing: The Desert From My Fingertips

I did not love the words I put on the page the last time I sat down to write.

I’m trying to process this feeling and I think that appropriately I’ll do so through writing even more. Maybe I’ll love these words, or maybe they’ll hurt like a toe stubbed on the sofa. Is this really coming out of my head? I can spend days or weeks “meaning to write” but never finding the time (what a lie) and when I finally sit down and get a measly few hundred words down, this is what I get? It doesn’t seem fair. It doesn’t seem right that anything so useless would be all my reward for getting my shit together and spending a whole half an hour in front of the keyboard.

Obviously, I need a reality check.

There are going to be so many more bad writing sessions. I’m going to writeso many crappy paragraphs, useless pages, and awful chapters that just have to be thrown away. I’m going to have to, if I want to get to the good ones. I’m going to pull a desert out from my finger tips and hope with every tug an oasis is found. I’ll drink the little haven dry immediately, and I’ll be surrounded by gritty unpleasant sand again to trudge through. I’ll be diligent. I’ll march on. I’ll find the next oasis.

I’ll never know when it will come.

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 operate on

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