The Happy Coder
Image credit: Stable Diffusion
I encountered the following quote by Clive Thompson a while back:
When you meet a coder, you're meeting someone whose core daily experience is of unending failure and grinding frustration.
I chuckled and thought, Oh, man, sometimes that is spot on.... I've found myself pondering the …
What's hard about SQL
Image credit: Stable Diffusion
These are some things that I find difficult about SQL.
SQL is the poster-child for leaky abstractions.
The SQL language is meant to abstract away the procedural steps that are needed to query a database, instead allowing you to define merely what you want …
UI Horror: Login... Again
I use Office 365 with the web version of Outlook at work. At some point, I'll notice that the browser tab has changed appearance, and click on it to find that I've been logged out. No worries, there's a prompt right there for my password to renew my session. Soon …
Functions Returning True on Success
Many beginning programmers latch on to the idea of having functions return
True if they succeed and False if they fail so that you have code like
this:
if do_something():
# It worked!
do_some_other_stuff()
else:
logger.error("Something didn't work!")
For me, I think it was when I saw some …
Origin of the Name of the City of Lehi
Most people believe that the city of Lehi, Utah was named after Lehi, the first prophet and patriarch of the Book of Mormon who fled Jerusalem with his family prior to the city falling under siege to the Babylonians around the beginning of the 6th century BC. Both the …
UI Baffler: Outlook Reminders
Why is it that in the Outlook reminders dialog, the "Dismiss All" button is disabled if there are no reminder items selected?
Well clearly it is because that button is supposed to dismiss all of the selected reminders, right?
No, because if there is any selected reminder, clicking "Dismiss All …
I'm concerned about using Python
Python is slow
The Feedback Meeting Game
We hold lots of meetings with the intent to gather feedback from members of a team. These can be architecture reviews, requirements walkthroughs, sprint or release retrospectives, and others. How do you conduct meetings like these in an efficient and productive way?
Some challenges that arise in meetings like these …
Solipsistic Backups
I noticed this banner ad the other day from Mozy:
Um... I actually do prefer to have background processes (such as backup) defer to the real work I'm trying to do on my computer.
Your right margin is telling you something
The recommendation to keep lines widths less than 80 characters is a surprising part of the Python style guide (PEP 8). Really, 79 characters? Is it still the 1980's in Python-land? Maybe it's time to upgrade that monochrome CRT and get some screen real-estate.
Acting a bit on faith, and …