Coding Ninja

Its nearing the end of 2017 and the digital gold rush seems to be in full swing. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for last 8 years, then the rocketing price of bitcoin (and bitcoin technology itself) would most certainly have caught your attention at the least. Bitcoin is indeed interesting in many regards, its not entirely novel as a few years earlier in 1998 Nick Szabo had created something called “bit gold” which was a distributed digital cryptocurrency (potentially the first of its kind) .

what follows is a tongue in cheek response, hopefully Bob is cool: Ah good ‘ol Uncle Bob (Robert C Martin), made a blog post a few days ago entitled “Bobby Tables” (most likely a reference to this xkcd post): Great xkcd post as always it’s funny because its true: sql injections are bad, like really bad. I’m not sure if Bob was actually drunk, but the logic that follows is erm, not right: Since SQL injections are possible, ergo SQL is flawed?

I was explaining the mechanics of how a computer works to a friend, when I realised that although I knew the basic concepts, I lacked the exact details. This reminded me once again about a fantastic courseware entitled “The Elements of Computing Systems” by Noam & Shimon. If you have not yet come across this courseware I highly recommend it. In twelve steps the student builds a real computer as the quote states “from NANDs to Tetris”.

As part of my journey to distance myself from Microsoft et al and to the free pastures of open source development. During an uninstall I couldn’t help notice the gigantic size of Visual Studio 2008. I do not recall the exact number, but suffice to say it was possibly a Gigabyte or more; slight feeling of unease came over me. Does an IDE really need to be this big? To conclude that an IDE is nothing more than a glorified text editor would be both harsh and a slight exaggeration.

Burnout amongst software engineers is a real danger. Years ago when I had first heard about burnout I brushed it off as a myth. After seeing it first hand and experiencing a little burnout myself, I can attest it is indeed real. Software engineering demands a high level of concentration. Debugging software and troubleshooting complex problems are mentally taxing. It is in the nature of most developers that we tend to fixate on a particular problem until it is resolved.

The post by Jacob Kaplin, entitled I refuse to tolerate **holes (19th may 2012). Caught my attention. After reading Jacob’s post, it struck a chord with me. Without a doubt the type of behaviour described does indeed exist. The strange thing is that, this type of behaviour is not acceptable in any other profession. So why is it that this kind of egotistical attitude be accepted in software engineering?

This post is a response to Jeff Attwoods post Please don’t learn to code (15th may 2012). I agree with 90% of this post, but I wanted to present a slight twist: I whole heartledly agree with Jeff when he say’s that its nonsensical that “every-one should learn to program”. Jeff offers an analogy about plumbing and he is correct in this regard. However I will need to re-visit this analogy later.

This is a response to Steve Yegge Post: programming’s dirtiest little secret that was made on September 10, 2008 (so a little old) :) I highly suggest you read the original article if you have not yet done so. Although its rather long, I understand where Steve is coming from. To sum his central tenet would go something like this: non-touch-typists have to make sacrifices in order to sustain their productivity