Category Archives: Programming
Books of Twenty Twelve
People who like my writing sometimes ask me how I learned to do what I do. Or they want to know how they can learn to do it too. My answer is simple and in two parts: Write more and … Continue reading
Posted in Explaining, Lists, Programming, Science, Space, Stuff
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Eloquent Explanations Talk Is Now Online
The talk that I’ve had the most fun doing lately is finally online. Here’s the official description: Have you ever thought about how much of software engineering involves explaining things? We stick comments in our program to explain why we … Continue reading
Posted in Explaining, Programming
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Another InformIT article!
I haven’t been blogging lately, but I have been writing. Along with the Best Advice article that came out last week I’ve also recently did an interview with Michael Hart, the author of Ruby on Rails Tutorial, 2nd edition. Here’s how it … Continue reading
Posted in Explaining, Programming, Ruby
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Five Truths About Code Optimization
One of the things that is remarkable about programming is how the details keep changing while most of the fundamentals stay exactly the same. Here’s an article about code optimization that I wrote years ago that I required only very … Continue reading
Acing The Technical Talk: Take Control Of the Room
Last time we looked at how to get ready for your talk, about how you want to think through the points that you want to make before you dive into the world of Keynote or Powerpoint. We also saw how … Continue reading
Posted in Explaining, Programming
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Acing The Technical Talk: Preparation
Recently I’ve had a steady trickle of people asking advice on how to put together a conference talk. I’m not sure I’m the right person to answer this question: After all, there are some truly great speakers out there. But since … Continue reading
Posted in Explaining, Programming
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Knowing And Debugging
There’s nothing I like better than a good science news story. You know the sort of thing: Extinct Monkey Found Alive and Well or Scientists Discover Galaxies Far, Far, FAR Away (Who would have thought?). So it should come as … Continue reading
Posted in Programming
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Some Important Numbers For Developers
This is a fun one that I wrote a few years ago. Software engineering is one of those semi-mathematical technical professions that is just chock full of numbers. Our machines run at so many gigahertz and produce some exact number … Continue reading
Posted in Lists, Programming, Repost
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Hysterical Planning
A couple of years ago I had an interesting experience that I think I’m finally ready to talk about. It all started when I was sitting down with some of the project management folks trying to plan our upcoming work. … Continue reading
Posted in Explaining, Programming
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