If you haven’t been able to keep up with my blistering pace of one blog post per year, I don’t blame you. There’s a lot going on right now. It’s a busy time. But let’s pause and take a moment to celebrate that Elon Musk
In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career.
With early computers, you didn’t boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command line.
I sometimes get asked by regular people in the actual real world what it is that
I do for a living, and here's my 15 second answer:
> We built a sort of Wikipedia website for computer programmers to post questions
and answers. It's called Stack
I didn't choose to be a programmer. Somehow, it seemed, the computers chose me
[https://blog.codinghorror.com/if-loving-computers-is-wrong-i-dont-want-to-be-right/]. For a
long time, that was fine, that was enough; that was all I needed. But along the
way I never felt that being a programmer was this unambiguously
Every geek goes through a phase where they discover emulation. It's practically
a rite of passage [https://blog.codinghorror.com/rediscovering-arcade-nostalgia/].
> I think I spent most of my childhood – and a large part of my life as a young
adult – desperately wishing I was in a video
You know what's universally regarded as un-fun by most programmers? Writing
assembly language code [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language].
As Steve McConnell said back in 1994
[http://www.amazon.com/dp/0735619670/?tag=codihorr-20]:
> Programmers working with high-level languages achieve better productivity and
quality than
I saw in today's news that Apple open sourced their Swift language
[https://t.co/KpC9xID5kU]. One of the most influential companies in the world
explicitly adopting an open source model – that's great! I'm a believer. One of
the big reasons we founded Discourse
In 1992, I thought I was the best programmer in the world. In my defense, I had just graduated from college, this was pre-Internet, and I lived in Boulder, Colorado working in small business jobs where I was lucky to even hear about other programmers much less meet them.
I
These two imaginary guys [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Bros] influenced
me heavily as a programmer.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Bros]
Instead of guaranteeing fancy features or compatibility or error free operation,
Beagle Bros software promised something else altogether: fun.
Playing with the Beagle Bros quirky Apple
Way back in 2007, before Stack Overflow was a glint in anyone's eye, I called
software development a collaborative game
[https://blog.codinghorror.com/software-development-as-a-collaborative-game/]. And perhaps Stack
Overflow was the natural outcome of that initial thought – recasting online
software development discussion into a collaborative game where the
Computer performance is a bit of a shell game
[https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-computer-performance-shell-game/]. You're always waiting for
one of four things:
* Disk
* CPU
* Memory
* Network
But which one? How long will you wait? And what will you do while you're
waiting?
Did you see the
I'm getting pretty sick of being nagged to install your damn apps.
XKCD helpfully translates:
Yeah, there are smart app banners, which are marginally less annoying, but it's amazing how quickly we went from "Cool! Phone apps that finally don't suck!" to