Category: General
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The Checklist Manifesto
The Checklist Manifesto is a book from 2010 by author Atual Gawande, an American surgeon and public health researcher. I read it a while ago and it reinforces my belief that we all make mistakes. Unsurprisingly the book is all about checklists. It may not sound like much it can be a great help in…
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Saving pennies
Imagine your shopping at a different supermarket from normal. You notice that baked beans are 3p per tin cheaper than you’re use to. The news had a story about supermarket price wars on basic goods recently. It’s a bit out of your way but if you switch supermarkets you could save money on beans each…
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API lock-in
When C# first came out it didn’t have generics, that didn’t come out until version 2.0. That meant that, say, the user interface APIs either had to deal with collections of unknown objects or be use custom written collections. If they did one you don’t know what object you have; if you do the other…
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PowerPoint misfit
I’m not a PowerPoint expert. I occasionally have to do presentation to colleagues but it’s not a regular part of my job. The discovery of a markdown to PowerPoint converters I’m probably going to use the PowerPoint editor even less. I normally most interested in the information, a bit of text and a few bullet…
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Journey, destination and story
I’ve been thinking about writing this one for a while, actually longer than that. I really needed an example to talk about. Fortunately I wrote some code recently. This is about code changes, how they made and how to present them. I’m going to talk about code changes as having a few different parts: The…
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Iterative development
It can be useful to develop in a series of small steps. At each point trying to write the code that you need but not too much more. Building a huge library that you think you’ll need might be a waste of time but building something small that lets you simplify you current code is…
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Image generation
I managed to avoid COVID until last week but it caught up with me. I’ve made a couple of attempts at writing something more complicated but it’s a bit much right now. My suggestion is to go off and watch this video on image generation by neural networks. It takes the idea of predicting just…
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A brief history of Agile
To deal with endless change the industry seems to have settled on Agile software development. However the original definition of Agile coming from the Agile Manifesto in 2001 hasn’t really survived. All these techniques call themselves agile but often it’s just a popular label rather than something deeper. Dealing with change is not new and…
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Is source control overworked?
I hope all of you out there are using source control. I’ve used a bunch of different systems over the years, most recently git. Any sort of source control is a massive step up from none at all. It means you: Does anyone else think that’s quite a lot for one system? Are all of…
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Maxims of comments?
Several years ago Tom Scott made a video, The Hidden Rules of Conversation, which introduced me to the cooperative principle. They are the conventions that are generally followed by everyone in order to communicate effectively. I wonder if they can tell us anything about writing comments? Grice’s maxims Paul Grice was writing about the gap…