Category: General
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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…
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Mermaid diagrams
Famously an picture is worth a thousand words. That may or may not be true but a diagram can definitely help explain something. There’s plenty of software and online tools to help with this but, in my experience, making a diagram can still take a lot of time. It’s good to do but if you…
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Forever change
Let’s start with a few updates about the blogs. I’m going to be busier in the coming weeks so, for now, posts will only be once a week. It might be possible to go back to twice a week once things have settled down. We’ll have to see. If you’ve been reading from the start…
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In what order
I came across the Odin language recently. I’ve not done any detailed research yet but I came across a new keyword and it got me thinking. defer The defer keyword goes in front of any statement and delays the execution of that statement until the end of the current scope. A possible use case is…
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The Power of 10
I originally came across the The Power of 10 by watching the video how NASA writes space-proof code. These are a set of rules to produce code that can be reviewed and statically analysed. As they’ve come from the space industry you can understand why they want to be really sure what their code does.…