Balance Programming
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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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Retrospective 27-52
I managed to get 26 posts in 3 months but 52 posts has taken me more than 8 months. I’ve slowed down but that’s okay. My schedule has been regular which is probably better in the long run. I’ve never managed to get hugely ahead of schedule though. I think I’ve written a one or…
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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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Dream formatter
I have my own preferences about formatting code. Some developers do but I’ve met others who don’t care and just want to get on with the code. On a team you’re dealing with other developers who will have their own ideas about this. How does that work? Do you each do your own thing? Do…
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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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The Agile Manifesto
I started with a brief history of Agile and now I’ll look in more detail at the big one the Agile Manifesto. My initial comments were that this was a process rather than a rulebook and it would need to involve the right set of people. The Agile Manifesto They have values: And some principles:…
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Learning from… fine art restoration
So I don’t practice fine art restoration myself, or indeed have much at all to do with painting, I do sometimes watch Baumgartner Restoration. It features the restoration of mostly paintings using modern materials and techniques. While the artwork is not world renowned none of it can simply be replaced. They are normally old pictures,…
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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…