writing

Re-learning to Program, “The Right Way”: Behavour-Driven Development and Test-Driven Development

2009-08-23

Development, HOWTO, my writing, personal, programming, Questions / Wanted, todo, writing

I act in cycles. I am inspired by and I work on something new, and that inspiration shifts around. I also have a tendancy to drop and pick up projects in cycles. In the past I’ve dropped ideas for long enough for all effort to become meaningless given enough time, but these days I’ve been careful to cycle back to earlier ideas to scrape off the cruft and re-launch the project.

When I re-launch a project, I often find myself bringing significant maturity to the table. I have new ideas and techniques, and I take a kind of sick pleasure in redoing much of my previous work. This isn’t just a programming thing.. it applies to anything that I’ve been working on.

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whitehouse.org archived

2009-08-10

internet, my writing, websites, writing

whitehouse.org has been permanently archived. Curious. I wonder if they were kidnapped and tortured as terrorists.

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I can’t write perfectly on the first try

2009-07-18

my writing, personal, WordPress, writing

Somehow my postings always have a couple of issues that I find after posting them. I always find myself editing and re-editing and re-re-editing a post to improve it, even though I scan it carefully a couple of times before the initial post. I guess I’m still a wiki user at heart.

My apologies to anyone who is subscribed via RSS, as they will probably be fed the original creation. =/

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Web 2.0 sucks

2009-07-18

internet, my writing, Questions / Wanted, todo, writing

Internet, Web >

The problem with developers is they fly off onto wild tangents without any consideration for usability.

I appreciate AJAX. I really do. The reason websites like YouTube are required to use this technique is to save on bandwidth costs.

The problem is that a site is totally unusable. Nomatter how pretty developers make their site, if it uses AJAX it will suck.

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How To Troubleshoot The Smart Way

2009-07-08

documentation, HOWTO, intelligence, my writing, todo, troubleshooting, writing

Something that’s been on my mind recently was the process of troubleshooting. Specifically troubleshooting while asking for help.

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For hackers, “doing nothing” is still hacking

2009-07-07

hackers, hacking, HOWTO, my writing, programming, writing

Hackers >

I have an interesting trick where I have a piece of myself watching the rest of myself doing whatever it’s doing. It helps me understand my inner workings quite a bit, because I can review how I was feeling and thinking after all the main activity is over and done with.

Reviewing the last week and a bit, I noticed that I’ve had periods of uptime then downtime. This is normal for someone working at a computer, because at the very least you need to take a 2 minute break every 20 minutes, to catch up on your blinking and to stare at objects in the distance so you don’t ruin your focus. If you’re not doing this, you’re doing damage. If you’re an employer, you need to force your employees to do this, even if you have to put a timer on their computer.

But aside from the eye-strain (and tendinitis, carpal tunnel syndrome or other repetitive strain injury) breaks, I’ve had periods of mental “downtime”. But it’s not like walking away from the computer when getting burnt out. I take breaks under two conditions.

A major success.
An interesting problem.

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Disabling fancy new features

2009-06-16

Firefox, glances, HOWTO, misadventures, my writing, Usability, writing

I can’t count the number of times I’ve updated/upgraded only to be kicked in the teeth by some smartass programmer’s bright idea for a feature.

It’s one thing to add bloat to a program, it’s another to force it down your users throat.

I really don’t mind having a featureful program. Really, I don’t. However, when I’m used to things working one way I don’t like having things change without my permission.

I also really hate when that happens and I can’t figure out how to change things back the way they were.

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Growing up

2009-05-22

documentation, my writing, personal, reviews, writing

Reading earlier things I’ve written, I’m like some kind of half-drunk crotchety old man on a rocking chair on his front porch, shaking his fist and muttering at “those crazy kids”.

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Re-learning to program – Fixing my broken brain

2009-05-20

bash, hacking, HOWTO, my writing, personal, programming, shell scripting, writing

Holy shit. I was able to complete my largest and most complex shell script to date, autotest.sh. It was a nearly total rewrite of a series of scripts that act as an automated testing environment.

That sounds fancy, but it’s not. The basic idea is that as you edit, you save a lot. Well, I do. Now every time I save, the change is noticed and the script is run automatically. It even goes one step further, doing some debugging if your script fails to run.

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Why I will move away from WordPress, guaranteed

2009-05-15

BlogText, compiled website, documentation, my writing, personal, WordPress, writing

Blogging is an interesting concept. It’s something I’ve toyed with since before the term was coined.

It’s never seemed to be particularly useful to me. Each item is a kind of pointless bit of gossip whose usefulness is at first questionable and which becomes less and less valuable over time.

spiralofhope

All posts tagged writing

Re-learning to Program, “The Right Way”: Behavour-Driven Development and Test-Driven Development

whitehouse.org archived

I can’t write perfectly on the first try

Web 2.0 sucks

How To Troubleshoot The Smart Way

For hackers, “doing nothing” is still hacking

Disabling fancy new features

Growing up

Re-learning to program – Fixing my broken brain

Why I will move away from WordPress, guaranteed

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