The Most Interesting Tech Reads in Feb2024
building a catedral
out of thin air
Mastering Programming — by Kent Beck
- https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/mastering-programming
- Returning to the chronicling of my readings. The insistence on analysis as part of growth is also in SICP. Here, it is about the problem as well as about the time. Slicing seems to be the most important skill masters possess. As well as single-tasking. Minimalism. Elegance. There are many words for the same thing.
The theme here is scaling your brain. The journeyman learns to solve bigger problems by solving more problems at once. The master learns to solve even bigger problems than that by solving fewer problems at once. Part of the wisdom is subdividing so that integrating the separate solutions will be a smaller problem than just solving them together.
Why you should never retire
- https://www.economist.com/business/2024/01/25/why-you-should-never-retire
- exactly right; the only problem is that you may develop a disability and one should think about that option. Surely no way I would ever enter the state social system to be taken care of. The horror stories make me cry.
In an episode of “The Sopranos”, a popular television series which started airing in the 1990s, a gangster tells Tony, from the titular family, that he wants to retire. “What are you, a hockey player?” Tony snaps back. Non-fictional non-criminals who are considering an end to their working lives need not worry about broken fingers or other bodily harm. But they must still contend with other potentially painful losses: of income, purpose or, most poignantly, relevance. Some simply won’t quit. Giorgio Armani refuses to relinquish his role as chief executive of his fashion house at the age of 89. Being Italy’s second-richest man has not dampened his work ethic. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s sidekick at Berkshire Hathaway, worked for the investment powerhouse until he died late last year at the age of 99. Mr Buffett himself is going strong at 93.
Where are Europe’s most expensive cities for renters?
After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
- https://www.piglei.com/articles/en-programming-is-still-hard-after-14-years/
- The note on creation and the reference to the Pragmatic Programmer’s big picture/cathedral view of the world is important.
While there are many benefits to “creating”, and programmers have plenty of opportunities to engage in it, many often lack the awareness of being a “creator.” This is similar to the widely told story about a philosopher who asked bricklayers what they were doing. Some were clearly aware they were building a cathedral, while others thought they were merely laying bricks. Many programmers are like the latter, seeing only the bricks, not the cathedral.
SE Radio 604: Karl Wiegers and Candase Hokanson on Software Requirements Essentials — Software Engineering Radio
- https://se-radio.net/2024/02/se-radio-604-karl-wiegers-and-candase-hokanson-on-software-requirements-essentials/
- Requirement eliciting is an interesting concept.
The first thing we have to do regarding requirements is to get some, and people often talk about gathering requirements, but that’s a little restrictive. The term requirements elicitation is broader and more accurate. I mean, of course there’s an aspect of gathering or collecting requirements out of people’s brains and documents and existing products and all other sources, but elicitation goes beyond that because there’s also a lot of discovery and invention that takes place during requirements elicitation. So you can’t just ask people what their requirements are and expect to get a useful or very complete answer. The business analyst is really a guide, or the requirements engineer, if we’re being optimistic, they’re a guide that leads this requirements exploration. And people also need to understand that elicitation, like the rest of the stuff that we’re talking about in this general broad category of requirements development, that’s an incremental and iterative process. Y
Gemini and Google’s Culture — Stratechery by Ben Thompson
- https://stratechery.com/2024/gemini-and-googles-culture/
- Critical suggestion that Google must learn from Microsoft and undergo culture change which usually means leadership change.
Those of us who don’t want to tell everyone else what to think, do, paradoxically, need to say so.
Change statusline color to show insert or normal mode
- https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Change_statusline_color_to_show_insert_or_normal_mode
- Great tip! No need to move your eyes to check what mode you are in ANYMORE
The Science of Learning to Code Debunking Myths and Exploring the Science — CoRecursive Podcast
- https://corecursive.com/the-science-of-learning-to-code/
- The science behind tutoring and mentoring helps me understand my son’s (under)perforamce in some extra-curricular classes he’s been taking and I am moving to 121 instructions. Also, “Camel has 2 humps” is rather an interesting story.
- Adam: So there’s this guy, Benjamin Bloom. He’s a famous educational psychologist, not a computer programmer at all, but he did an experiment that shocked the world. Shocked the world of education that is. I’m not sure how much anyone else cared. But it became known as the Two Sigma problem.
- So picture it, it’s Chicago in the 1980s, and Bloom and his team of grad students have set up an experiment with students at different Chicago public schools. They took a group of average students randomly selected, and they had them learn a curriculum through conventional teaching methods, which is like lecturing, testing, some group work, et cetera. Standard classroom stuff.
- Another randomly selected group from the same pool of students learned the exact same curriculum, but with one-on-one tutoring. Each student worked through problems on their own, but with a tutor who gave them immediate feedback and then advanced them to the next problem set when they had demonstrated that they had mastered that concept. The results, the students with tutoring vastly outperformed the others by two standard deviations, hence Two Sigma.
A Small Matter of Programming by Bonnie Nardi — Future of Coding — Omny.fm
- https://omny.fm/shows/future-of-coding/a-small-matter-of-programming-by-bonnie-nardi
- Watching my son having a same relationship to computers as I have to electricity, i.e. reified taken for granted stuff, I am skeptical about end user programming . It’s fight-club hacker’s club where this goes. Besides, part of the job description.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_matter_of_programming
- https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262140539/
