riboflava

Also consider an SDET role, those can sometimes be easier to get and then you work internally on removing the T if you really don't like that sort of work.

Comment · 10 years ago

Have you looked into commercial real estate at all? One of the factors that scares me off from residential real estate is that one bad tenant can really screw me over, especially as I'm just getting started. It intuitively seems like if you can get a business to pay rent on a property instead you're less likely to have a disaster situation...

Comment · 10 years ago

Placebo effect.

Comment · 10 years ago

The return of the Ranger will be very welcome to me, if they don't screw it up...

Comment · 10 years ago

For me, age 26, I'm already slower than I was when I was 18. I write better code though and can wade through harder abstractions, so on hard, novel material I'd likely win against my old self. Still, I really detest the "work" aspect of work which I don't wake up excited to do, so my plan that I'm on track for is to be "retired" by 32. Why slave until I'm 50? I've even considered depleting my savings earlier on to take a couple years off and then come back, delaying "retirement" by a few years but potentially making the "come back" slog much more pleasant. (I don't think I'll ever master the tricks other, often older, people seem to have about becoming excited to do even the mundane or just being able to plow through it regardless of 'motivation' or 'pleasantness'. My mother basically worked her whole adult life until she died, I don't understand how but sometimes wish such a mindset was more genetic.)

Comment · 10 years ago

I go back and forth on the singly-called function as a code smell. It really depends. What annoys me are the private method refactors that then can't be unit tested unless the 'private' keyword is removed.

For an instance of how it depends, see the classic Forth example for implementing a washing machine driver:

        ...
    	: RINSE  FAUCETS OPEN  TILL-FULL  FAUCETS CLOSE ;
        ...
    	: WASHER  WASH SPIN RINSE SPIN ;

Then a single call to WASHER is all that happens when the user presses the start button.

Function calls should make things clearer, not less clear because of some other principle (like DRY or single responsibility or testability etc.). That's ultimately where I think the JavaLand culture has gone wrong, all these abstractions (many of them caused by being forced to live in a Kingdom of Nouns) that are sometimes quite useful in the large are always a pain in the small, but many times the small is all that is needed. Big projects are slowly learning they don't need to be so big, they can instead be a set of independent smaller projects, but it'll take more time.

Comment · 10 years ago

It can still be non-obvious with an optimizing compiler, or with non-Lisp.

I don't see the point in having beginning students think about tail call optimized recursion vs normal recursion unless they're going through SICP. In the end it can totally be a compiler thing. For instance, GCC can optimize this:

    int factorial(int x) {
       if (x > 1) return x * factorial(x-1);
       else return 1;
    }

into this:

    int factorial(int x) {
       int result = 1;
       while (x > 1) result *= x--;
       return result;
    }

(http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/will-it-optimize.html)

Comment · 10 years ago

I find the pen and paper method of visualizing invaluable. Make a small sample input that hits full coverage and trace it through step by step, writing out each call point with its values. Then you see the shape of your recursion (https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-11.htm...) and if there's a bug it can quickly become apparent.

Comment · 10 years ago

As soon as you have to buy something that takes up physical space, the "skills", or maybe better put the "mindset", becomes quite different. I don't think I can explain it very well. In principle someone who can understand a flow diagram (which is, to only mildly exaggerate, all a circuit diagram is) and master the complexity of getting a web application published online should be able to do what you did with the $3.50 board. They almost certainly could do everything in a short amount of time at a workshop with all the hardware provided and a printout of instructions. But once they're home, without a similar set of instructions for "buy this here, do this, do that, to accomplish this" it's unlikely you're going to see much robotic/smart-home creativity even after a workshop. Meanwhile unlimited complexity and creation can be had in the web app realm without having to leave the comfort of your keyboard, or even having to buy anything.

I just remembered this post which I think helps better capture some of what I'm talking about: https://plusbryan.com/its-just-wood But I think there's something else besides avoiding things that are mysterious. I think it has something to do with the physicality of the thing. At least something else is needed to understand the weird reluctance with working with hardware that a lot of software-only people have, who differently from the general public (who can't even use their computers) are sharp enough to battle with mind blowing complexity and solving mysteries of bugs or how new languages or APIs work every day behind their screens.

Comment · 10 years ago

I'm a fan of the out of the box immutable data structures and like the sugar, though you can get both in Lisp if you want. (Presumably Racket as well.) Lisp has everything, and more, though sometimes you have to work for it. I do enjoy Clojure's interop with the JVM, but that along with the community producing interesting things (this includes ClojureScript) are the primary reasons I care about Clojure at all. On the nice-to-work-with side of things I really enjoy that it was designed by one person rather than a standards committee from decades ago, it feels fresh working with it, but if you stranded me on an island and gave me one language to have for the rest of time I'd pick Lisp for its power.