In Pokémon Go last summer, a new feature popped up: bad guys. Some Pokéstops turned dark, and Team Rocket appears there, and they want to fight me. And they always win, dammit! This much I can discover within the game. If I want to know more — like how to win the fights — I …
Scientists should be on tap but not on top. Winston Churchill In the Cold War, political and technical considerations were no longer separable. The President got a Science Advisory Committee, but “apparently… scientists must not concern themselves with devising and proposing policies; they ought to limit themselves to answering such technical questions as they may …
TS7016: Could not find declaration file tsc, all the freaking time My favorite thing about TypeScript is gradual typing. I don’t have to prove myself to the compiler because it lets me opt-out. But sometimes opting out is harder than other times. When I import a JS module that is not built for TS, the …
Read more4 Terrible Ways (and 4 Better Ways) to pacify TypeScript
Git tries to help translate line endings between operating systems with different standards. This gets sooo frustrating. Here’s what I always want: On Windows: git config –global core.autocrlf inputThis says, “If I commit a file with the wrong line endings, fix it before other people notice.” Otherwise, leave it alone. On Linux, Mac, etc: git …
(originally titled: “On the Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming”) Blog write-up Abstract There’s a story to tell, about musicians, artists, philosophers, scientists, and then programmers. There’s a truth inside it that leads to a new view of work, that sees beauty in the painful complexity that is software development. Starting from The …
Read moreKeynote: Collective Problem Solving in Music, Science, Art, and Software
Then Back in the 2000s, we wrote applications in layers. Presentation layer, client, data transfer, API, business logic, data access, database. We maintained strict separation bet ween these layers, even though every new feature changed all of them. Teams organized around these layers. Front end, back end, DBAs. Layers crisscrossed the flow of data. Responsibility …
Software development is a neverending string of “What happens if I…?” Each new runtime, language, or tool is a new world with its own laws of nature. We get to explore each one with experiments. Objective Today I added another alias to my PowerShell $profile: To use that alias in my current shell, I need …
Today I learned how to create aliases in PowerShell. I’m switching from Mac to Windows, and I want the terminal in VS Code to do what I want. No terminal will work for me until it interprets gs as git status. I type that compulsively. In bash, setting that up looks like this: alias gs=’git …
It is 7:09. One child is out, and I have returned to bed. Alexa will wake me at 7:15. Six minutes: I could make my bed or do tiny morning yoga. Six minutes of rest is useless; I’ll feel worse afterward. What am I likely to do? I picture the probability space in front of …
Today I typed psql to start a database session. That put me in the wrong place, so I typed \connect org_viz to get into the database I wanted. But then I stopped myself, quit psql, and typed psql -d org_viz at the command prompt. Why? It smooths my work. I knew I would exit and …