Yesterday at the Java User Group, I talked to someone with a recent Ph.D. in Computer Science who can’t get a programming job. Why? He doesn’t have experience. Everyone wants to hire a Java programmer with Spring and Hibernate to program in Java using Spring and Hibernate. To get experience, you need to have experience. … Read moreThe chicken and the egg both come first
Rebase is one of the most awesome commands in git. Use it to keep the local branch up to date with what’s going on in trunk. A rebase a day keeps merge conflicts away! In the form advocated here, rebase takes your branch’s local changes and applies them to the most recent code in the … Read moreGit Rebase inside IntelliJ IDEA
Scala’s type system is impressive, and yesterday one feature came in handy: converting certain classes into a common type with useful methods on it. Say several types have a core set of characteristics, and we want to define methods based on those without modifying the original classes. In this example, various classes represent regions of … Read moreDuck typing is like the force
Premise: Our brains learn by recognizing patterns. We see patterns everywhere and we don’t notice that we are learning them. Advertisers show pictures of products next to pleasing images; we form associations. Premise: We notice gender immediately. We can’t even think about a person without first deciding “he” or “she”. Premise: Most serious programmers are … Read moreWhy and how
This turns out to be a lot harder than watching browser traffic.Forgive the crudity of this post; I’m on a tablet. Gotta get this info out before I forget, because this problem was a sticky one. Couch returned a 400 Bad Request with the error message “invalid json” and I needed to see the json … Read moreSniffing traffic between my app and local CouchDB
This one time, at Savvis, there was a piece of software that ran in production, but it was past its life. No one had the source code, no one knew how to reconfigure it or update it. It was designed as a flexible middleware, but all it did now was sit between two production systems, … Read moretrue in Undeath
Waterfall works as well for relationships as it does for projects – which is not very well at all. After meeting someone new, what runs through your mind? Should I get together with them again? Might anything develop – a friendship or otherwise? How do I really feel about the other person? Do I want … Read morerelationships
Biological evolution is a processing of ideas. Each gene represents an idea. More useful ideas win against other ideas, and new ideas rise out of these. Each builds on the ideas before it. Where is it all going? It isn’t. These ideas came from somewhere, but they are not going anywhere in particular. There is … Read morewe don’t know where we are going
After the first session at StrangeLoop, I ran downstairs, heading for the side of the lobby with the women’s restroom. I had to pee. Halfway there I looked up; it said “Men’s Restroom.” Turned around: “Men’s Restroom.” Wait a minute. The venue converted the women’s room into a men’s to alleviate overcrowding. They did not … Read moreThis is not OK
I have enjoyed being a woman in a profession dominated by men. I love being the only woman in a roomful of men. I love when they open doors for me. When they carry heavy boxes for me. When they give me a chair in a full room. I love it even more when a … Read moreConfessions of a woman in tech