As a programmer, especially a strong-typing functional programmer, I love abstraction. Defining what the program does and expressing that cleanly in code. The code should express little else. Now I’m studying secure code, and it is the opposite. It’s all about what can happen, not what should. So many nitty-gritty details of network protocols, memory …
Read moreWhat functional programming and secure code have in common
Video version here There’s this great, short book by John Kay called Obliquity. It’s about goals that you can’t achieve by aiming for them directly; you have to look for an oblique goal that will happen to get you there. Like, you can’t aim for “happiness;” you have to find something such that aiming for …
Developers have a love-hate relationship with code re-use. As in, we used to love it. We love our code and we want it to run everywhere and help everyone. We want to get faster with time by harnessing the work of our former selves.And yet, we come to hate it. Reuse means dependencies. It means …
I’m hella excited to get to work on Atomist full-time starting now (January 2017). Why? What do they do? Oh let me tell you! I love developing software, not least because we (as an industry) have not yet figured out how to software. We know it’s powerful, but not yet how powerful. Software is like …
You can watch the full keynote from Scala eXchange 2015 (account creation required, but free). The talk includes examples and details; this post is a summary of one thread. Scala is a scalable language, from small abstractions to large ones. This helps with the one scaling problem every software system has: scaling the feature set …
Or, What underlying implementation is clojure.tools.logging using? Today I want to change the logging configuration of a Clojure program. Where is that configuration located? Changing the obvious resources/log4j.properties doesn’t seem to change the program’s behavior. The program uses clojure.tools.logging, but that’s a wrapper around four different underlying implementations. Each of those implementations has its own ideas …
The other day at Outpace, while breaking some coupling, Eli and I decided to retain some information from one run of our program to another. We need to bookmark how far we read in each input data table. How can we persist this small piece of data? Let’s put it in a file. Sure, that’ll …
Read moreA victory for abstraction, re-use, and small libraries
GOTO Amsterdam started with a retrospective on Java, and ended with the admonition that even Waterfall was an advancement in its time. The conference encouraged building on the past, renewing and adding for growth. As our bodies renew themselves, replacing cells so we’re never quite the same organism; so our software wants renewal and gradual …
Read moreGOTO Amsterdam: Respect the past, renew the present
There is no silver bullet. What if there is a silver pill? It is no single change that can rocket our productivity. It is a change in the rate of change. There are two outputs of everything we write: some code, and a new version of ourselves. If we stop thinking of our product as …
We like to take a hunk of data, graph one factor against another, demonstrate correlation, and infer causality. This naive form of analysis is appealing in its simplicity, but it doesn’t cut it in the real world. With Big Data, we can identify correlation out the wazoo, but it’s time to get way more sophisticated …
Read moreCausality: tougher than it looks, but we can take it on