Today I need to do some calculations for an article, so I want to persist them. The best way to do this is in a notebook, in Python. This Jupyter notebook thing that is exactly what I need. And VSCode recently added support for it! The installation instructions for Jupyter are all like “anaconda” and … Read moreMinimum path to a Jupyter Notebook in VSCode
In games from Animal Crossing to Path of Exile, play starts with world exploration. How does physics work here? What can I do? Software development is the same way. Here’s my video from GOTO Chicago 2020. Also, I did a version at Philly ETE (video):
https://changelog.com/podcast/398 Looks like I talked about “Understanding software systems, transferring knowledge between devs, building relationships, using VS Code & Docker to code together, observability as a logical extension of TDD, and a whole lot more.”
TL;DR: gci -r -fi <filename-pattern> My favorite use of find in bash is to find files whose name matches a pattern. For instance, find all the jar files under this directory: bash# find . -name ‘*.jar’ In PowerShell, there’s a program called “find” but it ain’t the same program. Short Answer Instead, use Get-ChildItem. The … Read morePowerShell equivalent of find
Every company, every team is its own system and works in its own ways. There are universal abstractions, but these are only useful when someone can translate them into the particular context of one company or team. Corporate anthropologists do this. First, they adopt the role of “participant observer.” They get deep into the context … Read moreUnderstanding, inside and out
Learning is a struggle against “the illusions of commonsense perception” (Maria Popova). When it was obvious that the Earth stood still and the Moon moved, Kepler wrote a novel about traveling to the moon and meeting a civilization who believed, based on their commonsense perception, that the Moon stood still and the Earth moved. If … Read moreillusions of commonsense perception
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 … Read moreGame science, programming science
Today in a keynote at Spring One, Tom Gianos from Netflix talked about their internal data platform. He listed several components, ending with quick mention of the “Insights Services” team, which studies how the platform is used inside Netflix. A team of people that learns about how internal teams use an internal platform to learn … Read moreNested learning loops at Netflix
We prefer simple models to complicated ones. Circles to ellipses, a single ancestor to a soup. But is that really because the simple explanation is more likely? The value of keeping assumptions to a minimum is cognitive. Philip Ball, The Tyranny of Simple Explanations Simpler theories are more useful because we can think about them … Read moreMoving beyond simplicity
Soft skills are hard. “They take work to build and work to apply.” @ruthmalan The word “hard” describes sciences like physics and chemistry. It is confusing that “hard” can mean difficult, because these sciences aren’t more difficult than the “soft” ones like sociology and anthropology. They’re differently difficult. The “hard” sciences are hard because they’re … Read moreSoft, or hard like mud