Being prepared includes…* Controlling the flow of the interview* Allowing uninterrupted dialogue* Keeping an open mind* Following the facts wherever they may lead Luizzo and Gaspar, “Demystifying the Investigative Process” in PI Magazine “Control the flow” and “Follow the facts wherever” seems contradictory. Do I make the interview go according to plan, or do I …
Read moreControl doesn’t mean you know what’s going to happen
In software and in business, we don’t build up from specific subtasks. We build up from broader capabilities.
In software and in life, breaking tasks into the tiniest possible pieces makes them smoother, and therefore easier and safer.
Today I brought up a load of laundry. When doing chores, I practice keeping WIP (work in progress) to a minimum. Finish each thing, then do another one. This is good training for code. For instance, on the way up the stairs with the basket, I saw a tumbleweed of cat hair. I didn’t pick …
Today before breakfast, we started the dishwasher. I think they might have been clean already, but when I saw Avdi loading all the dirty cups from the counters in, I didn’t complain. Today making scrambled eggs, I didn’t have my favorite spatula. It was in the dishwasher. Dang it! This is a danger of running …
In a big new project, where do you start? My dad bought this old building, and he’s turning it into an antique mall. It’s a huge project: two floors of shopping plus a gallery and museum at the top. Yesterday he showed me what he’s done so far. In the basement, he added support beams …
A Swede, on American Football: “Are there any rules? It looks like they stand in two lines, someone throws the ball backwards, and then it’s a big pile.” Me: “141 pages, last I checked. It takes a lot of rules to look like there aren’t any.” Later, people talked about error messages. There are so …
Every action has two results: a set of side effects on the world, and the next version of ourselves. I learned this from Erlang, a purely functional yet stateful programming language. Erlang uses actor-based concurrency. The language is fully immutable, yet the programs are not: every time an actor receives a message, it can send …
When we learn math, geometry, and logic in school, we’re always talking about things that are holding still. The element is in the set or it isn’t. The angle is acute or obtuse or right or we can’t know. Things are related or not. A thing has a property, or doesn’t. Code can have properties. …
There’s a funny thing, that when I walk into the kitchen and there’s sunscreen on the counter that I left there before yesterday’s bike ride, there’s a plate that I put to soak on the counter and there’s a book about Klimt that I had hoped to read with my coffee, this is fine. It …