Best Programming Style Always Depends
In Steve Yegge’s hauntingly interesting “Portrait of a n00b” article, he argues that:
- all meta-data is unnecessary for programs to run. n00b programmers can’t handle the complexity of code, and so prefer as much whitespacing as possible (so that there’s less code on the screen). – Expert programmers on the other hand prefer as much code on the [...]
Catching up on Action Games
So I recently got a new gaming PC. It’s good to not have to say “can’t play that game, my computer is so old”. I was able to re-play through Just Cause 3. – I’d played through on a friend’s PS4; but since then the DLC for the game has been released.
JC3 was already very much an action-playground. [...]
My Impression of Ruby So Far
Background I’ve recently started programming in Ruby. I’ve inherited a codebase for writing automated-UI tests against a website. The tests make use of Capybara, which provides a high-level “DSL” for interacting with a webpage/browser in the sameway a user would; Capybara itself does this by abstracting over Selenium (or some other driver, like Poltergeist/PhantomJS); Selenium itself allows interaction with different [...]
My Hope for Political Discussion
The other day something wonderful happened in a chat group I’m in.
Upon reading David Wong’s excellent discussion of rural voter mindset, a friend made the remark like “we need more ‘empathic explainers’, rather than ‘explainer’ articles”. I agree with the sentiment.. but my mind thinks in ways like “what are the obstacles”.
So I can agree that [...]
Future Cop LAPD
Future Cop LAPD is an old game, released for PlayStation One, as well as PC. It looks like there are dozens of videos about it on YouTube, getting ~1k-10k views each. The comments are usually filled with “man, this was such a cool game”. Sadly, as happens with ‘legacy’ games, it doesn’t look possible to purchase on modern systems. Even [...]
On Programming and Testability
I’ve been reading some interesting blogposts recently: This summary of “Why Functional Programming Matters”, (I’ve not read the piece it summarizes, would probably be interesting) argues roughly that the usual pitch of FP is its purity (“no side effects, no having to reason about side effects”), & that this is a bad pitch. Rather, the benefits FP brings are that [...]
On QA Automation Blogposts
I’ve been reading up on the topic of test-automation. One kindof useful resource has been ThoughtWorks’ insights blog, but my feelings towards this are mixed.
Some of the posts have great insights, others are more mundane; and there’s a fetishization of nouns which makes wading through the bullshit to find the useful tips all that much harder. As an [...]
On Wet Shaving
It occurs to me I’ve never written about wet-shaving on this blog. “wet-shaving”, I’d say, is shaving not-with foam-from-a-can / cartridge-razor. So, using a shaving-brush with some shaving-soap (or shaving-cream), lathering the soap for the face, + using a safety/double-edged razor (or a straight-razor) to shave.
Pretty old-school. – I guess in the same way that programmers now may [...]
RWBY's Arkos Ship is Adorable
Recently I went back and re-watched RWBY’s Volume 3, Chapter 12.
Spoilers (up to end of Season 3) below; although I reckon RWBY’s story is good enough that it wouldn’t be “spoiled” by lack of surprise. I also had some fun watching some of the reaction videos for the episode.
I’m not a big fan of reaction videos [...]
On Revising in Programming and Blogging
In one of the more fascinating sidebars in “The Cucumber Book”, Dan North discusses his first experience pair-programming with Martin Fowler; initially aghast that Fowler spent time re-arranging the test code (and at times, duplicating) snippets of code.. until realising the improvement the changes brought: the test code became a more readable story.
(The principle “Don’t Repeat Yourself” was [...]