As a followup to my recent post on debugging, when confronted with an extremely difficult bug, I find there are essentially two mental processes you mix: Deductive: Spend enough time to fully work through all of the code paths to try and find an intuitive solution to the problem. In some cases, you can eliminate … Continue reading
Urban bike wisdom says do not get attached to your bike. It’s not whether it will be stolen, it’s when. I’ve lost several bikes over the years but my current street bike has had a good 10 year run. I u-lock frame and front wheel and use a separate small u-lock for rear-wheel. But recently … Continue reading
The complexity of the solutions you can build is limited by the complexity you can debug. When code gets complex, debugging gets harder. More data is involved, setup is more difficult, problems harder to reproduce. Code paths are more complex. Data structures become unwieldy nested graphs. Stack traces many hundreds of frames deep. Multi-threaded timing … Continue reading
Many programmers prefer typeless, interpreted languages like PHP and Ruby for several reasons. They are more concise and easier to read and write for a novice. They tend to be interpreted languages, not compiled, which are simpler to use and typically offer faster round-trip time between making a change and seeing the result. They support … Continue reading
