Sean has a reputation for a take on technology that can seem to be "out of left field," but is guaranteed to get you thinking. Sometimes contrarian, always insightful, he offers a unique perspective on the practice of programming and on technology in general.
The cold winds of recessionary pressures were blowing around Pentementi Mountain as the two technologists made their way to Master Foo's cave near the summit. The WIFI signals had long disappeared from their netbook gadgets but text messaging still worked on their cellphones.
Two phrases often heard around the computing halls are the phrases "hard wired" and "soft coded". If something in an application is hard coded, it is bad - or so goes the consensus. Hard coding installation directories is bad, hard coding the IP address of the server is bad, and so on.
The first big dirty secret of coding is that to do it well, you need to spend as much time coding around your core code as you spend, coding the core code itself.
I have lots of files in my computers. I have lots of folders in my computers. Folders are like files in that they both need names. URLs are like files in that they are names too. I need to name the names. Otherwise, I cannot navigate, I cannot surf. I cannot organize.
A small thought experiment for you on this bright but chilly winter's morning. In your hand you have a 40 page document. On your computer screen you have an electronic document open in a word processor. You have been told they they are "the same document". How can you tell? What does it even mean to say that they are the "same"?
Making it possible to write software that will work in any language in any country, in any culture in the world is an extremely laudable goal. A goal that I wholeheartedly sign up to. We should make sure that the software arts make it possible.
If I were to utter the two words "implementation" and "design" in the context of an IT project, would you be inclined to re-order them in your head? I.e. to think in terms of "design" first and "implementation" second?
A while back I wrote an article about my pet peeves related to XML. Some time soon I hope to write something similar related to my other main weapon of choice, namely, Python. Before that though, I thought it might be interesting to think about the peeve that relates the two.
Maybe it is just me but gosh, the unrelenting rate of change, of the rate of change, in IT is becoming brain frazzling. As soon as I think I have a handle on where things are currently at, along comes some new complex twist; some new turn; some new innovation that threatens to take the status quo and put it through the wood chipper.
Sidekick: The Good News & the Bad News Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325
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