A Spork in the Road

As is my wont, I’d like to celebrate the combination of whimsy and insight that characterizes the best software development approaches.

Today’s exhibit comes from the programming language Ruby. Duck typing is a concept that is summarized in Chapter 23 of Dave Thomas’ excellent Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide:

…the type of an object is defined more by what that object can do… If an object walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then the interpreter is happy to treat it as if it were a duck.

Non-programmers may find the exact meaning of that quote obscure, but hopefully you can appreciate the humor and common sense of looking at the currency of everyday code (integers and characters and files and arrays and other, more complicated elements) through the lens of the old “walks like a duck/talks like a duck” cliche.

Still no time to write my own posts, so here’s another interview excerpt, this time an interview with Burmese monk Sayadaw U Tejaniya in the Winter 2007 Tricycle:

…when wisdom grows, it leads you by the nose. You can’t stop. That’s why I like the atheists. There’s hope for them. There is no need to believe anything. People become atheists because they think—they cannot believe, but they still want to know.

In the beginning, just start with wanting to know. Everyone has some curiosity, some basic need to know. Just encourage that. A good education is motivating a person to want to know for himself. All the cramming and rote learning is never a good education. You won’t get the best out of people that way. Their potential is stifled. Only people with an inner urge to learn will keep developing.

—Sayadaw U Tejaniya

Another pseudo-post, this time cribbing a fabulous excerpt of an interview with Kelly Link. I hope to someday be bored again…

Boredom is useful for writers. I need a certain amount of boredom to get work done. But I also need to do other things besides sit at a desk and write. If I weren’t involved in various editing projects, I would have to find something else to do. You need other kinds of work, and you also need significant periods of stillness in order to have time to think. Boredom allows time for thinking. Even in writing, boredom serves a useful function — if I’m boring myself when I write, it means I need to stretch myself, try something I haven’t done before. I can only keep at one kind of work for so long and then I need a change. For the past couple of years it’s been kind of nice to have months in which I am writing, then to move from that to editing the books, thinking about design, print runs, fonts, et cetera. — Kelly Link in Locus Magazine

…I’ll post this:

(via Maureen McHugh).

I’m reading a fantastic book about agile software development: The Art of Agile Development by James Shore and Shane Warden. And as I’m reading, I’m thinking about how to scale some of these principles — designed for and derived from teams of approximately 3-20 people — down to a team of 1.

Read the rest of this entry »

Riddle me this, Batman: why in the world does any enterprise website use ASP at all?

Now, I’m a Firefox user, for reasons too numerous to describe here and now. I’m on the web constantly. I design for it, and I explore it for business and leisure. Most particularly for business, and here’s where I absolutely cannot fathom business websites that insist on utilizing a website framework that does not work on a significant portion of their user’s browsers.

Read the rest of this entry »

I got an email from Al Gore the other day about Current.com, which I checked out because, you know, it’s an Al Gore project, and I’m always curious what he’s up to.

I eventually ended up on a very simple but wonderful site called Study Guides and Strategies. This is right up my alley. It’s subtitled “An educational public service helping learners to succeed.”

So next time you’re fighting off procrastination, or preparing to give a speech, or wondering how to manage stress in Kiswahili, or just plain bored, check out this site.

I’ve been refactoring code today. This is the programmer’s equivalent of a thorough edit: I’m not rewriting the story, just reworking everything so it’s clean and compact.

This is not my own code. It’s an application that we bought and are translating from one scripting language (PHP) to another (Ruby on Rails). I have to admit that I like refactoring, which I manifest by my copious complaints about all the mistakes the previous programmer made, his lack of style, his illogical choice of variable names, and so forth. It is SO much more fun to complain about someone else’s mistakes than it is to clean up after your own. Read the rest of this entry »

I love HGTV. I love decorating and choosing paint colors and buying accessories. To my great delight, it’s finally time for us to decorate our kitchen/sitting room area. I was inspired by a gorgeous throw we got from Maureen, and after a few iterations of paint color choices (the first pair of yellows we chose clashed with the blue-gray marble, for instance), we’re finally settled on a color scheme: Adriatic Sea (blue), Fortrace (gray), Ranch Red, and Crushed Pearl.

But I didn’t let my color fancies go to waste. I now have five AcePaint booklets and a slew of paint chip panels on file in my office, because I had a fabulous revelation last week: home decorating tools are a great tool for choosing website color schemes.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m trying on new blog themes for size over the next couple of days. Prepare for some ongoing visual changes until I either give up or find a new theme I like better.

9.24.07: Well, I’ve gone back to my original theme. Someday(tm) I will design and implement my own WordPress theme — or at the very least, customize an existing theme — but for now this seems the best balance between aesthetics and features.

9.29.07: Ha! Changed it after all. This particular theme has stuck in my mind, so I’m giving it a whirl.