People complain about RAII, but at least you can look that acronym up. Sure, "Resource acquisition is initialization" might have the air of a really clever Danish witticism that got a bit mangled by Google Translate. However, compared to Dijkstra, who invented semaphores solely as a psyop to get us to use the words…
In his classic software engineering essay, No Silver Bullet, Fred Brooks argues that software complexity can be broken into two types. The first is essential complexity emergent from the problem domain. The second is accidental complexity caused by software bugs or serious flaws in architecture. In this essay, I’m…
Looking back at POSIX When it comes to software, standards are an important tool to protect against “lock-in.” Back in the day, this was accepted as common knowledge. Academics ( ACM , IEEE ), industry user groups ( SHARE , GUIDE ), and government ( NIST , DOD) collaborated on standards bodies, wich led to things like…
I am not a long-time Io enthusiast. I'm just a polyglot developer backpacking across different language ecosystems with a sense of curiosity and the software equivalent of a Rick Steves' travel guide: Bruce A. Tate ’s Seven Languages in Seven Weeks . In previous posts, I introduced my motivations for this project and…
Recently, my friend Kait Moreno and I have started a YouTube video series to follow our progress as we go through The Rust Programming Language . If you haven't seen this yet, please consider clicking here to open the playlist of what we've produced so far! While we initially targeted a weekly cadence, we're…
I am not a professional mainframe developer. I'm just a polyglot programmer backpacking across different language ecosystems with a sense of curiosity and the software equivalent of a Rick Steves' travel guide: Bruce A. Tate ’s Seven Languages in Seven Weeks . In previous posts, I introduced my motivations for this…
I am not a Rubyist. I'm just a polyglot developer backpacking across different language ecosystems with a sense of curiosity and the software equivalent of a Rick Steves' travel guide: Bruce A. Tate ’s Seven Languages in Seven Weeks . In the previous post , I introduced my motivations for this project. Our first stop…
A key assumption behind my decision to go back to grad school was that I would be free to engage in passion projects and creative coding. Alas, phrases like "that does not sufficiently advance the state-of-the-art" or "that is too engineering-centric" turn out to be the academic equivalent of something failing to…
Earlier today, I was pleased to discover that FedEx had shipped me an important package. No, this wasn't Christmas a week early (...or was it???). It was the brand-new Pixel phone and Daydream VR set that Fullstack Academy is loaning during the two months of my senior phase. After ripping open the box, getting all the…
Why this reference? After the first week of my junior phase at Fullstack Academy , it's clear to me that Regular Expressions is a concept that I need to master quickly. In the past, I've usually performed string manipulation through verbose and brute-force if/else logic. This approach does not work cleaning in succint…