“A great leap in the dark” — Thomas Hobbs
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The Voices of Software Development
The other day I was writing up a job description, which I take rather seriously, and I remembered that I needed to include the statement that an engineering manager has the responsibility to function as the “voice of the engineer”. Then I sat back for a moment and thought, Is this true? Why can’t engineers…
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Emoji Tac Toe Opened Sourced
Happy Father’s Day! To celebrate my 28th Father’s Day I’ve opened sourced Emoji Tac Toe. It’s actually not a big deal to anyone but me. It’s kinda of scary open sourcing code that you wrote alone and without first cleaning it up. But what the heck. If someone can learn something from this code,…
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JavaScript, Swift, and Kotlin Oh My!
This blog post now lives on http://blog.viacom.tech/2017/05/31/the-co-evolution-of-javascript-swift-and-kotlin/ (and it’s much shorter and better!)
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A Short Note on Tolkien’s On Fairy Stories
I’ve been a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Hobbits and Middle Earth since I first ran into Bilbo Baggins at a children’s library appropriately as a child. I remember falling in love with the tale and being somewhat disappointed that the other books of its type were not as deep or as rich as Professor Tolkien’s…
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Swift Programming: Filtering vs For Loops
The current version 3.1 has come a long way from the Yet-Another-C-Based-Syntax of the 1.0 version of Swift. One of the best features of Swift is how functional programming idioms are integrated into the core of the language. Like JavaScript, you can code in Swift in several methodologies, including procedural, declarative, object-oriented, and functional. I…
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The Rise and Fall of Autocorrect
I’ve turned off “auto correction” on my iPhone and it’s a godsend. I still get predictive suggestions and spelling correction. But I no longer have to fight with autocorrect and end up with wrong but similar words in my emails and texts. When the iPhone first arrived in eight years ago we needed autocorrect because…
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The Young President
I’m watching the Young Pope on HBO and I’ve been struck by the by the similarities to another man unexpectedly thrust into a position of power and world leadership. Yes, you got me right-our 70-year-old President Trump is acting like a young and inexperienced pope with a chip on his shoulder a mile long.…
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North Star
Successful companies usually have a secret sauce. It could be an algorithm or an insight. But whatever that secret sauce is, it is used to create or disrupt a market. Apple created the PC market when Steve and Steve figured out that affordable pre-built personal computers would be really useful for consumers. IBM disrupted the…
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Eternity versus Infinity
I just completed reading, at long last, Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity. Like many of his novels, EoE is a morality play, an explanation, a whodunit, and a bit of a prank. The hero Andrew Harlan, is a repressed buffoon at the mercy of various sinister forces. Eventually Harlan finds his way to a…
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Telling Time as an Engineer
Time is the most precious resource. It’s in limited supply, once spent we can’t get it back, and you can’t trade it directly. This might sound a little radical but most global, national, business, and personal problems, seem to me, to boil down to problem of time and who’s time is more important than yours.…
Got any book recommendations?