Despite its popularity, video is really not the best way for a lot of people to learn things
Published at 4:43 pm on September 1st, 2024
Filed under: Geekery, Technology. Linkery.
Or remember that computers are still not boxes of infinite resource, whatever you might think
Published at 4:03 pm on October 15th, 2022
Filed under: Geekery, Technology.
Sometimes, given that I often work with people who are twenty years or so younger than me, I feel old. I mean, the archives of this blog go back over twenty years now: these are serious, intelligent colleagues, and when I started writing my first blog posts they were likely still toddlers.
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Keyword noise: software, software development, resources, coding.
Or, a coding exercise
Published at 4:12 pm on June 25th, 2022
Filed under: Geekery, Technology.
One of my flaws is that as soon as I’m familiar with something, I assume it must be common knowledge. I love tutoring and mentoring people, but I’m bad at pitching exactly where their level might be, and in working out what they might not have come across before. Particularly, in my career, software development is one of those skills where beyond a certain base level nearly all your knowledge is picked up through osmosis and experience, rather than through formal training. Sometimes, when I’m reviewing my team’s code I come across things that surprise me a little. That’s where this post comes from, really: a few months back I spotted something in a review and realised it wouldn’t work.
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Keyword noise: coding, software, .NET, .NET Framework, computing, C#, development.
One thing I have been doing over the past few weeks is: finally, finally, taking the hard drive out of my last desktop computer—last used about 8 years ago at a guess—and actually copying all the documents off it. It also had stuff preserved from pretty much every desktop machine I’d had before that, so there was a whole treasure-chest of photographs I hadn’t seen in years, things I’d written, and various incomplete coding projects.
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Keyword noise: coding, Linux, Unix, computing, C, daemon.
Or, principles and platitudes
Published at 9:06 pm on July 29th, 2021
Filed under: Dear Diary.
It’s nearly a month now since I started the new job. It’s not been plain sailing all the way, of course, but it feels like it’s going reasonably well.
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Keyword noise: work, coding, motivation.
I passed a very minor milestone yesterday. Duolingo, the language-learning app, informed me that I had a “streak” of 1,000 days. In other words, for the past not-quite-three-years, most days, I have fired up the Duolingo app or website and done some sort of language lesson. I say “most days”: in theory the “streak” is supposed to mean I did it every single day, but in practice you can skip days here and there if you know what you’re doing. I’ve mostly been learning Welsh, with a smattering of Dutch, and occasionally revising my tourist-level German.
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Keyword noise: Duolingo, learning, languages, coding, Welsh, Cymraeg.
Or, what to do with a particular compilation problem
Published at 6:02 pm on November 13th, 2020
Filed under: Geekery, Technology.
This week, Microsoft released .NET 5, and it reminded me I’ve been meaning to post a piece of technical advice that has bitten me a few times but which doesn’t seem to be very well-documented or well-described online. It’s a piece of technical advice, though, that will slowly be fading away in relevance because it’s advice on .NET Framework; so I thought I should put it up here whilst it is still helpful to people.
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Keyword noise: programming, coding, .NET Framework, Visual Studio, MSBuild.
Or, finishing off the odds and ends
Published at 11:10 am on October 27th, 2020
Filed under: Meta, Geekery, Technology.
Settling down to see what else I should write in the series of posts about how I rebuilt this website, I realised that the main issues now have already been covered. The previous posts in this series have discussed the following:
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Keyword noise: blogging, Wintersmith, Bootstrap, web design, responsive design, coding, websites, HTML, CSS, accessibility, JavaScript, npm.
If you want to start reading this series of articles from the start, the first part is here. In the previous part we discussed how I adapted Wintersmith to my purposes, adding extra page generators for different types of archive page, and refactoring them to make sure that I wasn’t repeating the same logic in multiple places, which is always a good process to follow on any sort of coding project. This post is about the templating language that Wintersmith uses, Pug. When I say “that Wintersmith uses”, incidentally, you should always add a “by default” rider, because as we saw previously adding support for something else generally wouldn’t be too hard to do.
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Keyword noise: blogging, coding, websites, Wintersmith, Pug, templates, refactoring, performance, optimisation, Agile, HTML, JavaScript.
In which we delve into Wintersmith and some CoffeeScript
Published at 7:23 pm on September 28th, 2020
Filed under: Meta, Geekery, Technology.
In which pulling on one thread untangles a whole mass of knots
Published at 10:00 pm on February 10th, 2016
Filed under: Dear Diary.
Most of the intractable problem I was slowly chipping away at at work was solved, today. I suddenly realised that the vast majority of all my unsolved problems - and another, urgent problem, that an outside contractor had asked me for help with - were in all likelihood all just different facets of the same thing. It wasn’t, it turned out, the sole cause of all of them, but it was enough of a hint to clear most of them and give me the boost of encouragement I needed to sort out the rest.
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Keyword noise: coding, weather, winter, snow.
The past two days at work have largely just been the long slog of writing unit tests for a part of the system which firstly, was one of the hairiest and oldest parts of the system; and secondly, I’ve just rewritten from scratch. In its non-rewritten form it was almost entirely impossible to test, due to its reliance on static code without any sort of injection.
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Keyword noise: coding, work, unit tests, refactoring.
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