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Recently, I was reading some AI-generated code.
At the high level, it looked like what I would expect for the work that it was trying to do, but once I dug into the details, it was kinda of bizarre.
It was code that one might expect from a novice programmer who was struggling with programming. Its intent was muddled. Its author was clearly confused.
It does he...
A single point of data -- one ‘variable’ -- isn’t really valuable.
If you have the same variable vibrating over time, then it might give you an indication of its future behavior. We like to call these ‘timeseries’.
You can clump together a bunch of similar variables into a ‘composite variable’. You can mix and match the types; it makes a nexus point within a bunch of a...
I’ve often felt that software development projects were representative fishbowls for the rest of reality.
They have the same toxic mix that we see everywhere else, just on a smaller scale. It’s technology mixed with people mixed with business mixed with time.
Because of its turbulent history, technology is an ever-growing mess. It kinda works, but it's ugly and prone t...
The biggest difference between now and when I started programming 35 years ago is patience.
Many of the people who commission software development projects are really impatient now.
The shift started with the dot-com era. There was a lot of hype about being the first into any given market. So, lots of people felt that it was better to go in early with very low quality...
There are two basic ways of writing software code: experimentation and visualization.
With experimentation, you add a bunch of lines of code, then run it to see if it worked. As it is rather unlikely to work the first time, you modify some of the code and rerun. You keep this up until you a) get all the code you need and b) it does what you expect it to do.
For visuali...
