I’ve been coding for a lot of years — next year, it’ll have been 35 years since I wrote my first line of code — and I’ve worked on a lot of projects over those years. Some of those projects have wildly succeeded, and some have absolutely bombed. (I’d...
Pop Quiz
I spent all day today dealing with too many different someone elses’ bad code, and it’s left me feeling irritable and grumpy and very elitist. I swear, most people really shouldn’t be allowed to program, ever. So are you one of the good “programmers”? Are you actually solving more problems...
Wow, where have I been?
I just realized I haven’t posted anything really serious about Smile in all of 2017. I’m definitely overdue for a status update! There have been over 360 commits in it this year, more than one commit per day (on average).
Life, as a story told in Git commits
Coders who are parents will know.
After Further Review…
I’ve spent a little time in the Stack Overflow review queues as of late, trying to do my civic duty by helping the programming community, and I’ve learned a few things:
Some thoughts on Islam
There was a time that I was mostly innocent of knowing anything about Islam. I remember learning about Islam in school in the ’80s; it was a religion practiced by a bunch of people in parts of the world I’d never been to, lumped in my mind with Hinduism and Buddhism and Shintoism...
Live from a future BBC One
June 30, 2017 We come to you live from Balmedie, Scotland, where BBC One producers are about to make an announcement. Trumball: Hello, hello, thank you all for coming. I’m Harold Trumball, the new director of BBC One under Theresa May, and we have a fabulous announcement...
A Letter to Donald Trump
I am well-known for never cursing. I don’t curse, because I believe that it isn’t necessary for most discourse. It’s certainly impolite and often impolitic to use them, but in addition to the social norms, omitting curses forces me to organize my thoughts more carefully than a simple...
Election Conscience
For twenty-two years, I was a registered Republican. In the ’90s, it was pretty easy: The Republicans were the party of small government, of fiscal sensibility, of moderation, and of prosperity. The Democrats were the “crazy hippies,” the tie-dyed tree-huggers who wanted us to eat nothing but kale and drive only solar-powered...
A Smile Posting!
Okay, so it’s apparently been forever since I talked here about Smile. Which is sad, because I think hard about it every day, and I work on its code multiple times a week. So here goes with a big status update.