Coding Horror!
29 Jan 2009Next up on my digital reading list:
I believe I found Jeff Atwood’s blog through Joel’s Reddit feed. Jeff’s articles kept popping up and I found my self always clicking through to read his articles. After much deliberation I finally decided to add his RSS feed to my Google Reader. Jeff has a very easygoing tone and relaxed style to presenting his ideas that I believe create a relaxed atmosphere around his articles.
Jeff is not without his detractors, me being one of his detractors, I should know.
I am finding he will drastically oversimplify a complex idea and then proceed to base his conclusions on the oversimplification, for me, leading to what I believe is the wrong conclusion.
A few articles I believe Jeff was off the mark:
Understanding Model-View-Controller
As with all bloggers, check their facts and don’t take every entry as gospel.
A few of my favorite posts include:
Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive
My father would have cringed reading that article…he learned his programming chops on the original IBM PC. My grandmother and grandfather both worked for IBM and were likely the reason we became an IBM household. What is the easiest way to obtain a brand new, first ever PC? Forget waiting in lines; know someone who works for the company.
::Actually, I have no idea how the launch of the IBM PC went, if they were hard to obtain or not. I do remember being told we obtained one the year they were released. My grandparents are not opposed to waiting in lines though. I was called up in college by my grandmother asking me if I wanted a Sony PS2. She and my grandfather waited in line overnight to get one and asked if I wanted it the next day. They are more hardcore than me…the longest thing I have waited in line for is the Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point::
My father wrote all of the software he ever needed to run his practice in BASIC on that PC. He even bought a compiler for BASIC from IBM. His main application was so large he had to remove all of his comments so it could compile and run. My father knew about resource constraints while programming and worked very hard around each problem he encountered. It was this hard work of finding out how to squeeze every last drop of performance out of a computer that made him adverse to just throwing hardware at a problem to fix it.
::The main application my father wrote for his practice and other ancillary applications he used for diagnostic purposes were impressive for their day and time. Some even to this day exceed what is currently available in the field of veterinary medicine. Sadly, my father passed in late 2006 and we never had a chance to sit down and rewrite his code together like we planned so many times to do.::
Avoiding The Uncanny Valley of User Interface
Jeff explores why one needs to be cognizant of not only whom one is writing an application for, but also where the application is going to live and run. Don’t try to make a web app that looks just like a desktop application. If you do, people will expect desktop like performance…an expectation even the best web programmers will find hard to fulfill.
Your Favorite NP-Complete Cheat
This article raised the ire of many of Jeff’s commenters, but having not thought about NP-Complete problems in a very long time this article was a great refresher back into the subject. I am a huge fan of not ‘re-inventing the wheel’, and any tool that I can get my hands on that allows me to say, ‘”Listen, this problem you want me to solve is impossible because it is very much like these other problems that 100s of people have also said are impossible,” is my kind of tool. Turn on your best Yoda voice here, lazy not I am, practical I very much to be.
Lately Jeff has been distracted with a new venture he and Joel started:
For my money, this is the site for programming questions on the Internet. Think of the site as a combination wiki/forum where questions are asked and answered. The most popular answers get pushed to the top for easy reference. I’ve been using StackOverflow to answer my day-to-day questions that pop up at work, with amazing results.
Follow me on StackOverflow from my profile
Check out the official blog for StackOverflow
Lastly, listen to their podcast.