Google had (has?) a tongue-in-cheek achievement system built into the employee directory. Anyone can define a new achievement and award it to whomever, provided they can create (or pirate) a neat little icon for it. Lots of people have over the years – there must be thousands of distinct achievements possible, at this point. It’s… Read more
It’s always bemused me that I did better in electronic engineering than computer science. I studied them simultaneously, receiving degrees in both after five years (some classes counted towards both, thus why it wasn’t seven or eight years). I grew up playing on, dabbling with, and programming computers. From BASIC II to Hypercard to RealBasic… Read more
I don’t know if it’s genuinely on the uptick, or just coincidence, or merely runaway pattern recognition on my part, but I keep seeing the same logical fallacy applied over and over again: if I add more layers to a system it will become more reliable. A recent example: this set of services have poor… Read more
I’ve experienced an interesting arc over my twenty or so years (thus far) of software development. I started out as a one-person shop, doing my own things, selling shareware. I had no manager nor technical lead. I had to make all my own decisions, in all aspects, without guidance or assistance. Subsequently, during my four… Read more
You might have heard the aphorism “Perfect is the enemy of good“. If you’re in a technical field, you’ve probably used it, or had it used against you, to shut down a conversation. It’s an effective way to do so because it insinuates that the target is thinking impractically, not focused on the problem at… Read more
It’s been a while since I wrote any meaningful Swift. How I didn’t miss the Swift compiler’s bullshit error messages. That yields, on the popFirst() method: Cannot use mutating member on immutable value: ‘someArray’ is immutable. No it’s not. It’s simply not. For whatever reason, if you instead call popFirst() on ArraySlice – ostensibly indistinguishable from… Read more
In no particular order. The Hotline File Transfer Protocol v1.1.1. I presume I was interested in, or actively doing, a third party Hotline client. I did tend to make lots of data transfer clients back then (e.g. HTTP, FTP, even POP3 & SMTP). My little gallery of childhood toys & memorabilia. I hadn’t forgotten about this… Read more