So, I just updated to Wordpress 2.5. Gotta love the automatic upgrading provided by Dreamhost.
If you see any errors, please let me know.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
So, I was reading Code Complete 2 and come across an interesting passage. Steve McConnell (author of the book) hit home with me on this one: Assignments given in classes are made to get you from beginning to end quickly. However, in the real world this isn’t the case. Requirements change all the time. It would be like a professor changing the program requirements after you have started the program.
This is probably not a surprising concept. Changing requirements is a regular occurrence for real-world developers (or so I hear). If this is the case, why don’t more professors create assignments that model the real-world? Make an assignment that becomes 2 or more assignments. Make the students have to maintain their own code, or (even better) maintain the code of another student. Have them build the solution of each new problem from their solution to the last problem.
I guess this might be outside of the scope of many programming classes. College isn’t trying to train us for our first “real” job, it tries to “make us more well-rounded individuals and teach us to think critically.” But if I were to create the curriculum for a college programming course, I’d like to think I could create assignments that more closely model the real-world than several unrelated assignments scattered through the semester. Or perhaps this all really is nonsense.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Just got done reading about this and it sounds like a pretty cool idea. The basic premise is that Ubuntu community members can make a huge contribution by “tending” 5 bugs a day. Developers fix bugs, users triage and confirm bugs, etc. Jono explains it better.
Perhaps I will try to get involved in this. I have had a voice in the back of my head that I should give back to the Ubuntu community. This might be a great time to start.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Despite being very simplistic, I want to share my backup script. This will only work for you if you are running on a machine with rsync on it, which is most Linux, Unix machines.
Here is the code:
echo "Syncing ~/docs"
rsync -ave ssh local/folder user@:host:remote/folder
This is pretty much the entirety. I just choose a few different folders by listing those two lines a couple of times. I am sure there is a better way to do this, but it’s working for me.
I think it is a really good idea to have a backup plan figured out, because you never know when a hard drive is going to fail.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Today, I was a given a copy of Code Complete 2nd Edition at work. I ended up talking to a coworker about must-have books for professional software developers/engineers. So my question is, what books in your collection do you consider must-haves?
I have meant to write up a list a few times in the past but never end up writing it down. Here are a few books that I have seen called must-haves:
- Code Complete
- Mythical Man-Month
- Pragmatic Programmer
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
- Knuth’s books
What books should I add or take away?