Good Programmer == Pragmatic Programmer
I was working with a programmer with a deep knowledge of a particular technology. However, after working with him for a couple of hours, I realized that he was not especially pragmatic.
Category Archives: Misc
Is Software a Science or an Art?
As we approach software today, often through web or mobile applications, people generally appreciate the elegance of the interaction or lack thereof. But as software engineers know, there is a lot going on behind the scenes. Of course, with user interfaces for the masses becoming a necessity for modern applications, designers and more artistic–oriented folks have been contributing to the practice of software development. That leads to the question: Is software more of a science or an art?
Why Things Go Wrong: A Simple Programming Problem
Much of programming is writing code with an obvious solution, it’s being a code monkey. You lay things out, you move them around, you wire it up, but you don’t really need to stop and think. I’d estimate that everyone is about equally good at this. But some of the work is also spent solving problems you’ve never seen before. This is where bugs are introduced, bad decisions are made, schedules are thrown out, and things go wrong. These problems are the really defining part of being a great programmer.
Name Recognition
Dear reader:
After being heads down in the code for quite a while now, we decided to dedicate a little time to sharpening our writing skills. In the coming weeks you should see a number of contributions covering a wide variety of topics. We’ll kick things off today with a seemingly pedestrian subject: the naming classes, files, variables, packages, etc.
Scientists Use Flash-based games to conduct brain research
Posit Science as agreed to work with Grio in building an Adobe Flash-based application that will be used by scientists as a tool to study human brain. This application provides games and excercises designed to stimulate brain activities.
Posit Science helps people be at their best throughout their lives by providing brain training software clinically proven to improve cognitive performance.
Installing an ISO file from Mac OSX to a parallels Windows instance
Yesterday I attempted to install Visual Studio 2008 from a DVD onto my
mac parallels Windows 7 instance. After sitting back and admiring the
pictures of happy Microsoft programmers provided by the VS
installation software, I heard a ticking sound coming from my
computer. After several minutes, the install crashed. Some sleuthing
proved that the disk was scratched and worthless – a typical Monday.