The Programmer's Paradox

For some technologies I have used, there is a philosophy that holds all of its functionality together. It is mostly consistent. It fits a pattern, it feels connected.Its existence means that if you need to do something, and you understand at least pa...

For most complicated things in our world, there is an inside and an outside.It’s a repeating pattern. If there is some clump of complexity, most often not all of that complexity is fully transparent. It is only visible locally. You have to be in th...

If there are two people who may edit the same data concurrently, as explained to me when I first started working, there is a serious problem. Someone way back then called it the dirty write problem.Bob opens up the data and starts to edit. But then h...

The strength and utility of any software system is the data that it persists.Persisting junk data is just wasting resources and making it harder to utilize any good data you have collected.Storing partial information is also bad. If you should have c...

It’s a simple idea.  Anywhere you go in this world, you can prove that you have some attribute. But at the very same time, absolutely all other information about you remains private. The inquirer gets nothing but an opaque token. Its existence...

I know the term data-driven has been used before, but I want to ignore that and redefine it as a means of developing code.So, you have some code to write.Step 1: Figure out all of the data that may be used by the code. Not some of the data, or parts...

For a long time, I have been attempting to write something specific about how to decompose code into reasonable functions. The industry takes this to be an entirely subjective issue. Programming styles go through waves. Sometimes the newest gene...