Programming
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#GGDOttawa: Art, Life and Programming
→: #GGDOttawa: Art, Life and ProgrammingWhen I was doing my undergrad in Edinburgh, in around my second year, I was at a ceilidh, and a guy asked me out on a date. And I said, “sure”. Then, he asked my roommate if I was single, which was a little bizarre. And finally, he tried to “get to know me”. We…
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Priorities and Next Steps
→: Priorities and Next StepsThe other day I was having lunch with some other interns, and they were discussing their GPA. It made me question what I was doing, surrounded by 20-22 year-olds who think that a GPA is a measure of achievement and/or a defining characteristic. I mean, to participate in the conversation should I calculate my GPA?…
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Back to Feeling Like an Imposter
→: Back to Feeling Like an ImposterAges and ages ago, I wrote about not having imposter syndrom anymore. I wrote about how being a programmer was an accident, but a happy one. I give talks (one next week in fact) on how great it is to code. But this evening, I was trying to prep for this interview I have coming…
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Math Error vs Code Error
→: Math Error vs Code ErrorThere’s a fractal I’ve been wanting to make for a while. And the other week I woke up with a flash of insight and coded it, and it looked like this: And I was really happy, until I realized it wasn’t the fractal that I’d meant to make. Oops. So I revisited it and remembered…
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Testing Code that Depends on Remote APIs
→: Testing Code that Depends on Remote APIsThis is something I did for a course I’ve been taking, but as I couldn’t find much information thought it might be helpful to document it here. Let me know if there’s anything you think I’ve missed! Overview The internet is a rich source of dynamic data, and is increasingly used in our applications. Many…
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Processing Workshop
→: Processing WorkshopI’ve been a little quieter than usual for a number of reasons, one of which is that I’ve been working on a workshop for the University. It’s aimed at getting 17-18 year olds interested in taking Computer Science, and I’m using Processing for that. I’m experimenting with what I’m calling an Activity Based Curriculum. I.e.…
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What Makes a Programmer Great?
→: What Makes a Programmer Great?This is a post I co-wrote with Douglas Gresham. Douglas is a software engineer at Google, who blogs at www.douglasgresham.co.uk (less often than he should, go bug him for updates). I’m a graduate student, though I firmly believe that great programmers are not the result of university courses in programming. But university courses take us…
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Can You Flow Your Way to Great?
→: Can You Flow Your Way to Great?If you know me at all (or have just been reading my blog for a while) you’ll know I’m really interested in how to be more productive, more effective, and generally achieving more. And of course I read Zen Habits and all these other blogs that talk about flow. Flow is about being completely absorbed…
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Not a Scientist, Nor an Engineer
→: Not a Scientist, Nor an EngineerWhen I was doing my undergrad, I knew a lot of geography students. One of them told me that geographers spent a lot of time debating what geography was. I found this completely ridiculous, of course, imagining the only thing to be more pointless than studying geography was angsting about nature of geography. (Of course,…