Inspiring Lunatics, Tainting Meats
Update: This kinda blew up! Featured in Hacker News, Ars Technica and PC Gamer, among others. Just months after Neil Armstrong s historic moonwalk, Jim Storer, a Lexington High School student in Massachusetts, wrote the first Lunar Landing game. By 1973, Continue reading
Entanglement is perhaps the purest form of the strangeness of quantum mechanics. Bell s Theorem is perhaps the purest demonstration of this, producing a result that is squarely at odds with classical notions of reality. Below is the simplest description of Continue reading
My mom passed away in 2020, and in cleaning out her house I found her old diaries. Seventy five years ago, in 1948 at the age of 15, she wrote: Ah, a puzzle. I like a good puzzle. Some quick Continue reading
When interviewing higher level software engineers, it s good to assess not just ability to write code, but also to design systems. To accomplish that, I used to ask people to design something, such as an elevator control system. However, that Continue reading
Many years ago I worked on code that integrated tightly with 3rd party software. The APIs were not always documented, and when they were, the documentation sometimes had omissions or was just plain wrong. In a situation like this, what Continue reading
I had a debate with some friends at work the other day, about whether the higher-order function map just adds needless complexity to a language. They considered it a kind of advanced function, which surprised me. They said that by Continue reading
Suppose you want to write some code to communicate using a binary protocol. You would think C (or C++) was a natural language for this. After all, low level data manipulation is one of it s strengths. But it s surprisingly hard Continue reading
tl;dr: When C programmers start using RAII in C++, they re less productive at first because they don t think of return; as cleaning up and returning, just returning. They blame the language, but they just need to adjust their mental habits Continue reading
So you did well in an interview and they ve made you an offer. And now you just have to decide which offer to accept. Right? Well, not quite. You can always go back to your top choice and ask for Continue reading
It s best if you can do some prep for the interview. Try to understand what the company s product is. It s amazing how cryptic a web site can be, especially if it s enterprise software in some industry you don t know. Still, Continue reading