Pulpit! Canst thou not make a pulpit, by simply inverting the nearest tub...[^1] I am an itinerant software engineer who likes to raise children, read, an...
Here my previous post about encapsulation, the primary purpose of which is to argue for the importance of the concept. Here are some realistic, important violations of encapsulation: Using a system that requires the properties or attributes of a runtime object to correspond one-to-one with the columns or fields of persisted objects. (E.g., DynamoDBMapper or Django models .) These extra…
I've written about encapsulation many times, but I've never written a post about encapsulation specifically. "Encapsulation" can mean a lot of things, both because it has many aspects and because we sometimes mean slightly different things when we discuss it. Good encapsulation can mean: That subsystems are communicating only through well-defined, appropriate interfaces; That responsibilities are…
By Marjane Satrapi . Consider a two-dimensional chart: one axis is my knowledge of a book's subject and the other is how much has been written about it. I doubt any book is deeper in the my ignorance - lots written quadrant. And that's the quadrant where I'm least likely to have anything useful to say. Very good book, though. I ought to read more about Iran, more graphic novels, and more memoirs…
By Ted Gioia . It's absolutely great, and the sort of great book that makes me expect to live a richer life now that I've read it. One small example: this article I saw while I was reading the book makes a lot more sense than it otherwise would have. There's really no substitute for knowing a ton and working really hard on a book. Music clearly comes out of a lifetime of intellectual work and…
 Some of my recent experiments have combined almost every major theme of this blog: I've put a bunch of work into expanding, documenting, and testing the Zippyflash API. This has been useful for creating sets of flashcards based on a document: I now frequently ask a fast model to make me cards according to certain specifications about the…
Here are some claims about front-end engineering: An era in front-end engineering began around 2016, when (i) React and Angular (and some successors) took off and (ii) a critical mass of users ran hardware and browsers that could support modern Web experiences. This era was way, way different from what came before it. If you have never tried to implement a non-trivial front end without the…
This is another "yep, something that is supposed to be good is in fact good" book... ...But I think it'll be a little while before I pick up another Sherlock Holmes book. The characters, or at least the characters of Holmes and Watson, hold up wonderfully well. (I wonder if mystery plots decay a bit faster than we generally think. I'd conjecture that, although one standard view is that these plots…
Models are getting better. That means that the most powerful models today are much more powerful than the most powerful models of a month ago, but it also means that today's fast models today are a lot more powerful than the fast models of a month ago. Even if you pay close attention to new models, 1 it's easy to focus on power at the frontier and overlook the "93% as good and super fast" model.…
By Haruki Murakami . This book was supposed to be good, and it is in fact good. It's both morally serious and entertaining. Notes: Once I've decided to read a book, I'm now avoiding not only spoiler-y reviews but even dust jackets and blurbs. When I go back and read them after the fact, they often seem irrelevant and/or inaccurate, and (if I can help it) I don't want them to prejudice me. In…
By Emily Meggett . Notes: I read this in part to fill in a square in a local library's summer reading Bingo chart. It's probably the first cookbook I've ever read cover-to-cover. There's a particular pleasure in reading a cookbook I don't much want to cook from. (A lot of it looks quite delicious, but tends not to be the sort of stuff that fits my household well. Also, there's (e.g.) a lot more…