I write about whatever comes to my mind
Ever wonder why insulin is so expensive in the U.S? Seriously, it costs upwards of hundreds of dollars per vial! Is it because insulin is hard to produce, and so the price must be high to compensate? No. It’s not. Not even a little. Insulin costs less than five dollars per vial to produce. It’s […]
If you’ve been a long-time follower of my blog, you’ve probably wondered at some point: Axol, how are your takes so based? The answer is simple. I’ve mastered a skill that few others possess. A skill that allows me to navigate the realm of truth in a way that leads to the light. That skill […]
I’m back at it again. Some of my first articles involved me expressing frustration at the common ways people conduct themselves in online debate. It’s a frustrating feeling when I know I’m close to exposing someone’s fundamental misunderstandings about a topic, but they manage to weasel their way out of conceding their wrongness. Or when […]
When I heard a year ago that Uncle Bob was planning on writing a second edition of Clean Code, I got excited, which isn’t normal for me. I thought the first edition was alright, and I don’t read often. Maybe it was the thought of getting to roast its code examples again like I did […]
I pride myself on being the kind of blogger who writes what he truly believes, even when it’s unpopular. That’s part of why I’m so brash and come across as condescending. It’s cathartic for me, so if being correct is condescending, I don’t want to be wrong. Having said that, it feels good when I […]
What’s the quickest giveaway that someone’s an amateur developer? When they tell you to break out a function into smaller functions, and the first reason they cite is “it’s over X lines of code.” Yeah, you heard me. This article is targeted at people who are so easily intimidated by long functions that they fail […]
If you’ve read my previous articles on TDD (here and here), you’d know I have complicated feelings about it. If you’ve read my review of a critically acclaimed novel, you’d know I have major trust issues when it comes to book recommendations. And if you’ve read my first ever article, you’d know that big names […]
If civil engineering is a mature field, then software development is a baby. An ugly baby, but perhaps a late bloomer. The so-called “best practices” of our industry are a chaotic nebula of differing, often incompatible, perspectives. “If you don’t follow TDD, you’re not a professional.” “If you think OOP leads to overengineering, you’re doing […]
Oh imagine a land It’s a faraway place Where the good faith debates are held Where the winner is the best Where each point gets addressed And the bad faith ones are quelled Where the activists from the left And the hosts from the center And the pundits that lean to the right You are […]
Caleb racked his brain trying to come up with the right dynamic programming recurrence for this medium LeetCode problem. He’d never used DP at work. In fact, he didn’t believe anyone had. So why did companies keep asking them? It wasn’t like it mattered anyway, since he couldn’t even get past the resume screening. It […]