Viewing profile — nybblesio

I've been thinking about this topic a lot recently. My thoughts are still crystalizing but this is a rough snapshot: What if there are actually two independent markets in play but …

What do you mean!? Forethought!? That's BDUF! YAGNI! This is the problem with you damn tech weenies: all you want to do is fix things and think ! There is no business value to fixi…

dBASE was a product of Ashton-Tate, not Borland. [1] Odd sidebar: Ashton-Tate had a BBS accessible via a toll-free (800) number for many years and it was extremely popular. I shudd…

The cash price for this drug in the US is insane: https://www.goodrx.com/ozempic?dosage=2-pens-of-1mg&form=car... I can only imagine the fight people will have with their insurance…

From 1997 to 1999 I had a contract with Caterpillar. Dealers used an AS/400 application called Service Advisor via good old-fashioned 5250 terminals [0]. For those not born when re…

This is super cool and I would pay Maya-level prices for it. For indie game development, tools like this are gold. Although MonsterMash is more advanced, this reminded me of Martin…

This is a good essay. However, the author didn't mention Pratt Parsing [1], which cleanly addresses [2] the shortcomings of recursive descent parsing. Parser generators look promis…

I feel the Story of Mel is appropriate for this thread. And to quote the legend himself, "If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?" http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/fol…

It's a shame Kent used the words "test" and "development". Test Driven Design would have been better, but people would still misinterpret what is under "test". Yes, there's a side …

Preface: Once upon a time, I worked for a company who rents movies on DVD via kiosks. When I joined the team, pricing was hard coded everywhere as a one (1), because YAGNI. The cod…

For me, the only model of acquiring currency from software engineering activities is via product sales (no more selling my time or expertise). To this end, I do have plans in motio…

First, I had to wrap my head around something very simple: who one is (I am a software engineer) and what one does to acquire currency are orthogonal. This is simultaneously obviou…

I've been programming since 1979. So long that "programmer" has become an integral part of my identity. I don't think I'll ever stop producing software. However, starting around 20…

My recent work involving EnTT is still under NDA, though at least one of the projects should have a public announcement sometime next year. With that said, if there is interest, I'…

Yes, this is the basic idea. Tokens from the lexer, AST nodes, basic blocks, control and data-flow graph nodes + edges can all be entities and/or components of entities, depending …

I've used EnTT in both compiler and graphics projects over the past few years. Nice API, good documentation, and continuous updates from skypjack. If you're looking for a C++ ECS, …

NOTE: This is tongue-in-cheek (for the most part). However, I cannot help but feel that articles like this are a subtle form of social manipulation; especially for younger, less ex…

Separate policy from mechanism . [1] I usually reframe this as separating the what from the how . Back in the 80s and early 90s people would commonly call this "data driven design"…

The OP's example is perfect: he didn't go to the leaf-nodes and write each test by hand . Instead, it was clear that writing a tool to do the job would be better. Software is all a…

Open-plan offices are but one of many symptoms of the much larger problem in the software engineering industry today: nobody in "the business" understands what we do. I started wor…

What you're looking for is something called "Lateral Thinking" [1]. Using one's prefrontal cortex "silences" their inner genius and prevents "Ah ha!" moments. This is why people ge…

You may want to give the CLion 2019.3 EAP build a try. I was having the same issues as you with a very large (~1 million SLOC) C++ code base. To my surprise, the EAP build has seem…

Long time AS/400 programmer here. I think the confusion arises from mixing the terms "SQL database" and what IBM refers to as the "Single-level Store" [1]. The AS/400 has true orth…

I love what Stephen King says on this topic: "I try to get six pages a day." [1] He works 3 to 4 hours per day, every day. He most likely works the same time block every day. As he…

Agreed and Knuth's Literate Programming. Our industry is caught in the event horizon of the black hole named, "cargo cults".