Within reason, there are no easy problems. I say “within reason” because there are pretty obvious solutions to some problems, like drinking water when you’re thirsty. But if you back far enough up and attempt to find an abstract solution to “someone is thirsty” you may find that even that problem isn’t as simple asContinue reading “There Are No Easy Problems”
Tag Archives: programming
I Don’t Care For AI (Right Now)
An enormous amount of ink has been spilled lately because of the release of ChatGPT. You can pop over there, right now, and have a couple of fun minutes getting a computer to generate some text that approximates, with varying degrees of success, the thing that you wanted. When you’re done with that, you canContinue reading “I Don’t Care For AI (Right Now)”
The Value of Leetcode
My day-to-day work doesn’t always involve interesting programming challenges. That’s the nature of this work – sometimes you’re building something grand, sometimes you’re sweeping the floor. Things like Project Euler and Leetcode have always been in the back of my mind. This week, I became determined to begin working my way through the problems foundContinue reading “The Value of Leetcode”
JavaScript’s NaN
I wanted to write something about NaN because this occupies a weird space in JavaScript and might not behave like you suspect it should when doing equality comparisons. It also came up recently, and I want to make absolutely certain that I don’t forget the manner in which I should handle this thing. My firstContinue reading “JavaScript’s NaN”
Useful Experience
I’ve been in a Senior Developer role for a little while now; long enough to start thinking about how to convey the usefulness of experience to more junior developers. There are a lot of jokes in our profession about being really good at using Google, or copying and pasting from Stack Overflow. Humor is importantContinue reading “Useful Experience”
OLKB Preonic: Longish Term
Alright so this is really programming-adjacent, and not fully about programming. That’s fine, I’ll allow it. It is my blog after all. So: since January of 2021 I’ve been doing the vast majority of my writing and programming on an OLKB Preonic. Full disclosure – it originally arrived in September 2020 and I assembled it,Continue reading “OLKB Preonic: Longish Term”
The Browser as an IDE!
Tl;dr-The browser is capable of handling quite a bit of programming.-It’s easy to collaborate with people and sync across different machines.-Most online options allow you to choose any language you would like. You just got the bug to learn programming and you are wondering where to start (Or maybe you are a seasoned veteran thatContinue reading “The Browser as an IDE!”
Why Code Is Hard To Read
If you’ve been developing for any length of time, it’s likely that you’ve run across some variation on the phrase “Code isn’t for machines to run, it’s for humans to read.” Yet, we’re often also caught discussing how code is a mess, difficult to read, hard to maintain, etc… It seems that if it wasContinue reading “Why Code Is Hard To Read”
JavaScript Object Equality!
I started working on a little test utility to go along with the verbosely-named “Let’s Make Byte Buffers Easier” project. There will be a post about that soon, because it’s been an adventure and I think I’ve produced something that is at least moderately useful. I quickly realized that determining whether or not two thingsContinue reading “JavaScript Object Equality!”
Timer Thing, part 1
I think all of us, as developers, have written some kind of software that solves a unique personal problem. If you haven’t, you should. Sometimes the hardest part is finding a suitable problem of your own to solve. But even small problems can contain interesting design decisions. In that vein, I found my own suitableContinue reading “Timer Thing, part 1”
Joe Writes Software 