xxcoder

Order of operations, default behaviours and your brain

Stray May 30, 2011 0 comments

I’m a creature of habit. I form strong habits very quickly. My wife and step-son joke that if I do something 3 days in a row I may well wind up doing it daily for the rest of my life.

This has pros and cons.

The cons are the obvious ones: some habits are not so good to have. I have had most of them!

The pro is that making good habits is useful.

In programming, habits are my default behaviours – my normal-for-me practices. We all have them – and, just like lifestyle habits, there are good ones and not-so-good ones. Ones we adopt mindfully and ones we just kinda slipped into. And we don’t really like it when people point out our bitten nails. Continue reading »

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try { harder } – a collaborative flash-dev conf.

Stray May 20, 2011 2 comments

What? Another flash-platform conference?

Yup – but this is different kind of conference, a collaborative conference.

To skip my ramblings about why we’re setting it up the way we are, just jump straight to the try { harder } site:

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Think like a medic

Stray May 06, 2011 0 comments

Ok, it’s not brain surgery. But there are parallels between practicing medicine and practicing programming – most obviously that every decision we make or don’t make has two streams of problematic outcomes:

Problems arising as a result of not taking action
Problems arising as a result of action we take

The second set are those we refer to as side-effects. And in programming, as in medicine, there is always the possibility that the cure will kill the patient. When the original condition wasn’t that serious this is a real downer.

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