Lessons from the top of a snowy hill

Things are rather treacherous out there. In my neighborhood, we have new-fallen (unplowed) snow, on top of wet (now frozen) fallen, partly-decayed, slippery leaves that were never swept or cleaned up because nobody seems to deal with those here either.

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Software is hard

A horribly embarrassing software disaster happened on Monday. It was caused by a bad certificate, which is a mechanism used to verify and authenticate a software service. As big as it was, I doubt anybody will lose their job over the Microsoft Teams outage even though it had an impact on millions of paying customers….

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More Moore’s Law

At the SoCal Python meeting on October 30th, I’m going to address in greater detail what I think developers are going to need to worry about in a post-Moore’s Law world, and why we need to be better engineers.

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To Optimize, or Not?

You should be forced to write efficient code and know how to do it in situations where it matters. You should also be able to recognize when it’s more important to optimize for readability, maintainability and clarity.

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Low-level understanding matters

If you haven’t figured out how to get the most out of what you already have, don’t ask me for more RAM/disk/CPU or anything else. Buy a Pi Zero and use it’s limitations to force yourself to write tight code.

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