Posts tagged: POSTS

I really do like Quora (you may have seen my SadQuora tweets, a side effect of the time I spend there). But when somebody asked, “What are the most annoying types of questions on Quora?” I couldn’t resist. Maybe it’s just my feed, but I see things like these a lot:

• I’m 23 years old, am I too old to learn programming?
• If a self-driving car had to either hit and kill a cow in the left lane, or hit and kill a horse in the right lane, which would it choose?
• I made this, do you like it?
• Who would win in a fight between seven adult tigers and a Humvee full of Navy SEALs?
• What is the best programming language to use if I want to make a site to compete with Facebook?
• What phone is best for graphic design?
• What is the process of building a jet airplane from scratch? Please be specific.
• Why do all my questions get marked as needing improvement?
• My computer is acting funny, how do I fix it?
• Is computer programming going to be obsolete in five years because all the computers will program themselves?
• My girlfriend said she didn’t want to see me anymore and moved to another country and married some other guy and changed her name. Would it be romantic to track her down?
• What is the cutest picture of your cat and what is a story about it?

When I first switched from OS X to Ubuntu for my daily development work, one of the things I missed a lot was Divvy.

“Window throwing” is the purpose of Divvy (and Spectacle, which I later replaced it with). With a single keyboard shortcut, I can make the foreground window fill the right half of the screen. Or the left half. Or the bottom right quadrant. Or the whole screen. Any rectangle I care to define. I can even send it to the other monitor.

Non-engineers want to know: what happens when a big bug is found in your software, and the bug is causing real users real problems, and you’re the one who wrote the code?

Engineers do sometimes write bad code, and sometimes it makes it into production, it’s true.

But shipping production software involves a lot more than writing code. It goes beyond that one engineer. That engineer is not the only person who saw or ran that code.

When we were growing our team of Python devs at CMG, I was involved in a lot of interviews. I really enjoyed it, meeting and hiring interesting and talented engineers.

I’m not a big fan of quizzing people on technical minutiae in interviews. I do think that asking some questions about technical likes and dislikes can be very illuminating though.

For example, “What’s your favorite standard library module?” (My favorite answers are itertools or functools, but anything that shows they have hands-on appreciation for the depth of the standard library is good.)

How do you comprehensibly explain to non-programmers the challenges of programming? Why can’t you “just tell the computer what you want it to do”?

A classic teaching tool for this is the “make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich” demo.

Put out on the table a jar of peanut butter, a jar of jelly, a loaf of bread, and a knife. Tell them you are a robot (computer) that is physically capable of making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but you need instruction (programming). That’s their job.