A couple of interesting articles about debugging. Debugging doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention when people are taught about programming, I assume you’re supposed to acquire this skill by osmosis, but it is actually one of those skills that should receive much greater attention because it’s one of those that separates highly productive developers from, well, not so productive ones.
Why I’m Productive in Clojure. I’ve long been a fan of Lisp and Lisp-like languages, even though I wasn’t originally that happy with having Lisp inflicted on me when I was at university. Because it was weird and back then I didn’t much appreciate non-mainstream languages. These days I do because that’s where you usually find better expressiveness and ideas supposedly too strange for mainstream languages. I guess that makes me a language hipster.
And while we’re on the subject of lisp-like languages - I’ve never heard of Julia, but this blog post made me wonder if it should be on my list of languages to look at.
We have a Nest thermostat and I wasn’t too keen when I heard that Google bought them. Probably have to look into securing it (aka stopping the data leakage). While I understand the trade “your data for our free service” model from an economics perspective, I do take some issue with the “we’ll sell you a very expensive device and your data still leaks out to us” model. Nests aren’t exactly cheap to begin with.
Debugging on a live system that’s shouldn’t be live. Been there done that, on a trading system…
Netflix and network neutrality, as seen from the other side. I’m an advocate of regulating ISPs (especially the larger ones) as public utilities and essentially enforcing network neutrality that way. Netflix obviously has been going on about network neutrality for a while now but the linked article does make me wonder if those supposed “pay to play” payments were actually more like payments for the server hosting. You know, like the charges that us mere mortals also have to pay if we want to stick a server into someone’s data centre.