Book Report - Straw Dogs

I recently read Straw Dogs by John Gray. It was part of my summer reading and I finished it on a boiling hot beach in Northland. When I returned to my home of Wellington I visited a friend’s place for tea. We talked animatedly about what we had done, seen, and read on holiday. As the caffeine urged on our conversation I told her what I had read in Straw Dogs. I tried my best to explain it as her eyes gradually glazed over (which is normal when I talk for more than a minute). But I could tell she was not comfortable with the ideas I was telling her. The tea in my cup had dried up and we changed the topic.

The Database Streamy Weamy Pattern

A few years ago I was introduced to an interesting ebook called Designing Event Driven Systems. In it the author Ben Stopford outlines how to build business systems using Apache Kafka. I was a young impressionable developer and the book turned my understanding of system design on its head.

P/PC: a productivity principle for programmers (and other people)

It’s so easy to make your dreams come true. All you need are goals! Just write them down - promise to read one book per week, do 100 push ups every morning, and learn French fluently. The next day, do less than half of what you planned. After one week, do none and forget about everything completely. Then wait until the next crisis has you scribbling new goals optimistically at 3am. Have you done this before? I have. Many times in fact. The problem is that if your ambition is not in harmony with your ability, your goals have no means to come to light. And you find yourself face-down on the floor wondering why you even started.

The Problem with Smurf Speak

You know how the Smurfs substitute almost every word for smurf? This is known as Smurf speak in the comics and TV show. We software developers also Smurf-speak. What we tend to do is put our company or product in the names of modules, classes, and functions. Classes like McDonaldsPendingOrder and GoogleDocsMainMenu have redundant prefixes. Yet PendingOrder and MainMenu are perfectly good names and give you the same information. I am going to outline why you don’t need to Smurf speak, and give a few tips to help you avoid it.

Okay this is my scratch pad. What am I going to write about. Travel and the death of the other. Multilingual apps. Yeah sure, the thesis is that you will be trapped in an anglophone bubble