Data is zeroes and ones — software is zeroes and ones and hard work.
I’ve been thinking a lot over the last couple of years about what an entry-level requirements and/or modeling tool would look like—something that undergrad students would find so useful in courses that they’d actually want to use it (instead of just going through the motions to get a grade). Over at InfoQ, there’s a good summary of some interesting discussion about traceability in agile projects that I think is relevant.
This guide at InfoQ is a nice counterpoint to my list of reasons for not switching to Git.
I’ve been giving talks about Beautiful Code for ten months now. Mostly I talk about how the project came to be, and a few of my favorite chapters, but I end with this:
My father built most of the house that I grew up in. My mother made ever sweater I wore until I was 28. My older brother made my wife’s wedding ring; my sister made the quilt my daughter sleeps under, and my younger brother made the desk I’m sitting at right now. I’m proud to come from a family that makes things, and makes them well. I’d like my daughter to be proud of the things that I make, but when I think back on all the code I’ve written my twenty-eight years of programming, there’s nothing I can point at and say, “I’d like to be remembered for that.”
So let’s throw it out as a new meme. If your obituary was going to be a few pages of code that you’d written, an architecture diagram, or some screenshots, can you think of something you’d be happy with? And if you can’t, what does that say about us and our profession?
David Crow has details. On an unrelated note, I’m looking for $75,000 to fund three junior programmers for six months starting in January to do Really Cool Things. If you’d like to know more, I’m easy to reach.
I got the following a couple of days ago from a colleague in the US:
Our development teams are debating the use of GIT vs SVN. [Project name] has standardized on SVN, but some of the projects are considering GIT. Do you have an opinion on their relative merits, particularly for computational science and engineering applications?
It’s a timely question—two of my best students are keen to switch us from Subversion to Git, and claim the latter makes them much more productive. I’ve decided we’re not going to (not before the end of 2009, anyway) for a couple of reasons:
Later: see also this guide to distributed version control systems.
We need a DJ for our reception on Sept 6. If you know someone in Toronto who doesn’t think that 70s Eurotrash disco has come back into fashion, or that little kids and gangsta rap mix well, please let me know.
We had our second student-industry lunch yesterday, and I think it was just as much a success as the first one. My thanks to everyone from Engenuity, Firestoker, IBM, Microsoft, MITACS, Mukodu, OCE, Red Hat, Scimatic, and ZeroFootprint who came out to chat to our students about life in the real world (and to give them a chance to practice their elevator pitches).
Speaking of where the times goes, these are my current projects:
Heather Williams has posted wordles of Obama’s and McCain’s speeches. Look for “Israel” in both. Now try to find “Iraq”. Er, what?
