Currently I am devouring Nassim Taleb’s amazing book “Antifragile.” In this essay, Taleb describes how societies and organisations can survive in the long term by not only becoming robust against adversity, but even thriving in the face of change and volatility. This got me thinking: Can we apply these ideas to software?
When you debug your code to find a problem in your program, you observe the behavior of the program and make assumptions about the nature of the problem. But the behavior you observe can lead you to the wrong conclusions. Based on the wrong conclusions, you would design a fix that might look good at first glance, but would fix nothing or even make things worse.
In this article, I will give an example of a bug hunt that went down the wrong path. Read on to see how even seemingly simple systems can be surprisingly difficult to get right.
A colleague recently asked me what I would do for a living once AI replaces computer programmers. After my initial (hopefully) witty answer, I began to wonder: How good is AI really at doing a programmer’s job? I had read about it, but never tried it myself. So I decided to put ChatGPT to the test.
In my test, I wanted to see if ChatGPT could do real programming. As I wrote before, programming is a creative task. How well would a computer be able to do it? Or would it just repeat examples from the Internet? I decided to interview ChatGPT, just like I would interview a new employee or student to see how experienced the candidate is in software development. Read on to see how well ChatGPT did in my interview.
Recently, I wrote about why I think every TODO in your source code needs a ticket (LINK).
Now that a few weeks have passed, I realize that I did not give the full picture in that article. Even if you have a TODO ticket, it does not automatically mean that it will be helpful. Here is why.
There is so much to do every day. So many tasks, big and small, waiting to be done. How do you keep track?
I have found that normal to-do lists are not enough for me. Often one to-do on the list leads to another, they depend on each other, or I need additional information for reference. So how do I group to-do items in a meaningful way?
Have you ever been jealous of a wizard? Well, I was jealous of Albus Dumbledore, the wise and mighty headmaster of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series. But my jealousy was not for his wisdom or power, but for a certain gadget he owned: The Pensieve.