In 2004-2005, I worked for Quova as a Network Geography Analyst. As a practical matter, given that MLB was one of our largest customers at the time, this meant that we fielded complaints for people who were locked out of viewing baseball games where they should not have been, and a good chunk of my […]
Geek Humor
QA Engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a sfdeljknesv. — Bill Sempf (@sempf) September 23, 2014 @sempf was it a mock bar? — Brian H Prince (@brianhprince) September 23, 2014 @sempf You forgot about when he ordered 0’; DROP TABLE […]
The Seventies: Getting into Programming
Note: this is part of a much longer piece I’m writing, which I’ll announce later. I thought you’d enjoy this first draft excerpt. I took my first programming class in the summer of 1975; I was 15 when I started. The programming lab was in the math and science building of Saddleback College. Back in […]
Programming Sucks & Why I Quit
This “Why I Quit Programming” page is consistently one of my top ten web hits, partly because of its strong Google ranking. This “Programming Sucks” rant has become one of my three favorite rants about software ever written. The other two are Benji Smith’s “Why I Hate Frameworks” rant and Andrew Clover’s (bobince’s) extra special […]
Writing and the Critical Path
As someone who’s spent my whole life working mostly on one large project after another, you’d think novels wouldn’t be as hard for me to write as they actually are. I had this glimpse into why: I generally had a sense, at all times, whether something was on the critical path—or not. There were desired […]
Box.com: Using My Powers for Good
Four months ago, I posted this commentary and critique of Box’s “Working at Box” page. It got back to me that it created quite a stir, but I hadn’t checked back on the page recently. I have noticed incoming links to that blog post, so I wondered what was up. Credit where due, Box has […]
The Sort Implementation Interview Question
I’m going to go out on what seems to be a wildly unpopular limb here and say this: asking a developer to write an implementation of a sort algorithm is almost certainly a bad job interview question. Why? Because you’re likely not hiring someone to write implementations of sort algorithms. Even if you were, they […]
On Quark XPress’s Demise
Back in the day, I used to write Quark XPress XTensions for a living, so this commentary (and linked article) about Quark XPress’s demise was fascinating. One of those involved revamping and revising a significant (and sluggish) XTension to add new features. I remember contacting Quark because of a problem we were having with so […]
Why I Wrote the Calcumatic
Bonjour to all my Francophone visitors! A French site has linked to my E-Book Royalty Calcumatic, and there are a couple of points I wanted to address. First, it is US-based, and it is my intention to expand it to other regions and vendors. It’s not my intent to be exhaustive, though. One of the […]
Learning to Program and _why the lucky stiff
I still remember learning to program. I remember the yellow paper tape and the teletype machine. I remember the smell of machine oil on the paper tape. I remember the paper cuts. What I can’t tell you is what I wanted to program back at that point in my life. Games, probably, which is something […]