ejames

8 ms·

1.
by ejames 5mo ago
Location: Atlanta, GA, USA Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Python, Elm, React, Typescript CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-james-45b44b16/ Email: thasero at gmail dot com
2.
by ejames 14y ago
More difficult to work with. It's not a problem for the computer if you have a lot of code in a single file, but it is a problem for the computer programmer. If there's a lot of functionality in a single file, class, or other grouping of c
3.
by ejames 14y ago
Take home exams are somewhat common at modern universities, and in fact are sometimes used as an anti-cheating measure. Rather than having questions which can be easily answered with access to research materials, the exam is designed to be
4.
by ejames 14y ago
Having the legal right to do a thing does not mean that you are invincible to criticism for exercising that right. You have the right to freedom of speech, but the things you actually say may be foolish or wrong; contrarily, cheating on yo
5.
by ejames 14y ago
Thanks for the example. Receiving a patch does let you know just what change the user intended to make, and often you actually care about the change, not the before or after. As I keep looking at this, it seems that it's most valuable when
6.
by ejames 14y ago
Hmm. I appreciate the idea of a standardized way to modify a JSON document, but I'm not certain what problem it realistically solves. Can someone who's worked with APIs that accept updates give a code example of something that would be be
7.
by ejames 14y ago
Hey Jonathan ;) This is the danger of having a 'test org' separate from the 'dev org'. When writing tests is tied to writing production code, your progress in one is tied to progress in the other. If it's easy to write tests for a particu
8.
by ejames 14y ago
You can't know, but you can guess, based on past experience or logic. The simplest way to estimate the future is to guess that it will be similar to the past. For example, if you personally tend to write off-by-one errors a lot, it's a goo
9.
by ejames 14y ago
Yes - but the test would fail when the invariant is mistakenly changed. On the test run after the invariant was changed, you would get new information (the test does not always pass) and change your behavior (revert the commit which altere
10.
by ejames 14y ago
I don't understand what you mean by "prevent you from unknowingly doing something that should have changed your behavior". If you do something without knowing it, how could it change your behavior? If it's a case where you should have cha
11.
by ejames 14y ago
This is why I left Microsoft. Automated testing was a separate discipline - meaning there were "dev devs" and "test devs". Automated tests were written based on what the "test devs" had time for, not on the need or usefulness of such test
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by ejames 14y ago
I've seen the value of text formats personally. I work mainly on an iPhone project. In order to handle customers requests for this or that custom UI feature, I invented a tool that generates something like a simplified XIB file from an ima
13.
by ejames 15y ago
It's because Objective-C methods are named according to the nouns that they return rather than the verbs they perform. For example, "[input stringByAppendingThing:thing]" rather than "input.append(thing)". Methods are actions, not objects,
14.
by ejames 15y ago
I think there are two types of claims typically made in the "people who use X are better/worse programmers than people who don't" argument. One is a claim based on difficulty. X is really hard, so if you can use it successfully, you must b
15.
by ejames 15y ago
It's hard to make accurate, general statements about a group. It's also hard to tell good programmers from bad programmers. So it's very hard to say whether Rails programmers in general are good or bad. I can tell you, however, that it's
16.
by ejames 15y ago
If you're dealing with a complex system that needs a lot of work, I would recommend trying to break it down into subsystems and handle the subsystems one at a time. The original article does assume that you're dealing with a system that mor
17.
by ejames 15y ago
There have been attempts to organize this, including one I know off the top of my head[1]. There are two problems. One is that an orderly transfer of control requires a certain amount of planning and coordination, which are precisely the r
18.
by ejames 15y ago
Part of it is a terminology problem. It's now common for any small business in the software industry to claim to be a "startup", even if it's actually a glorified consulting agency or contract software shop. Part of it is an integrity prob
19.
by ejames 15y ago
HTTP status 418 is an "official" status code released in the traditional yearly April Fool's Day paper[1] of the Internet Engineering Task Force. It was the joke for 1998. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_Text_Coffee_Pot_Control_P...
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by ejames 15y ago
I think there are two important facts to keep in perspective here. First, polls have shown that U.S. citizens drastically overestimate the amount of the federal budget allocated to foreign aid. As I recall, the average estimate is 25%; the
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by ejames 15y ago
It's a joke commit, with auto-generated CoffeeScript from a conversion tool. About 3,700 deletions come from files that were erroneously replaced by empty files. Another 1,400 or so are from removing the license comment at the top of the f
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by ejames 15y ago
Austin, TX - BarZ Adventures. Software developer, Rails or iPhone. Android experience also welcome. We're a small but profitable business that licenses software for making tour guides and visitor directories. The company was founded on sa
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by ejames 15y ago
It's worth remembering that jury nullification is a two-way street. Nullification is most famous for its history in racially-charged trials in the American South. Southern jurors would refuse to enforce criminal laws if the accused was whi
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by ejames 15y ago
Yes, interview questions like this are common. The problem with "practical application" questions is that the answer almost always comes down to "it depends". The correct optimization or fix is specific to the actual thing you are doing; t
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by ejames 15y ago
It is common practice for engineering to be explicitly forbidden from looking at any patent whatsoever. A peculiarity of the U.S. patent system is that the size of the penalty is larger if the party accused of infringement is shown to have
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by ejames 15y ago
I would say it's a little from column A and a little from column B. On the one hand, no I don't need to know calculus formulas off the top of my head for my daily work. Even if something came up, I could kick my textbooks out of the attic
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by ejames 15y ago
By having a 7-digit serial and omitting leading zeroes, perhaps?
28.
by ejames 15y ago
An excerpt from an article[1] I ran across a few weeks ago seems appropriate: "The printer was the first drum printer that I had ever seen. It would print 1500 lines per minute alphanumeric, and 1800 lines per minute when only numeric value
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by ejames 15y ago
Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. An advantage of electronic voting is that the machines can be designed for use by the blind. This is in fact one of the goals written into the act of Congress which funded the development of the m
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by ejames 15y ago
I was a software engineer with no reports at MSFT, and at the time had 5 people between myself and Steve. Since leaving, I've heard from former coworkers that the team was reorganized... to make it flatter. The problem with Microsoft's org

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