learning

The M-Word: The Culture of Programming
Dec 14, 2019 programming learning teams
In addition to [the monad] being useful, it is also cursed and the curse of the monad is that once you get the epiphany, once you understand—“Oh, that’s what it is!"—you lose the ability to explain it to anybody. — Doug Crockford. I had a problem, once. I was working on a Rails application which generated integration files to be consumed by external partners. They were generated every night in a dozen formats and shipped around the Internet to populate sites you’ve probably used.

Mind the Gaps
Dec 12, 2019 programming learning
“If you truly accumulate effort for a long time, then you will advance.” Xunzi. It’s no secret that many programmers are self-taught. Some of us, myself included, lack formal credentials related to computer science. I’ve worked with good programmers who didn’t graduate high school. It’s a strange profession, with the skills often acquired simply as a side effect of tinkering. You don’t hear about many civil engineers or corporate attorneys who do what they do because they enjoyed playing Zork on their dad’s office computer.