Stop Treating Digital Weapons Like Biological Weapons
Our Chief Code Whisperer, M. Scott Ford, shares his thoughts about the WannaCry/WannaCrypt malware and reinforces a call for a Digital Geneva Convention.
Our Chief Code Whisperer, M. Scott Ford, shares his thoughts about the WannaCry/WannaCrypt malware and reinforces a call for a Digital Geneva Convention.
Recently, I was pairing with a developer on a client's team. He was stuck and couldn't figure out how to fix the problem. I had a look and guided him through a series of bash and other shell commands until we found the solution. After thanking me -- he had been at it for hours -- he asked me 'How do you know all of this?'
npm is not only the package manager for JavaScript, it's also used to set up tooling around your codebase. Linters, transpilers, testing, and servers. Everything can be configured and run using the very same thing. Basic usage is really simple, too.
Have you ever had one of those “down-the-rabbit-hole” experiences, in which one idea sends you careening through a wormhole of thought? Such a journey often yields unexpected results, yet the “mind map” of your travels can actually be even more surprising. Well, it was one such “Eureka!” moment that convinced me of the parallels between the classic Hello, World! program and Test-Driven Development (TDD).
In this two-part post, I explain what are interactive notebooks, why we'd want to use them, and how to get started with the nteract desktop program.
A few years ago, in a screenwriting class, our instructor asked us the following question: “How do you prepare yourself to write? What things do you do to create an environment that’s conducive to writing?” This was the third quarter with my fellow students – first class with this instructor – and I was comfortable speaking my mind. My answer went something like this: “I don’t have time for that. I only have one hour at lunch to write. So I turn on my laptop and I write.”
Software engineers usually don’t deal with binary data directly. Most data is stored in well-known, open-format files and manipulated through libraries that know how to handle them. So bits and bytes are almost never in a developer’s mind. Apparently, they even scare people: all that random, unreadable mess not meant for human consumption...
While doing his undergraduate at Virginia Tech, my son Tyler worked at 100-Cents (or some such store of similar name). He went on to graduate with honors and become a CPA at one of the Big-5 accounting firms. Then, he got an MBA at Darden (one of the top MBA colleges in the country). And now, he is an investment banker that manages the sales and acquisition of companies valued over a billion dollars. So he’s doing OK. But, instead of telling him I’m proud of his accomplishments, I chide him saying: “I had hopes of you becoming a manager at 100-Cents.” Which is not necessarily a career that you spend $250,000 on education to achieve.
“You should strike,” he said. We were laying in bed, catching up on the day's news when I saw an article for a general strike being organized to bring awareness to the contributions of women, both at work and at home. I mentioned it to my husband, Scott, who is also my business partner. Or as he likes to point out, I'm technically his boss as I'm the majority shareholder.
In my last blog post, I explained why metaphors are so important and how they can help raise our chops (and our hopes) when it comes to influencing the business side of things. The Seat Belt metaphor used in my previous example may have worked great for some, but not for others. Keeping a few different ones at the ready helps you adapt on-the-fly and better connect with whomever you’re speaking with. Another one of my favorite car metaphors to use is inspections.