I wonder why people boast they can do ten things in one line. Less lines of code doesn't mean less bugs. The debugger just stops at each symbol instead of each line which I think adds to the cognitive load.
Documenting while waiting for the flow is like stretching before exercise. It gets you to that place :)
I got my experience/slaps by fixing my own code in the same codebase for more than ten years. I have empathy for the future maintainers :)
Also, it's important that you make your own templates for each of the document types, because thinking about them is part of the design process. It reduces the cognitive load of understanding yet another set of design document templates, and they are malleable in your own hands :)
I'm a fan of using the least number of language features to get the job done. If a language is simple and can be stepped through easily, one benefits from the removal of the added cognitive load of knowing a large number of language features. This provides extra brainspace to understand the problem space and the system one is working on. Most importantly, it makes it easier to have the whole shebang in your mind while you add code (correctly.)
And it adds to maintainability (so long as done in a balanced way!)
I had a boss who saw me looking out a window say, "You look like you are concentrating. I'll come back later."
I document EVERYTHING I think straight away into their appropriate documents so I can forget about it while I'm loading as much of a system's design into my head as I can. It allows me to write good code during that small window of available zen. After years of doing that, I made a document about documentation. Hope it's of use. https://pcblues.com/assets/approaching_software_projects.pdf
I'll be the antiquated person here. Writing/speaking well has brought people to knowledge because the authors are uniquely positioned to use genius, humour, gentleness and generosity to bring an inquisitive but ignorant person into a new area of knowledge. When the value of that can be quantified, then we can compare AI "generation" of "efficiently written, useful knowledge" with what we had/have.
Same for fiction, visual art, raising children, caring for old people, and so on, and so on.
At university, I studied zoonosis (travel of disease from animals to humans) and the introduction of AIDs to the world from Congo. The most likely theory (to me) is that when cities were developed to physically concentrate and economically exploit African people and resources, along with the associated international travel, it was an unhappy accident that contributed to the success of diseases that would otherwise transfer from animal to human and then die out due to the physical separation of populations.
Agreed. He seems to be smart enough to never be caught. Could just be the need to be liked/famous/known. On the other hand, he might not have expected to be noticed by someone who knew him. That's a real 0.01% you can't predict in your perfect planning.
I loved playing games I was familiar with because the rules had been finalised with the people I played with, and we had agreed on the ambiguities (they became house rules). We then developed our strategies based on a known and "complete" understanding of the rules, and the fun came from winning based on the mutually understood set of rules, not a strategem that a player extracted from an unread part of the manual. On the other hand, learning a new game is fun when no-one has played it before, and part of the process was agreeing on the rules after a few run-throughs. Illuminati was great like that. Yet so was the Game of Life card game.
A complicated game/rulebook is a different beast. I believe it also needs a person willing to teach the game, or learn it on their own, then teach it. It needs a person familiar with the game, and new players willing to invest in the
game knowing they will play it together A LOT. That will exists.
For a bit of tangentially related fun, I recommend Steven Jackson's Murphy's Rules. It was a book of irrational game rules. I used to have a hard-copy of this. Sorry if this is not an official link. You may have better luck finding it yourself :)
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/download_preview.php?pid=317646
Plastic slide covers that stick on are pretty cheap if your laptop doesn't already have one. I also think that the open microphone issue is a greater problem, especially with the current ability of speech-to-text, but what you utter may not be as important as being seen "doing a Toobin" during an online meeting. YMMV :) (I won't expand that acronym!)
When SQL can't internally optimise a query into a more efficient constraint problem, unrolling joins is the key. This once MSSQL hacker got to the point of optimising queries with large amounts of joins or CTEs to just populating a single table's columns with one query per one to a few columns at a time (two minute locking queries down to about two seconds.) After that, I started using SQL to generate SQL and run that for really curly requirements. That gives you the ability to write queries that can search for a particular value in any column in any table, or find changes in the past 5 minutes in any column in any table within a fairly quick timeframe. And that's great for debugging applications that interface with the database or identifying rogue table changes. Without needing a transaction log. Programmer's paradise :)
I think it has to do with the precision of the hand wrapped around a pen/paintbrush with a lifetime of experience. The precision of effectively painting with an orange can not be matched to painting with a stick :)
(Edit follows:) Also having the side of the hand on the canvas creates the ability to by so much more accurate. You have minute movements of the fingers rather than painting with your forearm.
I'm too old to remember the mappings for 20 button mice, but I've found the lowly Logitech G305 useful because it has a hardware button to toggle between DPI settings. That makes it useful without using any other key to change the speed of the mouse. Other than that, it has four buttons, and the scroll wheel clicks and goes left and right.
If you shift the computational result back in time to the same time you started it, your O notation is just a zero, and quite scalable. Actually it would open the programming market up to more beginners, because they can brute force any computation without caring about the time dimension. Algorithm courses will go broke, and the books will all end up in the remainder bin. Of course, obscure groups of purists will insist on caring about the space AND time dimensions of complexity, but no-one will listen to them anymore.
I think a syntax highlighter and in-line documentation for future language features before they are created is also necessary. I'll stick with more established languages, too. Time in a single direction is already hard.
I've found that people who do this have just told your company they are not worth the money to employ them, and they go in the next downsize. If the sixty days is enforced by being the actual deadline, all the important steps (documentation, testing, future-proofing, extensibility, simplicity of design, etc.) should be done, along with a new set of custom tools to make the same type of job take a week next time it is asked for. By somebody else if necessary. Ironically (?) the best developers build their own redundancy into their work. I developed in a way that allowed another person to get up to speed and take over my work. It informs good design, coding and documentation. I kept that job for over twenty years with several downsizing episodes. Sorry this sounds like gloating, but it was a technique that worked, so I thought I'd share.
The shift of screen sizes for computing devices from a single aspect ratio (4/3 monitors) to just about anything created a nightmare for UX, and web development is suffering from it. I still maintain that no-one should have to scroll to use software. Everything you need for a certain place in an application's workflow should be on one screen. If the size of the screen means that more steps are needed to complete a task using software, then that should be handled by the adaptability of the software (including larger text for visually impaired people). Scrolling was the work of the devil. As for accessibility, it makes a blind person able to become familiar with how many elements are available on any screen they use based on their own experience.
And so another level of abstraction in software development is created, but this time with an unknown level of accuracy. Call me old-school, but I like a debuggable, explainable and essentially provably reliable result. When a good developer can code while keeping the whole problem accurately in their heads, the code is worth its wait (deliberate sic, thank you) in gold.
Hallucination from software generation AI is worse than software written by a beginning programmer, because at least they can analyse and determine the truth of their mistakes.
Here's just a little silly story from my own life of unfinished projects. I wanted to make a sort of shazam where I could hum the tune of a classical piece of music and find out what it was. I hacked together an enormous midi database of classical music with a couple of libraries to take a hum and turn it into midi notes in order to find the pattern in the database based on the difference between each note in a melody of a classical piece as an identifying key (pun intended). As a really bad singer, I couldn't hold a note, but you can imagine the work required to get this to actually work.
The amusing part was that I told a prospective software development employer about the project because it was consuming a fair part of my life at the time and showed an interest in software development in my spare time. They asked, "Did it work?" I said, "Nope"
I didn't get the job but we both had a laugh about it during the interview.
This is interesting because I believe the two major supermarkets in Australia can create a duopoly in anti-competitive pricing by just employing price analysis AI algorithms on each side and the algorithms will likely end up cooperating to maximise profit. This can probably be done legally through publicly obtained prices and illegally by sharing supply cost or profit per product data. The result is likely to be similar. Two trained AIs will maximise profit in weird ways using (super)multidimensional regression analysis (which is all AI is), and the consumer will pay for maximised profits to ostensible competitors. If the pricing data can be obtained like this, not much more is needed to implement a duopoly-focused pair of machine learning implementations.
Centralisation vs decentralisation.
Cost-savings vs localisation of disaster.
It's a swinging pendulum of decisions. And developers know that software/hardware provision is a house of cards. The more levels of dependency, the more fragile the system is.
Absolutely horrible when lives will be lost, but determining the way our global systems are engineered and paid for will always be a moving target based on policy and incentive.
My heart goes out to life and death results of this. There are no perfect tech solutions.