#255 – March 18, 2018
Compressing and enhancing hand-written notes
I wrote a program to clean up scans of handwritten notes while simultaneously reducing file size.
Boiling Frogs - about lowering your standards to mediocrity
Poor (in terms of engineering culture standards) work environment doesn't just impact negatively the end products (quality, fit-for-purpose), development process (effectiveness, efficiency) & people morale - it can also deteriorate their skills, attititudes, long-term motivations. One with high standards is not likely to welcome happily the sudden, significant drop, but we fool ourselves by justifying short-term "compromises" that slowly (but cumulatively) lower our baselines, effectively turning us into much more inferior engineers over longer period of time.
Famous cryptographers’ tombstone cryptogram decrypted
William and Elizebeth Friedman were a husband-and-wife team who were amongst the very first US government cryptographers. Their careers started just before the US entered World War One in 1917, and continued through and beyond World War Two.
Stack-Overflow Developer Survey 2018
Each year, we ask the developer community about everything from their favorite technologies to their job preferences. This year marks the eighth year we’ve published our Annual Developer Survey results—with the largest number of respondents yet. Over 100,000 developers took the 30-minute survey this past January.
When I was first learning to play water polo, a coach told me something I’ve never forgotten. He said, “Great players make everyone around them look like great players.” A great player can catch any pass, anticipating imperfect throws and getting into position. When they make a return pass, they throw the ball so that the other person can make the catch easily.