Technical Debt is like Tetris

#307 – March 17, 2019

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Technical Debt is like Tetris

Like most people who’ve played it, I love Tetris. I still remember playing it for the first time on a friend’s Nintendo Game Boy. You may already have the theme song stuck in your head. Not only is Tetris one of the best games of all time, it’s also an excellent analogy for technical debt. The point of this analogy is to reach a common understanding of technical debt and its impact.

“Good Code Documents Itself” And Other Hilarious Jokes You Shouldn’t Tell Yourself

Code documentation — is there anything more exciting than spending your time writing extensive comments? If I had to guess, your answer is probably somewhere along the lines of “uhm, yes, everything is more exciting than that”. Plus, requesting to document your code is almost like an insult to your well thought out design, this beautiful creation you implemented so carefully that it just has to be obvious what is happening. Writing about it is just redundant, the code is all you need.

A gentle introduction to multithreading

Modern computers have the ability to perform multiple operations at the same time. Supported by hardware advancements and smarter operating systems, this feature makes your programs run faster, both in terms of speed of execution and responsiveness.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders

Each year, 600 coders gather to talk shop at a conference in New York called PyGotham. The organizers know how male and white the tech industry is, so they make a special effort to recruit a diverse speaker lineup. They promote the event on mailing lists for women and people of color who code, and they run a workshop for women in tech to encourage them to submit talks. The organizers ask speakers to fill out a demographic survey so they can track the progress of the conference’s diversity.

The philosophies of languages, from Smalltalk to Perl

In the new world of single-user computers (personal computing), programming languages evolved with completely different purposes. User interface had never been a consideration before, but researchers soon realized they needed to put the personal into personal computing.

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