I think the development of Python and Jupyter and other less known things like Vega are much more interesting. Python is today the only "glue code" that puts all of it together, from data to insights. Other than the expensive part, is it really such a bad thing? I feel like relational databases are…

part of SQL for Web Nerds by Philip Greenspun Suppose that you want to start lumping together information from multiple rows. For example, you're interested in JOINing users with their classified ads. That will give you one row per ad posted. But you want to mush all the rows together for a…

This is the second post in a series. If you want to start from the beginning: Don’t Do This in Production. Early in my career, I worked at a company that built web content management systems. Their product helped marketing departments self-manage their own websites, instead of relying on developers…

concurrent (noun): Archaic. a rival or competitor. Two lines that do not intersect are called parallel lines. In this piece, I disagree with Joe Armstrong and Rob Pike, basing my argument on the differences between vending machines and gift boxes (illustrated with drawings carefully prepared in…

The Swift community has recently had an interesting discussion about "when to use classes vs when to use structs." The conclusion I think has been most widely accepted is "use classes when you need reference semantics, and use structs when you need value semantics.". "Classes for references, structs…

Skip to content November 16, 2018 QUESTION: I remember reading somewhere that John F. Kennedy quoted Chesterton as saying something about not taking a fence down until you know the reason why it was put it up. I think the idea was if someone says they don’t understand why something is the way it is…

See Also Strings in Objective-C Welcome back after an end-of-Summer hiatus. Last time we looked at concatenating strings in Objective-C . Today we look at another common string operation: comparison. Identity Comparing two variables or objects can sometimes be a tricky proposition. There are several…

Not too long ago, Jenna Bilotta wrote an excellent article called, How designers and engineers can play nice 1 , in which she talks about ways for designers and engineers to work more productively. Having faced similar challenges working with designers (and also working with engineers, when I was on…

For many people, listening to music elicits such an emotional response that the idea of dredging it for statistics and structure can seem odd or even misguided. But knowing these patterns can give one a deeper more fundamental sense for how music works; for me this makes listening to music a lot…

If you've got any real world programming experience then no doubt at some point you've had to resort to some quick and dirty fix to get a problem solved or a feature implemented while a deadline loomed large. Game developers often experience a horrific "crunch" (also known as a "death march"), which…

Don’t Coddle Your Code September 23rd, 2010 Jeff LaMarche presents a rundown on whether Objective-C dealloc implementations should bother nil’ing out an instance variable after releasing it. LaMarche offers a fairly balanced presentation of the two sides, but in my opinion he gives too much…