Havoc's Blog

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Category: Uncategorized

What Matters In Software Development

Lots of traffic on Twitter about Steve Yegge’s post defining a “software ideology” spectrum. Myles Recny made a survey to help you place yourself along said spectrum. Thinking about it over the weekend, I can’t identify with this framing of software development. Those survey questions don’t seem to cover what I think about most in […]

Developers: request for complaints

I’m looking for a new personal weekend project that would be useful to others. Maybe there’s a useful book or useful piece of software I could create for fellow developers, tech leads, project managers, etc. Doesn’t have to be anything related to any of my current or past work (Linux, C, GTK+, Scala, etc.), but […]

New blog hosting

I’m trying out WPEngine instead of self-managed EC2 since my self-managed uptime stats were pretty bad. Let me know if anything about the blog is more broken than it was before.

Desktop Task Switching Could Be Improved

In honor of GUADEC 2012, a post about desktop UI. (On Linux, though I think some of these points could apply to Windows and OS X.) When I’m working, I have to stop and think when I flip between two tabs or windows. If I don’t stop and think, I flip to the wrong destination […]

ACA constitutionality doesn’t hinge on what you call it

TL;DR I got it right, you may now send me your offers for lucrative legal consulting work. Note: I am not a lawyer. I’ve had a little series of posts, first and second, arguing that the tax code already punishes you for failure to purchase health insurance and health care. (Because any tax credit can […]

The best answer requires some aggravation

Once you think you have a good answer to an important problem, it’s time to drive everyone crazy looking for an even better answer. Here’s a scenario I’ve been through more times than I can count: I thought I had a pretty good approach, or didn’t think anything better was possible, and wasn’t looking to […]

Binding an implicit to a Scala instance

In several real-world cases I’ve had a pair of types like this: An implicit often leaves a policy decision undecided. At some layer of your code, though, you want to make the decision and stick to it. Passing around a tuple with an object and the implicit needed to invoke its methods can be awkward. […]

practice and belief

This NYTimes blog post scrolled past the other day, a discussion of an article by John Gray. John Gray has this to say: The idea that religions are essentially creeds, lists of propositions that you have to accept, doesn’t come from religion. It’s an inheritance from Greek philosophy, which shaped much of Western Christianity and […]

A few thoughts on open projects, with mention of Scala

Most of my career has been in commercial companies related to open source. I learned to code just out of college at a financial company using Linux. I was at Red Hat from just before the IPO when we were selling T-shirts as a business model, until just before the company joined the S&P500. I […]

The Java ecosystem and Scala ABI versioning

On the sbt mailing list there’s a discussion of where to go with “cross versioning.” Here’s how I’ve been thinking about it. Disclaimer I’m a relative newcomer to the Scala community. If I push anyone’s buttons it’s not intentional. This is a personal opinion. Summary Two theories: The largest problem created by changing ABI contracts […]