Home on the Digital Range
Last weekend I competed in the qualification round of Google Code Jam. I went into it cold (i.e. not having read any of the previous problem sets), and found it a little harder than I expected. The first 2 questions were easy. The last 2 were easy in principle, but I found my implementation didn't scale well to the large data sets, given the limits involved. I still got well over the required score to get me into the next round.
My take-aways from the process are as follows:
I've just been reading this Forbes article called "The Rise of Developeronomics". The author argues that because increasingly software is the core value proposition that differentiates companies from each other, that software developers are more and more becoming the wealth creators in society. The author recommends investing in software developers as a way of leveraging your own capital. This article builds on an earlier article by David Kirpatick called "Now Every Company is a Software Company".
I was browsing a list of tools and services for a lean startup a couple of days ago, when I noticed that many of tools implement a Kanban methodology. I had never heard of Kanban, so I took a quite trip over to Wikipedia.
I've just read two blog posts on creating written content programatically. The first was the article How I automated my writing career by Robbie Allen. This article gives a brief description of how the author's company generates web-site content automatically using the quantitative analysis of data.
I read the post "Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice" on the weekend. It is mostly aimed at permanent employees at companies, although I thought there were some useful takeaways for contractors as well.
Below is my summary of the points that resonated with me:
There is an Emacs mode for working with Ruby on Rails (of course). The main project page can be found here. In order to get everything set up, I had to do the following:
Alecco Locco has summarized the SQLite presentation entitled A Lesson In Low-Defect Software at this URL: SQLite: A Lesson In Low-Defect Software. Now, I'm a big fan of SQLite, and this summary has pointed out a few things that I need to improve in my own development process - namely, more comments (apparently SQLite has a comment:code ratio of 2:1), and automated full coverage testing.