Reflections

They say that code should read like well-written prose, and that code is written to be read by people—it’s only incidental that machines do something with whatever we create. To those ends, prefixing the names of variables of the boolean type with “is” or “has” or another interrogative word has the effect of leading the reader to expect an answer—“yes” or “no,” or in the parlance of the language, true or false. This communicates to the reader that the variable represents a boolean, and primes them for approaching the next part of the expression as something that may or may not happen. ...

A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage. As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing up in Saskatchewan he’d been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak must have had to work in a garage. “Those guys must have been freezing!” That’s one of California’s hidden advantages: the mild climate means there’s lots of marginal space. In cold places that margin gets trimmed off. There’s a sharper line between outside and inside, and only projects that are officially sanctioned — by organizations, or parents, or wives, or at least by oneself — get proper indoor space. That raises the activation energy for new ideas. You can’t just tinker. You have to justify. ...

this post is in reference to Slack/Hipchat/Hangouts Direct Messages, not Dungeon Masters An all-too-common approach to communication I’ve seen is DM’s for any number of subjects which should be public: how to set up a server, a discussion about an architectural proposal, how to address the content in an open PR, and so on. At best, they limit information sharing among the team members; at worst, they further fracture a team’s cohesion and ruin any efficiency in communication by forcing folks to repeat themselves. ...