Weekly News Roundup 12/2015

Productivity is all about efficiency — doing more, faster and with less.

I like pragmatic articles. And I like to be productive when I’m working. David Lavenda does a good work, summing up 10 extremely simple tips that would boost your productivity.
Don’t be fooled, though: they are simple in their essence, not in their applicability.

These are things in PHP which make me sad.

When looking at sites like this, you can think that the person that wrote it is an hater. But if you stop and think about it, you can be so specific only if you have used PHP for a long time. The one about the PHP logo is my favourite.

The “Fizz-Buzz test” is an interview question designed to filter out the 99.5% of candidates

Being a computer scientist means being a problem solver. Nowadays we focus on Architecture-level patterns and we are leaving the problem solving behind. This study shows that we should focus more on solving problems.

Using these anti-patterns makes for less readable, more buggy, and less Pythonic code

Programming in a new language is almost like speaking in another language: a native speaker will always spot the differences ¹. What happens when you just learned Python?

Having at least one other set of eyes checking any code

I have never done formal code reviews, but in the last weeks I’ve had other (more experienced) people looking at my code. Boy, what a disaster. In one sentence, with code reviews your code (and you) get to stand on the shoulder of the giants and works toward more professionally-written code.

When asked what doing things like a girl means,a girl responds “Do them as best as you can”

Assume people are as or more qualified than you.
If you’re at a conference and talking to a feminine presenting person, assume they are an expert in the field of the conference.
Before you are about to explain a paper condescendingly to someone in a dress, assume that they wrote it.

Find something you love so much that you’ll do it for free,then become so good that anyone will pay you to do it

If you have a problem or are stuck on something that needs your manager’s attention, come prepared to explain the problem to them but also present your solution. Let me know that you’ve put some thought to this. You can ask for either my clearance to go do your plan, or a validation that your plan is reasonable and feasible. But most importantly, demonstrate to your team or management your ability to solve the problem, and it won’t go unnoticed.

Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them

I think it’s far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

Are you sick of hearing #Big #Data buzzwords?

You know what? It is the mediocrity we have been against all the time. Mediocre developers who in the first .com boom got into the market by taking a class or reading a book are back in a different shape: those who know how to be opinionated, look cool, play the game and take the paycheck. We are in another .com boom now, and if there is a crash, sadly they are out – even if it includes me.
But soon this will be no good. Not good enough. We got to grow up and go back to school, relearn all about Maths, statistics, and generally scientific reasoning. We need to man up and re-learn that being a good coder has nothing to do with the number of stickers you have at the back of your Mac. It is all scientific – we come from a long line of scientists, we have got to live up to our heritage.

Would you trust a music notation program developed by a non-musician?

I can relate to this one, because I was one of those people who’d asked “What can I build?”. The story is really simple here: stop reading and begin writing code.