Tesugen

Summary of May, 2003

May, 2003, was unusually focused on software development, exploring aspects such as programming and process.

As I continued reading Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, I was particularly interested in his examples for illustrating the incredibly weird theory of superstrings, and in how new scientific theories emerge—and of course I was curious about what parallels could be drawn between science and software development.

See the following posts:

Then I read two articles by Paul Graham, The Hundred-Year Language and Hackers and Painters; I wrote a summary of the former, and pulled quotes from the latter.

This month, I had an idea that I kept coming back to, about how someone unfamiliar with a piece of code should be able to randomly pick a spot somewhere, and quickly get a sense of how it relates to the rest of the system, just by studying the local code.

See these posts:

Also related to this, I realize now, was a post about code clarity and Hungarian Notation. Hungarian Notation establishes conventions which allow programmers to express more with less typing, but also requires the knowledge of those conventions—which isn’t naturally a bad thing; there are many conventions in programming.

Then I began reading a very long interview with complexity theorist Brian Arthur, from which I pulled several quotes:

I also began reading, or rather skimming through, Thomas S. Kuhn’s classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which resulted in the following posts:

Then I wrote a longer post about writing, blogging, and software development, inspired by an article and two books: Richard Gabriel’s great Repetition, Generativity, and Patterns—from which I also pulled some quotes; Stephen King’s On Writing—which I listened to as an audio book; and a book I read nearly a year earlier: Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake.

Then some stray posts related to software development:

I also watched a keynote by Fred Brooks and posted my notes, and lastly, I read two articles which I pulled quotes from and briefly commented:

The above was posted to my personal weblog on October 25, 2003. My name is Peter Lindberg and I am a thirtysomething software developer and dad living in Stockholm, Sweden. Here, you’ll find posts in English and Swedish about whatever happens to interest me for the moment.

Posted around the same time:

The seven most recent posts:

  1. Tesugen Replaced (October 7)
  2. My Year of MacBook Troubles (May 16)
  3. Tesugen Turns Five (March 21)
  4. Gustaf Nordenskiöld om keramik kontra kläddesign (December 10, 2006)
  5. Se till att ha två buffertar för oförutsedda utgifter (October 30, 2006)
  6. Bra tips för den som vill börja fondspara (October 7, 2006)
  7. Light-Hearted Parenting Tips (September 16, 2006)
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