I talk a lot about costs. I believe good engineering is about finding the most cost-effective solution to a problem, whether that cost is measured in dollars, hours, morale or lost opportunities. Some costs are paid immediately and some are assumed as debt. Everyone in business knows this intuitively, but some costs are less obvious than others, so it’s important to point them out to your team.
Rich Hickey gave a very interesting talk on problem solving titled “Hammock Driven Development”. Rich took a much more personal (experiential) angle with this talk, so while it was sparse on academic research references it does seem to fit into at least some of what the research on brain science says. Still, while it may not wholly scientific, it was still a very thought provoking talk.…
…The Zen of Python
- Beautiful is better than ugly.
- Explicit is better than implicit.
- Simple is better than complex.
- Complex is better than complicated.
- Flat is better than nested.
- Sparse is better than dense.
- Readability counts.
- Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
- Although practicality beats purity.
- Errors should never pass silently.
- Unless explicitly silenced.
- In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
Earlier today, I read Stop paying your jQuery tax, an excellent article by Sam Saffron which explains why it's a great idea to move all of your external JavaScripts to the end of the HTML document, then proposes a method which allows you to continue to use jQuery's .ready() method anywhere in your document, even though you've moved jQuery itself to the bottom.…
