Well, let’s do something fun… If you are a writer/blogger like me, you probably keep some ideas/notes/drafts around. Things you want to publish later, but it hasn’t quite been fleshed out into a full article yet. I’ve been writing for many years now, and I started keeping notes by just creating a draft article in WordPress, and keep it around to work on it later. Given that my articles can be quite technical, some of them might need some research, some reading up on topics, writing some code, testing with some hardware or such. Thing is, some of these draft posts never made it into an article so far. Some are just a few quick quotes or links. Some have been around for more than 10 years.
So I was thinking it would be fun to take a few of these, and make them into short articles. See what I remember about them. What was it I wanted to talk about? So I will start with the oldest today. This one was first created on the 17th of September, 2012. It was last edited on the 11th of December, 2013.
The title was (as you can see): “Yet more thoughts!”. It was supposed to be another post similar to these earlier ones, which just discusses a few short, unrelated things.
The first note reads ‘OS junkies’. Yes, I remember the point I wanted to make there. And it seems it has already made it into this article: OS and platform wars.
Then there are three links to other blogposts I wanted to discuss:
http://prog21.dadgum.com/80.html
http://prog21.dadgum.com/152.html
http://prog21.dadgum.com/153.html
I notice that the above article has already covered these three as well. Well, this is turning out to be quite an exercise in futility, is it not? Apparently most of these notes have already been worked into an earlier article, but this draft was never updated to reflect that.
But, there’s more! There is one last note that appears to be some quotes from some discussion. Sadly the source of this discussion is not saved, so I’m not sure what this discussion these were originally taken from, or even who it is I am quoting here. The first one is:
Yup, and for many individuals it is a problem when they are let loose without direct supervision from peers/superiors.
This one is difficult to interpret without any context, but perhaps it was meant to be in relation to the first article by James Hague mentioned above? Perhaps mostly related to this: “Once you’ve got something working, then build a series of improved versions”.
That again is something I covered in various articles, such as this one, where I talk about ‘growing your code’ by starting with simple working prototypes and building up functionality in small steps. And there’s other stuff I’ve written on that since. So perhaps that remark is to be seen as the observation that ‘many individuals’ (meaning: developers) would require a bit of guidance from peers/superiors to structure their work that way, rather than trying to write the whole application at once, before having tested a single line, and then trying to jumpstart the whole thing in one go… which always turns into a big explosion of bugs.
Or perhaps it was more to do with what is also discussed in this article, as ‘phase 2’:
About how you have all sorts of ‘libraries’ and ‘frameworks’ these days, which are often too complex and too generalized to use effectively. So perhaps the remark is to be seen in that sense: scope creep and adding all sorts of ‘features’ that are considered good practice in literature, such as unit tests, all sorts of interfaces, design patterns etc. But in the process you might make a mountain out of a mole hill. The key is to keep your code simple and effective.
Another problem is that most people have no clue what it means to be a moderator. How to moderate a discussion/debate… what a debate is, what basic rules of conduct in a debate are… how to see through common fallacies etc.
In this quote it is at least obvious what the context is. Apparently it is about moderation of online forums, as I guess social media wasn’t that much of a thing back then, at least, not for me, so it probably wasn’t about Twitter, Facebook or whatnot. I was mostly active on forums/comment sections of certain tech news websites and such.
I suppose this is a recurring topic. I had already covered it before, and I suppose, also with all the new woke ideology that has come into academia, politics and the media, it has only gotten worse over time. Rational debate without logical fallacies seems to have become a niche thing. Less and less people know how to actually argue a point properly, or spot the difference between a rational, valid argument, and an emotional/moral ‘argument’, which is really more coercion than it is persuasion.
Ironically I believe one person actually did try to come to my rescue by pointing out that I did in fact correctly predict some technical stuff despite the fact that the majority claimed otherwise. I think the example given may have been AMD’s underwhelming Bulldozer.
I suppose I will be getting back to this topic at some point in the future. Anyway, this was the first in a series of clearing out my old drafts. This one hasn’t been all that interesting, as apparently I had already worked most of it into an article. But there are more, and things should get better. Hope like liked this one anyway, and hopefully the next ones are even more fun.
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