I’ve been working with a lot of brand new developers at work recently. It’s really fun being able to magically solve problems for them that I remember being frustrated by not so long ago. I’m trying to strike a balance between giving them useful mental models and overloading them with detail. In the end, I’ve leaned most heavily towards encouraging an experimental model.
How does this tie in to crappy code?
My first tech talk Today, I had the opportunity to give a talk to a bunch of (presumably) computer science students at Carleton- thanks to Elisa and the Carleton Computer Science Society for having me! It was nice to see a bunch of students who were willing to come and listen to 1-2 hrs of talks after going to class all day.
All in all, I probably spent 4-5 hrs prepping for the talk and it was a ton of fun!
When you’ve been wrestling with a bug mentally for a while, finally figuring it out is a great feeling. Almost 2 years ago, I wrote an implementation of the Tortoise-Hare algorithm for cycle detection in singly linked lists.
This was just to see how the algorithm worked, but I couldn’t figure out why it didn’t always work perfectly. I was super stuck. So, I wrote out a (somewhat overkill) set of tests to help figure out what was wrong.
Hey!
This is my first blog post- sometimes I want to write stuff that’s longer than a tweet. I have also wanted to see why people have been evangelizing over static site generators for a long time. Well, those two factors have combined, so this is my first post. In no way is this a commitment to post regularly-I’ll be writing when I feel like it, so keeping a look out on Twitter for new posts will be the best way to keep track of what’s going on here.
