planetjones

For code exercises I set when recruiting I send a pdf out and then expect a zip file or link to GitHub or bitbucket with the solution. I might give an advisory along the lines of this shouldn’t take more than half a day. But if the candidate screws up and starts again that’s ok. Mistakes and wrong turns are taken all the time in the real world. It works very well. Simple. No complications. And free.

If what you are saying is true it would be possible to go overdrawn at an ATM. This (again AFAIK) doesn’t happen as there is a call to check your balance.

I know the author is talking about a small scale project here, but shortcuts like this (in my experience) just lead to a mess later on; irrespective of the complexity of the problem being solved.

Java doesn’t also say you have to separate concerns. You could easily write a single method which mixes business logic and IO (file and DB)

When writing a batch program you need a balance between understanding it, making it efficient and reliable and promoting re-use (e.g. if many batch programs want the same behaviour break it into a reusable module). COBOL still has dependencies too, so each program is rarely written in isolation and you have to co-ordinate with other teams to ensure their module versions are in sync with yours.

The thing that has always let COBOL down for me is the lack of automated testing.

Of course eventually we (like most parents I believe) learned to relax and not obsessively record sleep, feeds and nappies. My friends who have more than one child said after the first they didn’t do any recording like this and instead just let things take their natural course.

There is a market for this. But I can’t see anything doing a better job than baby connect.

Seriously what are Apple doing. The fundamentals are gone. I literally don’t know what day it is anymore in iOS 11. I use google calendar which is stuck on 31 because apple don’t let third party devs have updatable icons. I used to swipe left to find the date, but that no longer works. Now I have to pull down from the top, which I find a rather cumbersome experience. I am not an expert on android but the latest pixel phones promo shots show the date on the home screen (or can be configured to do with widgets I guess). It’s getting tempting to jump ship.

Now I don’t need to download Hugo, remember the Hugo commands, remember my web server login details, etc. I think it’s a lot less fiddling as all I need to remember now is how to add a file to a git repo to get a post published.

too many programmers think that schedule pressure makes it OK to do a half-assed job

This is solely blaming the programmer . I have been on software projects where someone is basically told deliver what you can by this date and then move onto something else. Then leave someone else to fix the bugs. This despite the programmer working very unsociable hours and trying their absolute hardest. What does Bob want the developer to do ? Refuse and be sacked, when they have a family to feed? Yes there are lots of lazy software developers in our industry who shouldn't be employed, but this kind of generalisation by Uncle Bob isn't helpful.

Better REPLs are not the answer. Model Driven Engineering is not the answer. Tools and platforms are not the answer. Better languages are not the answer

This is just nonsense. They are not the only answer, but of course they are part of the answer.

I stood before a sea of programmers a few days ago. I asked them the question I always ask: “How many of you write unit tests on a regular basis?” Not one in twenty raised their hands.

I would like him to provide evidence of who these people were and if they have any relevance to the article, as the article's jist is about serious and critical software. Are teams delivering such software really not writing automated tests ? I really doubt it.

Automated testing is great. Test Driven Development is a useful technique which I have in my arsenal. But Uncle Bob's obsessive focus on this can cause issues too. I once worked with a developer who had to write everything using TDD and apply EVERYTHING based on Bob's videos. It was too much. APIs weren't designed, data models weren't sensible and there was too much code (methods like isOpen, isNotOpen everywhere). It was clean code taken to the extreme. And not a good extreme.

I am not defending software developers as a whole. The levels of professionalism shown by some in our industry is at times scary. But a silly article like that which Uncle Bob originally wrote isn't helpful.

Only in iOS 11 have they added tags to the files app - the previous iCloud Drive app had a button for tags but it was seemingly not implemented.

Finding issues in apple products is really like going hunting in a zoo at the moment.

Maybe some corporations which have Windows on the desktop, but where most employees use iOS devices on the go, will find some use for this.

I guess there is no perfect healthcare system, but in my limited experience I am not surprised the Swiss system ended victorious. Having to cater for only 8 million people surely helps them though.

As a final remark - I bumped into another British expat over here a few weeks ago and he was walking on crutches after a hip replacement operation. When I asked him how he thought it would have played out on the NHS, he said he'd still be waiting to see a consultant!

Who are the participants in the blockchain and how do you ensure it cannot be tampered with i.e. could someone just go back to a previous block and rewrite history. Difficult admittedly. I don't understand what a consensus means in this implementation.

Also, it sounds like the trust is completely in the hands of one entity i.e. the person who adds details about the cow and cut of meat. How is that trustworthy ?

Either, the article doesn't explain how blockchain could fix a key problem in China's food industry, or it doesn't fix a key problem.

In my opinion food safety has to be regulated by a central agency like a Government. A decentral system like Blockchain isn't what solves the problem. Regulations and process are.

I wonder what the procedure is in a near Miss like this. It looks like not enough of the 'process' to capture evidence kicked in soon enough. Judging by the photo and distances this looks like it was an imminent disaster, which hadn't been clear to me previously.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/aug/03/air-canada-...

This post seems to have saved me the trouble of Googling myself. I am installing on the Mac and iOS as we speak.