Category Archives: whatevs

Knowledge management—not just in software engineering and not just digital knowledge management—has long had to account for tacit knowledge: the things that people know, but never say. “A lesser blog would reproduce the Donald Rumsfeld statement about known unknowns at … Continue reading →

Although I didn’t make any resolutions this new year, it’s still a time for change. That’s because I finally submit my D.Phil. thesis (if I’m on time, that will be before January 18th), so I’ve already been putting things in … Continue reading →

There’s this paper from August 1970, called Managing the Development of Large Software Systems, that’s considered something of a classic (either for good or for bad, depending on your worldview). The discussion often goes something like this: Let’s say I … Continue reading →

Another day in which someone lamented to me the demeaning nature of the interview coding challenge. It is indeed embarrassing, when someone with more than two decades of software engineering experience is asked to complete a gotcha-style programming task under … Continue reading →

The upcoming issue of the SICPers newsletter is all about phrases that were introduced to computing to mean one thing, but seem to get used in practice to mean another. This annoys purists, pedants, and historians: it also annoys the … Continue reading →

My Python script for Global.health was not running in production, because it couldn’t find some imports. Now the real solution is to package up the imports with setuptools and install them at runtime (we manage the environments with poetry), but … Continue reading →

When I wrote I have some small idea of what I’m doing, it was on the basis that DHH was engaging in some exaggeration. Surely software engineers, whose job depends on what they know and what they can learn, would … Continue reading →