A common way to save persistent, important data is a spreadsheet. It provides a handy, potentially normalized store that's readily accessible with minimal tooling. It has a UI usable by people with a spectrum of skills.

Sadly.

There's a core conflict:

• The advantages of spreadsheets-as-database are numerous.
• The disadvantage is …

Background: https://medium.com/capital-one-developers/bashing-the-bash-replacing-shell-scripts-with-python-d8d201bc0989

And this

I wonder how/why python did not pick up some sort/form of pipe operator. 🤨 (although coroutine does have .send method 🤔)

—Ivan Pejić (@nadrimajstor) August 26, 2017

The answer to this is interesting because there are two kinds of parallelism. I like …

Read this: http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html.

I was originally focused on "beauty". Clearly, good design is beautiful. Isn't that obvious? Why so many words to explain the obvious?

The post seemed useless. Why write it in the first place? Why share it? Why share it now, 12 years …

There's much to learn. The idea of digesting knowledge down to a pithy little proverb is interesting.

https://github.com/AntJanus/programmers-proverbs

http://futurice.com/blog/programmer-proverbs

http://quotes.cat-v.org/programming/bumper-sticker-computer-science

Some of it's new to me. Some of it's timeless.

Also, this http://www.bowdoin.edu/~ltoma …

Once in a great while, you see someone engaging in Obstinate Idiocy.

Here's my recent example.

They're solving some kind of differential equation. Not sure why.

Symptom 1 of Obstinate Idiocy is No Rational Justification. The explanation is often "that's not relevant, what's relevant is this other thing I want …

Okay. This is seriously cool.

The Universal Data Element Framework (UDEF) provides a controlled vocabulary that should be used to seed a project's data model.

See http://www.udef.com/

See http://www.opengroup.org//udef/

We're looking at applying UDEF retroactively to an existing schema.

What a pain in …

"Threads don't promote concurrent I/O."

Kernel threads may. Most of us write user threads. Here's a great summary under Thread (Computer Science).

However, the use of blocking system calls in user threads (as opposed to kernel threads) or fibers can be problematic. If a user thread or a fiber …

Read this: "How to explain why multi-threading is difficult".

We need to talk. This is not that difficult.

Multi-threading is only difficult if you do it badly. There are an almost infinite number of ways to do it badly. Many magazines and bloggers have decided that the multithreading hurdle is …

Imagine that you're a beer distributor who provides "just-in-time" beer by type. You don't take orders for a specific brand, you take orders a type: stout, lager, India pale ale, etc. You resolve the bill based on what you actually delivered.

This can be kind of complex. However, there's no …

As a hypothetical, I was asked about doing Oracle Analytic functions in Python.

[Sidebar: Politics. The question came from a DBA in a C# shop. That's why it's just hypothetical. Politically, they could never make use of this information. In C# world, Functional Programming is often scary and evil. It …