Yesterday was the first day of Hacker School.
- I wrote yesterday’s post to help make my list of projects concrete.
- Refreshed myself on my previous attempts at the first chapter of Programming Pearls. Realized that I was too clever in Chapter 1 in my tests. Reminded myself of a quote from The Elements of Programming Style:
Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
- Paired with Michael Ford on his Siesta project, a not-ORM for Javascript. It helps keep a representation of an object from an outside source consistent. I didn’t know enough Javascript to be useful in code, but he had me read his documentation and I pointed out parts that seemed confusing.
- Started working on a transport for Zulip to IRC. Zulip seems to be a IRC clone, or a pre-Slack project without any transport to IRC. They have a public API that’s a breeze to use. I started hacking together a basic perl wrapper for it and got to the point where I could send and receive messages.
- I should probably pick a language I don’t know to write this in, but I definitely got weak and took the path of least resistance. Zulip seems to have a private API that I’m going to see if I can use as well.
- Talked to Julia Evans about my legendary strace post. She gave me lots of advice and was very kind. Recommended that I put a little more time into the first post of series and just publish.
- At 6:30, we left to go to Ebay’s office to hear a talk by Crista Lopes on her new book, Exercises in Programming Style. It was a fascinating talk on how she wrote the same python programming 33 different ways, to show off different ways of modeling problem solving. It was great reading the reviews for the book, because I found that each style was available online on Github: https://github.com/crista/exercises-in-programming-style
I went home exhausted. Tried to write this post last night, but fell asleep!