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26
JUN
2014IPSC 2014 Postmortem
I decided to give the Internet Problem Solving Contest (IPSC) a go this year, with a couple of friends. I've done it in the past and enjoyed it. I like how it only eats a few hours one day and I like how the variety in the problems they give you keeps things interesting.
That said, my performance in the IPSC this year is probably best described as, "Three strikes and you're out!" I did terrible.
I solved one very simple problem. I spent the rest of the contest chasing after a much harder challenge that I couldn't complete in the time allowed.
The worst part is that I made some silly mistakes that I've learned to avoid in the past. As penance, I offer up this article, mainly as a reminder to myself, but hopefully also as a tool that could save others from some of my folly.
Let's start with a simple mistake I made…
Not All Problems are Programming Problems
The IPSC does a great job each year of reminding us that some problems are trivial to solve without programming. It's a good thing they do too, because I seem to need a lot of reminding.
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28
MAY
2014Are We Teaching the Best Things?
I'm in Denver right now, mostly to see family. Being the geek that I am though, you know I snuck a little time for the local Rubyists. One of those Rubyists that I was lucky enough chat with is Katrina Owen.
I always love getting a chance to talk with Katrina. She's so thoughtful that she raises the level of discourse and makes me feel smarter. Plus, it turns out that Katrina and I have been thinking about similar things lately.
For my part, I've been thinking about the various students that I've taught to program over the years. I have taught many and because they all learned from me, they learned roughly the same way. What's interesting to me is how different the results have been from that technique. In some cases my students were all set after our lessons and they just began coding up a storm. Other students didn't seem to feel they were ready yet though. They had more of a "Now what do I do?" attitude at this stage.
Katrina raised a similar point from her time teaching in a developer school. When they would get to teaching language basics, they would show several constructs and how they are used. This is similar to how I teach. Just as I have observed, this works for some students. They can just take what they know and run from here. But they also found other students felt a little lost at this point.
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17
FEB
2007I believe in Ruby
For the contest and all you Bull Durham fans…
Well, I believe in blocks, iterators, closures, that everything should be an object, the power of reflection, garbage collection, exception handling, that multiple inheritance causes more problems than it solves. I believe interpreters should be totally free. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing pointers and verbose syntax. I believe in a strong standard library, green threads, that a language should trust the programmer rather than restrict his efforts and I believe in sheer fun of coding that truly is possible to achieve.
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7
NOV
2006Doing It All!
I'm not really in the habit of putting non-code content on this blog, but more than one person asked me the same question at RubyConf. If people really want to know, I'll try to answer. Paraphrasing, the question was:
How do you keep up with so many Ruby projects?
First, this question surprised me. Do I really do that much? If you just said yes to that, I would like to introduce you to Ryan Davis. He easily doubles my output and his projects are wicked complex compared to mine.
That doesn't answer the question though.
In short, I do as much as I possibly can with the time I have. The truth is that I would like to do a lot more. I turn down at least as many damn cool Ruby projects as I accept because I'm a wimp and not willing to give up my sleep. There are so many crazy cool Ruby projects out there that I would love to be a part of. There just aren't enough hours in the day.
I guess I still didn't answer the question.
The question was "How…" and the answer to that is actually trivial. Masayoshi Takahashi summed it up with a single slide in his presentation at RubyConf:
