In my day-to-day work with technology, I have found there is No Silver Bullet [ucsf.edu] to the essential difficulties of software development. Essential best practices are situational and defined by context.
Find Me in Chicago is an independent civic project built to make public data from the City of Chicago more accessible. Originally launched in 2016 using JQuery and Google Maps JavaScript API the application has been modernized and rewritten using React. Google Maps is now brokered through React Google Maps and there is new support […]
What a difference a year makes. When I wrote AI Is The New Rubber Duck (Force Multiplier) last April, AI really was a rubber duck. At least for the low-grade AI I had access to on a minimal budget with no corporate or venture capital sponsorship. It was helpful, but it couldn’t usefully write much […]
Though this art of artificial intelligence arose long after my time, its nature is familiar. No craft emerges from nothing. AI is shaped by centuries of reason—by the logic we devised, the mathematics refined, the natural laws discovered. Its pattern-seeking mirrors our induction, its reasoning, our syllogism. Though AI lacks the soul’s intellect, it reflects […]
This article is OBSOLETE, see AI Is NOT a Rubber Duck for my latest thoughts. Rubber duck debugging is when a developer explains their code to an inanimate object to spot problems and clarify their thinking. It works because verbalizing the problem forces the developer to think through each step more clearly, often revealing the […]
Web applications accessible to the public Internet are guaranteed to be the target of random or focused attempts at mischief or abuse and recovering from a root compromise always painful. At a minimum, web applications require the planned design and consistent implementation of diverse technologies based on: education in the Most Critical Security Vulnerabilities [owasp.org] […]
There is a definite Art in Computer Programming [pragprog.com] shaped by the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs [mit.edu] and established Design Principles and Design Patterns [depaul.edu] From a technical pespective, Refactoring [refactoring.com] is the essential technique to incrementally remove harmful code patterns such as the Go To Statement [c2.com] and other AntiPatterns [antipatterns.com] such […]
The original Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks [acm.org] was a major milestone in the history of information technology that has undergone changes in understanding over the years. Despite the fact There is No Database Magic [kimballgroup.com], A Review of Relational Concepts [wikipedia.org] is useful to avoid widespread Logical-Physical Confusion [dbdebunk.com]. Conceptual, […]