Habits and routines are frustrating sometimes.
Most of the content on this tumbl is a record of what I did at work on that day. Short and hyperlinked.
There’s also a bunch of duplicated tweets, in various formats, the vast majority of which just link to articles I found on Hacker News.
Part of the reason for starting this was so I could look back on a day or week and be reminded what I spent my time doing. Some side-effects were hoped for as well: a platform to write technical blog posts and a record of technical achievements that future employers may find noteworthy.
Infrequently I’ve also added quotes on here taken from what I consider to be the most powerful, inspiring and amazing set of 66 books that I’ve ever tried to read.
Every now and again, more often than the occurrence of a blue moon but less so than the passing of the Sabbath, I lift, or have lifted for me, my head above the proverbial computer screen and have a look at the world around me. Unlike an ostrich my attention is removed from the sand and instead rests on people. People who are hurting, people who hurt, people who need help, communities that are broken, industries that are corrupt, societies that are imploding, a world in agony and I realise how trivial the whole technological world is and how misleadingly addictive it’s fast moving pace is.
Writing another script in PHP, or setting up another MySQL database, or installing the latest and greatest package on Ubuntu, or learning this weeks hot new technology doesn’t help, holistically.
I’ve probably got 80 or 90 years of life here on this planet. I’ve spent 24 of those already and once I’ve spent a minute doing something, I can’t spend it again doing something different. I’d like to spend the remaining years walking in the footsteps of the most powerful and poorest man in history. He only ever said what his father said and only ever did what his father did. When I was a kid he adopted me into his family and I’d like to follow his example.
Which programming language should I learn first?
- To program in an expressive and powerful language: Python
- To get a website up quickly: PHP
- To mingle with programmers who call themselves “rockstars”: Ruby.
- To really learn to program: C.
- To achieve enlightenment: Scheme.
- To feel depressed: SQL
- To drop a chromosome: Microsoft Visual Basic
- To get a guaranteed, mediocre, but well paying job writing financial applications in a cubicle under fluorescent lights: Java.
- To do the same thing with certifications and letters after your name: C#
- To achieve a magical sense of childlike wonder that you have a hard time differentiating from megalomania: Objective C
Why not to use Google Drive
So I think I’ll stick with Dropbox thanks very much.
“Don’t be evil” my ass…
Paul Irish’s “The State of HTML5: Inaugural Address” at Fronteers 2010.
Awesome.
Found bug in PHP script that attempted failed to update the array currently being iterated over. Solution:
// $value is required to be referenced using &
// to allow the $elements array to be modified
foreach ($elements as $index => &$value) {
if ($condition_met) {
$new_elements = get_new_elements();
$pointer = $index + 1;
foreach($new_elements as $elem) {
$elements[$pointer++] = $elem;
}
}
}
Meeting to update on postcode search and database migration.
Updated Tumblr code-highlighting for PHP snippet above.
Installed Windows 8 Consumer Preview in Virtual Box.
Continued work on database migration script.
Created annual accounts for LLP.
Why do I like PHP, Perl, Python and Javascript?
You can see all teh codez.
