Tag Archives: programming

Long-awaited Granny Squares Design Going Live

10/17/2017 Melissa Avery-Weir

Years, folks. Years. That weird fabric texture background is finally going away.

Ever since I’ve thrown myself full-tilt at Future Proof Games, I’ve let my older side projects run as they are with no updates from me unless something was catastrophically wrong.

A lot has changed on the web since Granny Square Colors got a major update from me, though: tablets and smartphones are even more popular among the GSC user base, Internet Explorer isn’t the worst thing to develop for anymore, and I’m a way better architect and coder than I was a handful of years ago.

Continue reading Long-awaited Granny Squares Design Going Live →

Links On Uncomfortable Realities

6/19/2013 Melissa Avery-Weir

A short one this week as I’m struggling to catch up on/skim 1400+ unread items in Feedly.

“She Must Have Deserved It”: An Uncomfortable Reality About Abuse, And Reporting It | Ferrett Steinmetz – "And the good news that emerges from this particular bad response is that most people would never hit their partner. When told, “He hit her,” most people run this information through a I-am-the-world filter…" and "[If] you’re a victim of abuse, you need to be very careful as to who you date. Children of abusing parents are fifteen times – fifteen times! – as likely to wind up married to an abuser as so-called “normal” people, which means that your abuser broke some vital instincts within you."
You can say no if you change your mind – Maybe this is more freeing than uncomfortable. It was an uncomfortable realization for me, though.
Legacy Code Preservation: How Do We Manage This? – I run into similar code and life-work preservation issues at work now. It can be quite frustrating. Common thing to hear: "No, no, no, I'm not attached to that code. It's just code. …But really, it doesn't matter very much that it doesn't meet all the new standards or is hard to work with: the damned thing works perfectly, without a hitch. Never needs maintenance."

Flaky Fluesday Flinks, Part Deux

9/18/2012 Melissa Avery-Weir

I think the last time I posted a link dump, I was flaking from my new tattoo. This week, I’m flaking from the tattoo’s touch-up! Much less pain for the touch-up, but the itching may drive me nuts if it doesn’t end soon.

Luckily, it’s healing very quickly.

Have some good reading:

Tony and Hilary’s Tiny Loft Apartment – I feel like it's been forever since I read The Tiny Life blog, but what a purdy little house to come back to.
Six Thoughts On The Case Of The Breast-Feeding Professor | Alas, a Blog – "The child was allowed to crawl on a floor! Shocking! She had to take a paper clip out of its mouth! Shocking! Etc, etc. Makes me wonder if these people have ever met an actual infant. Seriously, the things are like a cross between a stumbling drunk and a vacuum cleaner."
Emptyage — Yes, I was hacked. Hard. – The more personal telling of the @mat hacking.
S.Lott-Software Architect: Performance "Tuning": running in 1/100th the time – "The idea of 'tweaking' a working program to improve performance is generally misleading. It might happen, but the impact is minuscule at best. […] Generally, reduce Cyclomatic Complexity." Continue reading Flaky Fluesday Flinks, Part Deux →

Beginner Developer: Where to Start?

11/10/2011 Melissa Avery-Weir 1 Comment

Camera curious — I just can't get enough of curious goats.

I have a friend who’s looking to become a marketable developer fairly quickly, but is essentially trying to go from zero to hero. Despite starting a project in Python to randomize wedding slideshows, he’s never really done development, nor does he understand its core concepts (classes vs. objects, for instance).

He kinda just needs a job, plus the ability to make useful tools for himself.

Folks are telling him Java and *.NET, and I (mostly) agree for the simple purposes of 1) easy desktop or web development, and 2) using keyword-heavy languages to reinforce programming concepts. Not strong reasons, no. If he just wanted a job, I’d recommend UI development.

Plus, for marketability in Charlotte, NC–home of plenty of Big Banks–diving into quasi-enterprise development can get you a cube (albeit maybe shared) and a comfortable paycheck. Good luck finding a Python gig here.

But where does he start? Continue reading Beginner Developer: Where to Start? →

Weekly Linkage: Grumpy Heroines, CRUD, and Prison Work

8/10/2011 Melissa Avery-Weir 1 Comment

This week’s internet cruising:

Questionable Content – Tool reference!
What does English sound like to foreign ears? – The Blogs at HowStuffWorks – An absolutely amazing song and video by an Italian comedian faking English, plus some adorable animal sounds.
Why CRUD might be what they want, but may not be what they need – Reading this sent me back to an old client’s site (from almost two years ago), remembering the CRUD-based admin console I developed that was such an incorrect way to go about giving them the functionality they needed. Oy.
Renaming Many Files At Once with Pattern Matching in Bash | Andy Regan – This proved very handy in renaming about 40 files quickly at work.

Video interlude! This video convinced me to start playing Mass Effect (the first) tonight.

So far, it’s a blast, and not too chock-full of grumpiness. Just enough to be fun.

…I did punch a rambling scientist, though.

On the Lieberman/Coburn plan (again) – “What we really should care about in [using life expectancy as a factor in Medicare change] is not life expectancy at birth, but life expectancy at age 65. In other words, if you make it to 65, how long will you be on Medicare? That’s when things get tricky.”
Leave to live by no man’s leave – Ayende @ Rahien – This is a 2005 post by a developer I frequently read from Israel, writing about his four years in the IDF working in prisons.
“On the one hand you are required to provide the prisoners with proper treatment and on the other hand… you listen to the news and see a bombing in Jerusalem and hear them celebrating. And that is in addition to the usual conflict of being in a position where you need to take care of people who would truly like to kill you.”
Why Steam Makes You Reinstall DirectX | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Finally, an explanation! It’s still annoying, but I feel a bit better now.
O’Reilly OSCON Data 2011, Steve Yegge, “What Would You Do With Your Own Google?” – YouTube – Learn math and solve important problems, apparently. I’m a fan.
Google, at scale – Ooh, a book review that makes me interested in the inner workings of Google. This one’s going on my wishlist.

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