Alan's Lair (Page 2)

More issues

Misaligned Expectations: investigating the expectations gap

As some of my followers already know, I'm enrolled in the great Master's program at Georgia Tech, the OMSCS. As a part of my studies, I'm doing some research to investigate the expectations gap between the higher education and the industry sectors; why does the university teach students this way?

SCP taming: stop local silliness

Every day now and then, I get an scp command wrong. Scp is designed after commands like rcp and works totally fine for local-to-local file copy. While this can (or could) be useful in some contexts, It's not what I like to do these days; very often, if either hosts

Productivity, the office, and the open floor plan

UPDATE: this article was written at a time when remote work wasn't so widespread. After having worked remotely myself, I don't think that the office is so critical anymore, even though I believe it's still useful to have a nice office somewhere where you can meet people in person, every

Command line data crunching with Python

Every time I'm doing some data crunching on the command line, I find myself juggling between sed, awk, sort, uniq, etc. While I like the UNIX way of having one tool doing one thing well, I sometimes find it slightly boring to put all the tools together, sometimes stretching their

Git: automatically set and use multiple commit identities

Sure, git is great. Sure it is possible to use multiple commit identities in git - just set local per-repo variables. If it weren't for the fact that chances of forgetting about it is about 99.9%. Problem context When installing git, it is required to configure a username and

Shell scripting: short or long format options?

This is something I get asked quite a lot, so I wanted to write a piece about it. This is an extract from the manpage from GNU grep: NAME grep, egrep, fgrep, rgrep - print lines matching a pattern SYNOPSIS grep [OPTIONS] PATTERN [FILE...] grep [OPTIONS] [-e PATTERN]... [-f FILE]

Stopping The Internet Of Noise - A Useful Internet Back Again

The internet is getting noisy. Too noisy. Having grown up in the nineties, with 56k dial-up, I sometimes struggle to understand how little I'm accomplishing today with all the bandwidth I can leverage. There were some key factors that made the old internet so productive, by the way, and many

Students that don't "get" computer science - bimodality as a teaching failure

There seems to be a common belief about computer science: people either get it, or don't get it. A recent paper by the University of Toronto, Evidence That Computer Science Grades Are Not Bimodal, dispels such myth. The paper even suggests some explanations for this myth: teaching failure. We don't

Primitive types are not your friends

Really. Stop (ab)using just strings and integers! Yes, they're the building blocks of whatever you do. But if you abuse them, you're not taking full advantage of your Object Oriented programming language. Let me explain with some concrete example. For the sake of conciseness, I'll use Python here, but

Enabling Process vs Bureaucratic Process

The Process, today, is king. There're a lot of people focusing just on process, and a lot of them hold it as The True Solution to all the world's problems. Then, there're those who don't believe in process. They say, we mostly focus on people! Process is a failed attempt