Programming Posts
Sentience and Old Code
Like many private detectives, “I didn’t get into this business on account of my interpersonal skills. I’m not what you would call a people person.” Even in the future, some stereotypes hold. The secretary is now an “indy”, code that Richie Boss can communicate with silently. He doesn’t often need to leave his desk, but there is still plenty of danger out there.
A storage device with USB (“in primary use from 1995 to 2028″) and wireless connectors. Emulation of ancient devices. Armies of ‘indies’, code that handles a variety of specialty analysis and work. The problem:
So either Pandora’s great-grandmother was one of hundreds who puttered and failed to develop old-timey “artificial intelligence,” or we had something very special on hand. Only one way to find out.
You should find out too.
I was delighted to find Micah Dubinko‘s short story, Ritchie Boss, Private Investigator Manager, on a table at Balisage last week. I’m more used to reading Micah’s long ago work for O’Reilly, but this glued me to my seat and wouldn’t let me go until I’d finished it.
Micah’s story is under a Creative Commons license, but won a contest to be included in Springer’s Finding Source Code on the Web for Remix and Reuse. Whoever decided that book needed to close with a fictional look into the future has my deepest thanks, as does Micah.
So, You Want to Run a Young Coders Class?
Teaching Future Coders
Ever since PyCon 2013, the interest in the Young Coders class has been intensifying. Practically every Python conference since then has asked about doing one, and several have run their own. Classes outside of conferences have sprung up, as well, from one time workshops to after school clubs.
As more classes happen, more people have been asking about running their own. These classes do take quite a bit of effort to set up, but the payoff is enormous. Also, once you do one, doing subsequent ones gets easier and easier.
Read more…
Purposeful Design Principles for Behavior Change
How to design products and services that help users change behavior
Steve Wendel (@sawendel) is the Principal Scientist at HelloWallet where he develops applications that help users take control of their finances. He’s also currently writing Designing for Behavior Change. I recently sat down to talk with Steve about the importance of testing and iteration, role of psychology, and resources and tools.
Key highlights include:
From BASIC to HyperTalk to JavaScript to Rails to Erlang
Every programming experience teaches
I’ve never formally trained to be a programmer, outside of occasional conference workshops and a week of XSL tutorials. In some ways, that’s terrible, because it’s taken me about thirty years to learn what some friends of mine appear to have learned in four. I’ve written some code that goes way beyond spaghetti, though fortunately the worst of it was probably when I was 15.
On the bright side, when I look past my many mistakes, I can see what I learned from a large number of various different experiences, and the pieces they helped me see. It’s a little easier to tell this story through the parts than it might be through a formal curriculum.
- My parents’ FORTRAN books
- I was reading computer books—dry ones—before I even got to play. I have vague memories about program structure, but mostly I learned that knowledge sticks better if it includes hands-on work, and not just a book.
- Sinclair ZX81
- 1K of memory! The sheer thrill of seeing my creations on screen was amazing. I had just enough logic to get things done, and leave myself puzzled. The Sinclair community seemed focused on making great small things. I learned simple logic in BASIC and that sometimes it takes a hack to get things done.
- Applesoft BASIC
- After Sinclair BASIC, Applesoft seemed vast. Much of what I did was transfer what I’d done on the Sinclair (itself a lesson in platform-shifting). As I settled, I started writing larger and larger programs, eventually forcing myself to restructure everything into subroutines…with global variables, of course.
- 6502 Assembly
- I knew there was more than BASIC. My early adventures with assembly language were mostly about graphics, and didn’t work all that well, but I picked up two key things: recursion and the importance of registers.
Upward Mobility: Overly Defensive Programmer
Sometimes, the best defense is a good offensive core dump
By now, most meme-aware internet surfers have encountered Overly Attached Girlfriend (and the Rule 63 counterpart, Overly Attached Boyfriend.) What isn’t as well known is that they have a brother, Overly Defensive Programmer (ODP, for short.)
ODP is a mobile developer who lives in the constant fear that the server-side folks are going to subtly change an API out from under him, making his app crash. To avoid this, he puts in code like this:
NSError *error;
NSDictionary *responseData =
[NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:data
options:0 error:&error];
if (error != NULL) {
// All sorts of logging code, followed by returning
// from the call silently, swallowing the error
}
if ((responseData[@"payload"] != NULL) &&
(responseData[@"payload"][@"objectId"] != NULL)) {
self.objectId =
((NSNumber *) responseData[@"payload"][@"objectId"].intValue;
}
We’ve all seen code like this. The developer didn’t want to accidentally cause a fatal error by trying to get the objectId parameter if the payload was missing, or to try accessing the objectId if it was missing. And if objectId is an optional field, this is totally the way to go.
The thing is, objectId sounds like it is probably a critical piece of data, without which the application will fail to operate properly. You want the application to crash if it goes missing, because that means it will crash during QA testing, rather than silently ignoring the problem and possibly malfunctioning in a way that QA misses.
Read more…
Hot Swap Devices and Increase Arduino Interface Options with I2C
Don't be afraid of the bus
After a short period of time, beginners working with the Arduino development boards often find themselves wanting to work with a greater range of input or sensor devices—such as real-time clocks, temperature sensors, or digital potentiometers.
However each of these can often require connection by one of the two digital data buses, known as SPI and I2C. After searching around the Internet, inexperienced users may become confused about the bus type and how to send and receive data with them, then give up.
This is a shame as such interfaces are quite simple to use and can be easily understood with the right explanation. For example let’s consider the I2C bus. It’s a simple serial data link that allows a master device (such as the Arduino) to communicate with one or more slave devices (such as port expanders, temperature sensors, EEPROMs, real-time clocks, and more).
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Can We Do Better Than XML and JSON?
FtanML looks for the best of both
Today’s Balisage conference got off to a great start. After years of discussing the pros and cons of XML, HTML, JSON, SGML, and more, it was great to see Michael Kay (creator of the SAXON processor for XSLT and XQuery) take a fresh look at what a markup language should be.
Many recent efforts have been reductions. JSON was an extraction from JavaScript. XML was a simplification from SGML. MicroXML pushes simplification much further. Reductions are great for cleaning up past practice and (usually) making tools more accessible, but genuinely new features come later, if at all. The JSON and XML camps mostly stare at each other warily, and though people mix them, there’s little real “best of both worlds.”
Upward Mobility: To Storyboard or Not to Storyboard
That is the question for iOS developers
Storyboarding was introduced in iOS 6, and it offers a way to consolidate all of your disparate Interface Building files into a single overarching whole. Although it’s tempting to jump on board and use it just because it’s the new thing, there are some things to keep in mind.
- Storyboards require you to make the jump to iOS 6; there’s no backwards compatibility for earlier versions. While this isn’t as much of a factor as it was a year ago, if you have legacy iPad 1 customers, you’re going to be locking them out of your app if you move to storyboarding.
- Having all your XIB files consolidated may sound good, but if you have a lot of them, you can end up with a new storyboard that’s so big that it is unwieldy.
- Storyboards are more than just a consolidation move; you also have to adopt a whole new programming style to move between your screens. Instead of explicit pushes and pulls off of view controller stacks or opening of modals, you are firing off segues that cause new view controllers to be created and transitions to occur.
The last point isn’t a bad thing per say. It’s a much more MVC-like paradigm: for example, where the overall controller knows what a transition means, and the individual views are only responsible for requesting a transition. It’s also much more like the way that Android does things. But it’s a different style of programming from traditional iOS UI development, and has a learning curve associated with it.
Read more…
The Ever-Changing Landscape of Mobile Gaming
Unity, iOS 7, and the Quest for a Great Mobile Game Experience
Jon Manning (@desplesda) and Paris Buttfield-Addison (@parisba) talk with me about where mobile gaming is going in the next 12 months.
Key highlights include:
- Game-specific APIs and standardized gaming accessories in iOS 7 [Discussed at 0:20]
- Android needs to catch up [Discussed at 1:55]
- Are tablets putting handheld consoles from Nintendo and Sony out of business? [Discussed at 3:13]
- Independent developers vs big game studios – fight! [Discussed at 4:53]
- Unity is now free for mobile game development [Discussed at 6:02]
You can view the full interview here:
Open Source convention considers situational awareness in cars, and more
A report from OSCon
Every conference draws people in order to make contacts, but the Open Source convention also inspires them with content. I had one friend withdraw from an important business meeting (sending an associate) in order to attend a tutorial.
Lots of sessions and tutorials had to turn away attendees. This was largely fall-out from the awkward distribution of seats in the Oregon Convention Center: there are just half a dozen ballroom-sized spaces, forcing the remaining sessions into smaller rooms that are more appropriate for casual meetings of a few dozen people. When the conference organizers measure the popularity of the sessions, I suggest that any session at or near capacity have its attendance counted as infinity.
More than 3,900 people registered for OSCon 2013, and a large contingent kept attending sessions all the way through Friday.
