A cool letter of recommendation for John Nash, found at this Twitter page.
I got a letter of recommendation once that said, “Al is a machine,” but I never got the “genius” thing.
In a related note, the “machine” reference — from a person I didn’t even like — helped me to realize I was living my life in an unbalanced, screwed-up way. I took my first long leave from work (sabbatical) shortly after I read that.
Chuck Carnevale is my favorite investor/writer on Seeking Alpha, and this article about how to avoid “value traps” in the current volatile market is very good.
I don’t know if it will ever see the light of day, but I’ll be back to working on a potential new book this week.
This is from this LionsRoar.com article about where Garry Shandling is in an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee with Jerry Seinfeld. (Shandling is a “longtime mindfulness practitioner in Thich Nhat Hanh’s tradition,” which I did not know.)
This images is from this really good article on earthsky.org about the tides, the Sun, and the Moon.
Following up on the “keep learning” theme I wrote about a little while ago, I also encourage you to explore any personal interests you have, in technology or otherwise. In my case, over the last few weeks I’ve been working on my Android football game, and while it currently pisses me off more than it makes me happy, I can see its potential. And beyond that, I’ve learned a lot more about Android than I would have learned any other way. I don’t know where this will ever lead, but I do enjoy the game, and it has laid a foundation for the future changes I know I want to make to it.
P.S. A strong running game and third-down efficiency are also important. ;)
It has a extraordinarily long way to go before it’s where I want it to be, but my “XO Play” football game is now available on the Google Play Store.
Yes, you can have multiple versions of Android Studio installed at one time, and this android.com page details that, circa January, 2016.
This article on medium.com has the flame title, Object-Oriented Programming: A Disaster Story. IMHO, a less-flamy but still accurate title would be, “OOP, FP, and the conundrum of encapsulating state.”
As someone who occasionally thinks of himself as an engineer as well as a software developer, I think you have to always look for what is the best solution to the problem, and sometimes that’s more along the lines of OOP, sometimes it’s FP, and sometimes it’s a hybrid.
For instance, when it comes to collection classes, I like the hybrid approach of the Scala collection classes where it appears that the functions are directly available on a collection instance, so I can write something like res = people.filter(age > 30). In other languages the filter function may not be directly available on a sequential collection class, so you have to import it and then write something like res = filter(people, age > 30). In either case you’re doing the same thing in the end, but the Scala approach “feels” better to me, and it’s also easier to read. (This example may just be syntactic sugar, but again, it’s easier to read, and the collections’ methods are a bit of a hybrid.)
As a better example of what I’m trying to say, OOP makes a lot of sense for rich GUIs, like Java Swing. Things like a JFrame, JDialog, JList, JTable, etc., all make a lot of sense in an OOP design. For instance, you create a JTable, the data is updated, users move columns around, and so on. OOP fits this very well.
When life gives you cold weather, make sure you have a good store of hot beverages, that’s what I always say.
“Byte Buddy is a code generation library for creating Java classes during the runtime of a Java application and without the help of a compiler.” Cool.
You know, I never met a photo I didn’t want to oilify in Gimp. This oilified photo is from the Denver Broncos win over the Pittsburgh Steelers in an AFC playoff game on January 17, 2016. (I think the original image came from espn.com.)
“How software projects actually ship.” Image from this Twitter page.
