Posts in the “programming” category

From this Cornell University page, Google’s AlphaZero algorithm has been generalized to learn new games given only the game rules: “In this paper, we generalise this approach into a single AlphaZero algorithm that can achieve, tabula rasa, superhuman performance in many challenging domains. Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi (Japanese chess) as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a world-champion program in each case.”

Amazon AWS is bringing AI and deep learning to the masses with their SageMaker and DeepLens projects. itworld.com has a story about it here.

I haven’t read it yet, but I just added Category Theory for Programmers to my “need to read” list.

Here’s a “99 bugs in the code” t-shirt.

Programmers can celebrate Christmas on Halloween:

31 oct = 25 dec

(3*8 + 1) == (2*10 + 5)

Apparently at some point Alan Kay said, “Lisp is the greatest single programming language ever designed,” and in this Quora post he writes about what he meant.

Boolean algebra was named after George Boole (1815-1864), which I just learned while reading A Book of Abstract Algebra.

Mark Burgess has a long article based on the keynote address for the Reactive Summit 2017 titled, Microservices, the future of society, and all that.

underscore.io has a nice article about code reviews titled, Getting into other people’s code.

“Show me your flowcharts (source code), and conceal your tables (domain model), and I shall continue to be mystified; show me your tables (domain model) and I won’t usually need your flowcharts (source code): they’ll be obvious.”

~ Fred Brooks, “The Mythical Man Month”

(text in parentheses added by me)

This image telling where the name “lambda” (in lambda calculus) comes from is currently floating around on Twitter.

I don’t know the original source of this image about “delegation” in computer programming (starring Inigo Montoya of The Princess Bride), but I like it.

“Designing APIs is a subtle blend of craft and engineering. It is the one area we should carefully refine our design skills for.”

~ from Martin Thompson on Twitter

deelay.me looks like a good website to use if you’re writing network-access code and want to simulate accessing a slow web server.

Jonas Bonér has put together a list of “latency numbers every programmer should know” as this gist. Peter Norvig put together a much earlier version of this list, and this berkeley.edu page has a bit of a graphic related to Norvig’s work.

If you’re interested in Domain-Driven Design (DDD), here is a link to an article titled “Effective Aggregate Design” by Vaughn Vernon.

(The article is available as three short PDFs that form the basis for his book, Implementing Domain-Driven Design.)

“The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world’s richest source of rewarding challenges.”

~ Edsger Dijkstra (as seen on twitter yesterday)

I was reminded of “Imposter Syndrome” yesterday. (Image from Wikipedia.)

“No matter how slow you are writing clean code, you will always be slower if you make a mess.”

~ Bob Martin (via this tweet)

Here’s a link to Github’s 2017 Open Source Survey.