Theories abound regarding what makes a good dev. These theories generally revolve around one or more particular skills (both "hard" and "soft"), and levels of proficiency in said skills, that are "must-have" in order for a person to be a good dev. I disagree with said theories. I think that there's only one thing that makes a good dev, and it's not a skill at all. It's an attitude. A good dev cares about code.
There are many aspects of code that you can care about. Formatting. Modularity. Meaningful naming. Performance. Security. Test coverage. And many more. Even if you care about just one of these, then: (a) I salute you, for you are a good dev; and (b) that means that you're passionate about code, which in turn means that you'll care about more aspects of code as you grow and mature, which in turn means that you'll develop more of them there skills, as a natural side effect. The fact that you care, however, is the foundation of it all.
I recently finished reading the classic novel War and Peace. The 19th-century epic is considered the masterpiece of Leo Tolstoy, and I must say it took me by surprise. In particular, I wasn't expecting its second epilogue, which is a distinct work of its own (and one that arguably doesn't belong in a novel): a philosophical essay discussing the question of "free will vs necessity". I know that the second epilogue isn't to everyone's taste, but personally I feel that it's a real gem.
So, while history has been just and generous in venerating Tolstoy as a novelist, I feel that his contribution to the field of philosophy has gone unacknowledged. This is no doubt in part because Tolstoy didn't consider himself a philosopher, and because he didn't pen any purely philosophical works (published separately from novels and other works), and because he himself criticised the value of such works. Nevertheless, I feel warranted in asking: is Tolstoy a forgotten philosopher?
The past decade or so has been touted as a high point for achievements in Artificial Intelligence (AI). For the first time, computers have demonstrated formidable ability in such areas as image recognition, speech recognition, gaming, and (most recently) autonomous driving / piloting. Researchers and companies that are heavily invested in these technologies, at least, are in no small way lauding these successes, and are giving us the pitch that the current state-of-the-art is nothing less than groundbreaking.
However, as anyone exposed to the industry knows, the current state-of-the-art is still plagued by fundamental shortcomings. In a nutshell, the current generation of AI is characterised by big data (i.e. a huge amount of sample data is needed in order to yield only moderately useful results), big hardware (i.e. a giant amount of clustered compute resources is needed, again in order to yield only moderately useful results), and flawed algorithms (i.e. algorithms that, at the end of the day, are based on statistical analysis and not much else – this includes the latest Convolutional Neural Networks). As such, the areas of success (impressive though they may be) are still dwarfed by the relative failures, in areas such as natural language conversation, criminal justice assessment, and art analysis / art production.
In my opinion, if we are to have any chance of reaching a higher plane of AI – one that demonstrates more human-like intelligence – then we must lessen our focus on statistics, mathematics, and neurobiology. Instead, we must turn our attention to philosophy, an area that has traditionally been neglected by AI research. Only philosophy (specifically, metaphysics and epistemology) contains the teachings that we so desperately need, regarding what "reasoning" means, what is the abstract machinery that makes reasoning possible, and what are the absolute limits of reasoning and knowledge.
Them robots are gonna take our jobs! Image source:Day of the Robot.
Most discussion of late seems to treat this encroaching joblessness entirely as an economic issue. Families without incomes, spiralling wealth inequality, broken taxation mechanisms. And, consequently, the solutions being proposed are mainly economic ones. For example, a Universal Basic Income to help everyone make ends meet. However, in my opinion, those economic issues are actually relatively easy to address, and as a matter of sheer necessity we will sort them out sooner or later, via a UBI or via whatever else fits the bill.
The more pertinent issue is actually a social and a psychological one. Namely: how will people keep themselves occupied in such a world? How will people nourish their ambitions, feel that they have a purpose in life, and feel that they make a valuable contribution to society? How will we prevent the malaise of despair, depression, and crime from engulfing those who lack gainful enterprise? To borrow the colourful analogy that others have penned: assuming that there's food on the table either way, how do we head towards a Star Trek rather than a Mad Max future?
I'd never before stopped to think about whether or not there was a limit to how much you can put in a cookie. Usually, cookies only store very small string values, such as a session ID, a tracking code, or a browsing preference (e.g. "tile" or "list" for search results). So, usually, there's no need to consider its size limits.
However, while working on a new side project of mine that heavily uses session storage, I discovered this limit the hard (to debug) way. Anyway, now I've got one more adage to add to my developer's phrasebook: if you're trying to store more than 4KiB in a cookie, you're doing it wrong.
Do you have multiple views on your Drupal site, where the content listing is themed to look exactly the same? For example, say you have a custom "search this site" view, a "featured articles" view, and an "articles archive" view. They all show the same fields — for example, "title", "image", and "summary". They all show the same content types – except that the first one shows "news" or "page" content, whereas the others only show "news".
If your design is sufficiently custom that you're writing theme-level Views template files, then chances are that you'll be in danger of creating duplicate templates. I've committed this sin on numerous sites over the past few years. On many occasions, my Views templates were 100% identical, and after making a change in one template, I literally copy-pasted and renamed the file, to update the other templates.
Until, finally, I decided that enough is enough – time to get DRY!
Being less repetitive with your Views templates is actually dead simple. Let's say you have three identical files – views-view-fields--search_this_site.tpl.php, views-view-fields--featured_articles.tpl.php, and views-view-fields--articles_archive.tpl.php. Here's how you clean up your act:
Delete the latter two files.
Add this to your theme's template.php file:
<?php
function mytheme_preprocess_views_view_fields(&$vars) {
if (in_array(
$vars['view']->name, array(
'search_this_site',
'featured_articles',
'articles_archive'))) {
$vars['theme_hook_suggestions'][] =
'views_view_fields__search_this_site';
}
}
Clear your cache (that being the customary final step when doing anything in Drupal, of course).
Being a member of mainstream society isn't for everyone. Some want out.
Societal vices have always been bountiful. Back in the ol' days, it was just the usual suspects. War. Violence. Greed. Corruption. Injustice. Propaganda. Lewdness. Alcoholism. To name a few. In today's world, still more scourges have joined in the mix. Consumerism. Drug abuse. Environmental damage. Monolithic bureaucracy. And plenty more.
There always have been some folks who elect to isolate themselves from the masses, to renounce their mainstream-ness, to protect themselves from all that nastiness. And there always will be. Nothing wrong with doing so.
However, there's a difference between protecting oneself from "the evils of society", and blinding oneself to their very existence. Sometimes this difference is a fine line. Particularly in the case of families, where parents choose to shield from the Big Bad World not only themselves, but also their children. Protection is noble and commendable. Blindfolding, in my opinion, is cowardly and futile.
For almost two years now, I've been living in the grand metropolis of Santiago de Chile. My time here will soon be coming to an end, and before I depart, I'd like to share some of my observations regarding the particularities of life in this city and in this country – principally, as compared with life in my home town, Sydney Australia.
There are plenty of articles round and about the interwebz, aimed more at the practical side of coming to Chile: i.e. tips regarding how to get around; lists of rough prices of goods / services; and crash courses in Chilean Spanish. There are also a number of commentaries on the cultural / social differences between Chile and elsewhere – on the national psyche, and on the political / economic situation.
My endeavour is to avoid this article from falling neatly into either of those categories. That is, I'll be covering some eccentricities of Chile that aren't practical tips as such, although knowing about them may come in handy some day; and I'll be covering some anecdotes that certainly reflect on cultural themes, but that don't pretend to paint the Chilean landscape inside-out, either.
Two weeks ago, the Gillard government succeeded in passing legislation for a new carbon tax through the lower house of the Australian federal parliament. Shortly after, opposition leader Tony Abbott made a "pledge in blood", promising that: "We will repeal the tax, we can repeal the tax, we must repeal the tax".
The passing of the carbon tax bill represents a concerted effort spanning at least ten years, made possible by the hard work and the sacrifice of numerous Australians (at all levels, including at the very top). Australia is the highest per-capita greenhouse gas emitter in the developed world. We need climate change legislation enactment urgently, and this bill represents a huge step towards that endeavour.
I don't usually publish direct political commentary here. Nor do I usually name and shame. But I feel compelled to make an exception in this case. For me, Tony Abbott's response to the carbon tax can only possibly be addressed in one way. He leaves us with no option. If this man has sworn to repeal the good work that has flourished of late, then the solution is simple. Tony Abbott must never lead this country. The consequences of his ascension to power would be, in a nutshell, diabolical.
It's been five years since it opened its doors to the general public; and, despite my avid hopes that it DIAF, the fact is that Facebook is not dead yet. Far from it. The phenomenon continues to take the world by storm, now ranking as the 2nd most visited web site in the world (after Google), and augmenting its loyal ranks with every passing day.
I've always hated Facebook. I originally joined not out of choice, but out of necessity, there being no other way to contact numerous friends of mine who had decided to boycott all alternative methods of online communication. Every day since joining, I've remained a reluctant member at best, and an open FB hater to say the least. The recent decisions of several friends of mine to delete their FB account outright, brings a warm fuzzy smile to my face. I haven't deleted my own FB account — I wish I could; but unfortunately, doing so would make numerous friends of mine uncontactable to me, and numerous social goings-on unknowable to me, today as much as ever.
There are, however, numerous features of FB that I have refused to utilise from day one, and that I highly recommend that all the world boycott. In a nutshell: any feature that involves FB being the primary store of your important personal data, is a feature that you should reject outright. Facebook is an evil company, and don't you forget it. They are not to be trusted with the sensitive and valuable data that — in this digital age of ours — all but defines who you are.
