Links for January 3, 2017

IEEE Computer (PDF): In a February 1995 article, “A Plea for Lean Software”, Niklaus Wirth (inventor of Pascal and Modula-2) laments the size growth in software applications, and calls out time pressure and lack of good design as possible reasons for this growth. In the second half of the article, he discusses his own solution for this problem (Project Oberon) which comprises an operating system, a compiler and a computer. To me, this was a good approach to take from an academic standpoint, but I do not think this had any effect on the mainstream practice of software development (similar in nature to Donald Knuth’s concept of literate programming). A second version of Oberon was released in 2013 (see link below).

Project Oberon – Website linking to Oberon book PDFs and other artifacts

Niklaus Wirth – Home page

Links for January 2, 2018

Some Javascript file handling links:

Writing files:

Eli Grey: Article describing his library FileSave.js

Demo 1: FileSaver.js demo of saving text from a HTML text area

Demo 2: FileSaver.js demo of saving a string in a blob

Github: Source for FileSaver.js

Reading the contents of files:

Treehouse: Several examples of opening files and displaying the contents in a web page

HTML5 Rocks: Multiple examples of opening files

NCZOnline: Code-only examples, no live demos

 

Links for January 1, 2018

Cooperative Software Development: An online book by Dr. Andrew Ko at the University of Washington, this work focuses on “the human aspects of software engineering for students interested in becoming software engineers.” (from the home page). The book covers a number of topics within the software engineering realm (requirements, process, even debugging). Each of the chapters contain footnotes for further reading. I thought it was a good view into a number of areas, based on his academic lectures and his own experience as a CTO for a startup (AnswerDash).

Software Engineering Daily: A podcast on software engineering topics, the past episode list looks interesting, will add this to my subscription list in PocketCasts.

Starting again in 2018

I am starting again to get into the blogging habit – wish me luck! I am going to start with sharing commentary on links, but also hope to post on some development projects as well. I look forward to the new year!

Asimov Institute: Analyzing Six Deep Learning Tools for Music Generation – I think this is a neat area of research (post is a year old, so other things are probably around), but I would like to see tools to help human composers create new works as opposed to totally computer-generated works.

@Ron, I saw your two comments on my last post, I am making another post, let me know if you saw my comment response.

 

Trying again, this time I have added micro.blog/ping to my “Update Services” section…we shall see..

 

Open Source Bridge Day 1 – My thoughts

This is my first time to attend Open Source Bridge conference in Portland, Oregon. So far, it has been interesting, fun, and welcoming.

Today’s keynote by Nicole Sanchez (VP of Social Impact at GitHub) was riveting! Her message of reforming the tech industry was direct and strong (via Karvel Digital):

  1. Tweet a systemic problem that needs minds & hands to work on it
  2. Use
  3. Follow for updates.

Nicole gave several examples of problems :

  • Compensation structures and equity
  • Governance
  • Pay parity across demographics
  • Net neutrality
  • Expanded “diversity reports” and other expectations of public accountability
  • Uses of data
  • Choices of source material

I am going to vote for “uses of data” later today…

Next, I went to the “How to Prototype and Test” workshop lead by Morgan Miller. She gave an excellent overview of usability, paper prototyping and user testing. The workshop attendees were divided into teams, given the task of developing an idea for an app or website, create paper prototypes and then conduct a user test. To me, the most important advice on paper prototyping was things can be messy, and it’s ok! It was a lot of fun, and I have a better idea of how to develop concepts and test them.

After lunch, I attended “Learn To Type at 250 WPM Using Open Source Tools” by Josh Lifton. His story of development of the open source steno software application Plover (OpenStenoProject.com) was a great story, as well as his side project of developing an open source stenograph machine (Stenosaurus.com). He did say that people are using this software to do writing of novels and other works, not just traditional stenography.

Next, Kronda Adair led a session titled “Quick and Dirty WordPress Sites that Don’t Suck“. She described a number of tools that can help in developing capable WordPress sites and help business owners in marketing and promotion. I am looking forward to checking out some of those tools!

My last session was “Decoding The History of Codes” by Niharika Kohli. Her talk covered a quick history of the use of ciphers and codes (dating back to Julius Caesar!), and included a fun quiz at the end of the talk. After a bit of time, the audience was able to work out the ciphers (not me, though!).

Come back tomorrow for Day 2!