The Best of The Programmer's Paradox

Blogs always see a constant flow of new, possibly intrigued readers. To answer that all important question that every reader has for a new blog, I put together a selection of some of my better works. This should help in making that all important judgment between insane lunatic, crazy rambler or just run-of-the-mill nut job. It's an easier choice if I provide references to some of my more interesting pieces, ones that have a strong point, were more popular or just contain fluid writing.

I've collected together my favorites with short intros, which I'll update from time to time to keep it up-to-date. Hopefully I can tag this in Blogger to make it standout.

If you're a long-time reader and I missed a favorite or two, please feel free to leave a comment. If I managed to get a few more suitable entries, I'll update this document. Comments for older pieces should be left on the original piece, Blogger will let me know that they are there.


NORMAL FORMS

Probably the most influential thing that I'll write in my career is the basis for code normalization, however I fully expect that the software development industry will happily choose to ignore any points in these works for at least another hundred or hundred and fifty years. Because of that, don't feel obligated to read any of these, they probably won't be relevant for quite a while:

http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/2008/11/code-normal-form.html
http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/2008/10/structure-of-elegance.html
http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/2008/10/revisiting-structure-of-elegance.html


SIMPLIFICATION

Simple is a constantly mis-used term, in this entry I'm trying very hard to get clarify a definition of it. It's the sort of thing that programmers should really really understand, yet the kind of thing that they rarely do:

http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/2007/12/nature-of-simple.html


ABSTRACTION AND ENCAPSULATION

Most of the incoming searches from the web seem to find my abstraction and encapsulation writings. Again these pieces are focused around clearly defining these terms. The first entry references the other two, I threw in the fourth one because its also deals with more essential definitions:

http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/2008/01/abstraction-and-encapsulation.html
http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/2007/11/art-of-encapsulation.html
http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/2007/12/pedantically-speaking.html
http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/2008/01/construction-of-primitives.html


SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

I've been struggling for years with trying to find the right words to explain how to make it easier to develop software. Software development is a hard task, but people so often make it much much harder than it actually needs to be. More software fails at the root development level then it does from organizational problems. If it starts off poorly, it will fall apart quickly:

http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/2008/01/essential-develoment-problems.html
http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/2007/10/first-principles-and-beyond.html
http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/2008/05/software-blueprints.html


BLUEPRINTS

Another interesting post that got a fair amount of feedback. I think that a simplified high-level (but imprecise) way to specify functionality would go a long way in reducing risk and allowing programmers to learn from each other:

http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/2008/05/software-blueprints.html


TESTING

Coding is great, but as programmers we fill up our efforts with a steady stream of bugs. You haven't really mastered software development until you've mastered spending the least amount of effort to find the maximum number of bugs, which is not nearly as easy as it sounds:

http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/2008/03/testing-for-battleships.html
http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/2008/02/testing-perspectives.html


IN THE FUTURE

I did a couple of forward-looking posts about things up and coming in the future. Computer Science forces us to be able to understand knowledge in a new and more precise way than is necessary for most other disciplines:

http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/2008/02/age-of-clarity.html
http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/2008/03/science-of-information.html
http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/2008/12/lines-of-progress.html


BUILDING BLOCKS

These are some of my earlier writings. Similar to this blog, but often a little dryer. The whole repository can be found here:

http://www.lulu.com/content/1054566 (should be free to download)

Some of the better entries:

Rust and Bloat -- http://people.lulu.com/blogs/view_post.php?post_id=28963

Five Pillars -- http://people.lulu.com/blogs/view_post.php?post_id=35232

When Ideas become Products -- http://people.lulu.com/blogs/view_post.php?post_id=33933


THE BOOK -- THE PROGRAMMER'S PARADOX

This site is named after my first attempt at a book. I quite work and decided to push out all of my software development understanding onto paper. It was something I always wanted to do. I can't say that it is a good piece of work, but I can say that there is a lot there, it's just in a very raw form. It was my first big attempt at writing (besides research papers) and apart from a few typos, the printed edition looks and feels very much like a real book (my sister says so, and likes the quotes at the start of each chapter). Professional editing could bring it out, but I've never been able to convince any publishers that this 'type' of material should see the light of day. My advice, don't buy the book, convince a publisher to publish it instead (if you'd really like to read the book, send me an email and I'll send you a copy).

http://www.lulu.com/content/178872


RANTS AND RAVES

Sometimes the world drives me nuts, so I set up a place to vent. Some of the venting is horrible, but occasionally it's amusing:

http://irrationalfocus.blogspot.com/2008/06/seven-platitudes-of-highly-ineffectual.html
http://irrationalfocus.blogspot.com/2007/12/ho-ho-what-ho.html
http://irrationalfocus.blogspot.com/2008/02/edging-towards-third.html


GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

Andy Hunt suggested a long time ago that my writing was OK, but not entirely personal. He said I was delivering observations but not tying them back to the reader. As a sort of fun exercise I set myself the goal of writing just little thought-lets: two sentence expressions. The first sentence is completely general, an observation; while the second one must tie that back to the reader somehow. The earlier versions were on yahoo360:

http://ca.blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-jQ.RlBwherOgu.uuFz5qB.I1

but there is a full copy at:

http://idealeftovers.blogspot.com/2007/11/yahoo360-yahoo-360-rant-in-long-run.html