3D Print Your Own Keycaps
Let’s say you have some very specific requirements for your mechanical keyboard: Gotta have the RGB bling Dvorak layout (because you’re a nerd) Also JIS layout (because cyberpunk) Turns out you can’t …
ARRL Field Day 2025
Much like my 2008 post, my pal Joel (W4LL) and I (N0JDC) operated a ham radio station for ARRL Field Day in a park near my house. Field Day is an event where amateur radio operators across North …
Before General Magic There Was Paradigm
General Magic was the company that created the Magic Cap operating system and hand-held devices including the Sony Magic Link and Motorola Envoy. Many concepts from Magic Cap went on to new lives in …
Kinesis Advantage2 Review
I’ve been using Kinesis keyboards since 1996, and from the outside, it looks like nothing much has changed since my first one. On the plus side, Kinesis didn’t screw up a good thing. On the better …
3D Printing with Taulman Bridge and Other Nylons
Nylon is an amazing material for 3D printing, producing extremely tough parts. However it can be difficult to print well, so this article describes my experience getting to successful prints with …
New Programmer's Survival Manual: Now For Sale!
Now for sale: my book for programmers entering industry, the New Programmer’s Survival Manual, is available in ebook and paper form. I expect readers of this book to fall into a couple categories: …
Dear Programming Job Applicants...
This article is written with considerable snark–put on your flameproof suit if needed. I’m not actually a jerk when interviewing people, but I do get frustrated when candidates fail to do basic …
Coming to a Bookstore Near You
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. First, thanks to all the readers who followed my PragProWriMo 2009 …
Quality: Beginning vs. Afterward
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. Yes, PragProWriMo 2009 was over yesterday. However, I can’t introduce …
Essential Industry Skills
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. Allow me to consult the vast oracle of the interwebs on a perplexing …
Quality is Job 0.99999
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. This is intended to introduce a chapter on quality. There’s a myriad …
Platforms
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. It used to be that the “user interface” for a computer was assembly …
Programming Languages
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. There are few topics that can get programmers riled up more than …
Optimism
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. In the 90’s Bare Bones Software released a text editor called BBEdit …
Corporate Myths
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. Author’s Note: it’s really hard coming up with good examples for the …
Functions and Parameters
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. This entry is a day late because I started writing about pointers, …
Investigating The Stack With the Debugger
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. This section assumes I already covered some basics of GDB earlier in …
The Stack
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. Every thread in every process has a stack. This is where local state …
Introducing the Machine
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. As best I can tell, the Intel 8086/8088 processor and its successors …
The Tao of Computing
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. Author’s note: This post is intended to introduce a larger section of …
Code Reviews
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. At some point your code will be the subject of a peer review. Many …
Methods of Software Development
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. As a product gets larger and more complex, the development team needs …
Software Over Time
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. NOTE: I’m really skipping around here. Let’s get away from business …
Products, Customers, and Value
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. Do I need to keep saying this is a first draft? From here out I’ll …