Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Recent advances in chatting or Q&A software has provided the ability to write simple computer programs. Hooray! There is a trend in the workplace called “low-code/no-code.” A person at work writes a ten-line computer program that is helpful in that it will do something in a minute that would take the person […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Considering DevSecOps—nothing to see here folks. It is just what computer programmers do. Everybody in the software-creating world is doing DevSecOps (development, security, operations). Well, if you are anybody in the everybody, you are doing DevSecOps. If you aren’t doing it, you are a nobody in the everybody. What is DevSecOps? It’s […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We used to discuss this topic, but with different choices. Time passes. People discuss this on the Internet. Today’s question is “R or Python?” Good grief, two interpreted languages that run slow. But they are good for prototyping things, bringing in mammoth libraries, and writing useful things in ten lines of code. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Some things are so obvious that we all miss them for a long time. Moving from experiment lab to the real world requires some expertise. To do artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, etc. you do computing. This means a lot of software work. Though not as old as physics and chemistry, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Some people work on big data. The rest of us find value by working on data that is bigger than we can understand without some hand-crafted tools. For about two years I worked on a BIG DATA project. Well, that is how it was touted. BIG DATA was a cool name that […]

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by Dwayne Phillips “Dot Notation” has some nice things going for it. Let us not, however, believe that it is object-oriented programming. “We do object-oriented programming,” said proud practitioner, project manager, and recruiter. “Believe us,” they all added. Silly me. I did believe these well-meaning folks. Time teaches. class-name DOT function-name See? Object-oriented programming (oop). […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Present and past weave together. New tools or old techniques? I am a bit slow on the uptake of “new” things from time to time. This past week or so I stumbled across this thing called Jupyter. It is a type of “notebook.” Some call it yet another implementation of the “notebook” […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It is easy to forget that those of us who write computer programs are basically simulating machines to perform useful tasks. That wonderful computer program known as Visicalc was credited with being the world’s first electronic spreadsheet. The name Visicalc was short for “visible calculator.” Great stuff that transformed many aspects of […]

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by Dwayne Phillips How to write a computer program when you have no idea how to do it in a new language. I wrote a computer program this week at work. (oooops, I am supposed to write that I was developing because that is what the job recruiters call it nowadays.) This shouldn’t sound remarkable, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips In Agile Development, we are supposed to talk to one another each day. Sometimes, however, we just didn’t sign up for this talking stuff. In Agile Development, we are supposed to talk to other persons. We are supposed to sit next to other persons and work with them. All of us are […]

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