A classic text on problem-solving by Jerry Weinberg. The book is short, but packed with wisdom. Especially useful if you are a software developer trying to build yet another feature for your application.

I had an interesting experience at work this evening. It was late afternoon, and I was tasked with an important feature, the details of which were not so clear to me. There was significant work involved in both back-end and front-end, including the database. I have been procrastinating on this for almost an hour.

Delegates in C# was one of the many concepts that eluded me for a long time. Not anymore. I started reading C# in Depth by Jon Skeet this morning, and the entire first chapter is devoted to delegates. It really dives deep into delegates. Here’s a brief summary.

I spent many hours this week banging my head to parse a simple XML document. It was a real struggle to get anything done. According to pragmatic programmers, I was programming by coincidence, without any clear plan, just hoping to get the code working somehow and failing.

Walk into any library, and the first thing you notice is absolute silence. Why can’t we design our offices like that?

Since getting exposed to functional programming, I have started seeing functions everywhere. One of the list abstractions that I never really understood was the reduce function. Whenever I came across it, my eyes just used to glaze over it. Not anymore.

As a bibliophile, 2018 was a great year. I read 70 books and skimmed through many more, averaging at least five books per month. Here is a list of all the books I read last year.

My head hurts. It’s 11 pm at night, and I just finished a 3 hour debugging marathon to fix a bug that has been on my to-do for last 2 weeks. What began as a simple list of items not showing up in the browser ended up in an ill-formatted sql caused by mis-match of enumeration in a switch statement in the deep backend. The fix involved changing a single word, but the path I had to take was treacherous and equally fulfilling. The feeling is serene.

Rest In Peace, Jerry.

I have been studying Stoicism for more than 2 years now. The more I read Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, the more I realize how Stoic principles can be valuable when applied to programming. This post is a quick reminder to myself when I am writing software.