Here’s how the Boston Globe describes the difference between a software engineer and a computer programmer:
While software engineers develop the software, computer programmers convert the design into code that the computer can follow.
That is, I believe, the definition of a distinction without a difference. The good news is that both jobs are on the paper’s list of ten least stressful careers.
I’ve been a vi user for many, many years. In fact, I used to program in C on a MUD using ed (vi is the fancy version of ed). However, it’s been a long time since I used vi as my editor of choice for development work. I use it for hacking scripts, editing files on servers, and general purpose text editing in a terminal window, but most of the time I use Eclipse for Java and TextMate for pretty much everything else.
A lot of people in the Rails community have migrated over to vim (and MacVim) in recent years, and I know there’s a very active community of programmers who are working hard to make it a better tool for developers. Anyway, I wanted to try out the Solarized color scheme people were talking about and Vim looked like the best option, so I decided to dive in, at least for Rails development.
I’ve been really impressed. Tim Pope’s rails.vim library for Rails developers is really, really good. The navigations features in particular are worth the price of entry. Then there’s the inherent goodness of Vim itself. Vim is difficult to approach initially, but it’s an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of someone who really knows how to use it. Even though I have been using it for a long time, I don’t really consider myself to be a Vim power user by any stretch of the imagination, because I’ve mainly used it to edit small files, one at a time.
Using Vim for project work is completely different, and that’s the area where my Vim skills need work. TextMate provides you with a file drawer with all of the files in your project, easy to use search across all the files in a project, and the ability to easily open multiple files in a tabbed editor and switch between them. The next step is to learn the tricks to accomplish the same things using Vim. Anyone seen a good tutorial?
Update: Just for fun, here’s my .vimrc.
This weekend we had a significant weather event as a tornado blew through and caused a lot of damage. In a lot of areas, tornadoes caused power outages and a number of traffic lights were out, even after power was restored in some cases.
I was surprised to see that many, many drivers did not treat intersections with disabled traffic signals as four way stops. I don’t know whether people don’t know that’s the law, or they just don’t care, but I repeatedly saw people blowing through intersections without even slowing down.
When I lived in Houston, KLOL (now a Latin station, apparently, but for many years a classic rock mainstay) ran a traffic segment called “Traffic in Bondage,” reported by the TrafficMaster Lanny Griffith. Houston has lots of traffic, and Lanny Griffith was perhaps the greatest traffic reporter ever. How many traffic reporters do you know of who have a devoted fan base?
One of his signature bits was, “Traffic signals are out at Westheimer and Gessner. Treat it as a four way stop! Hwah!” Everyone who listened to KLOL heard that, usually multiple times per day. This, to me, will always be the essence of public service journalism. I wish someone had taken a poll at the time that compared the level of awareness of what to do when traffic signals are out among Houstonians to Americans in general.
We don’t have such a traffic reporter here, and very few people seem to know how to drive. When you arrive at an intersection with the traffic signals out, treat it as a four way stop.
On an unrelated note, in the photo, Lanny Griffith is biting a Key Map of Houston, which was the best navigation aide you could possess prior to the age of MapQuest and GPS receivers. Owning one was absolutely essential if you had a job that required driving around. The company that publishes them is still in business and still produces maps only of Houston and its surrounding areas.
Tyler Cowen positions himself as pro-choice when it comes to health insurance. Here’s his basic proposal:
When people turn a certain age, allow them to trade in the current benefits package for a minimalistic package (set broken limbs and offer lots of potent painkillers), plus some of the rest in cash, doled out over the years if need be. For some people, medical tourism will fill the gap.
But if a person wishes, he or she can keep the extant benefit structure and forgo the cash altogether. No one is forced to take this deal.
It sounds fine in theory but I worry about it in practice. These sorts of deals are contingent on the idea that if you opt out of comprehensive care, we (as a society) let you die, or suffer. When happens when a senior who has opted out developers Alzheimer’s Disease, or Parkinson’s Disease, or ALS, or some other slow-developing terminal illness that is expensive to treat? What happens when they develop a chronic condition that isn’t going to kill them but is going to require constant care for the rest of their life? Unless we’re willing to put them on an ice floe, then everyone else is going to wind up paying their medical bills one way or another. Or perhaps their family will go broke trying to purchase medical care for them.
As a society, I don’t see us being willing to let people really suffer the consequences of their choices. Even people who make healthy lifestyle choices become ill and get into accidents all the time. My prediction is that people will regularly take on lots of “health risk” and that in the end, bailouts will be available, regardless of the choices they’ve made. Our public policy has to acknowledge that
Interestingly, a number of people raise this issue in the comments and Tyler responds glibly. I really am not sure how he accounts for this problem, putting me in the group of people he describes as irrational.
Andre Torrez takes issue with the excessive carping about products we see on Twitter and in other outlets:
I think making the right choices when you face them is the best way to say how things should be done. Having empathy for people doing what you are doing is as important as having empathy for your own users.
Path dependence is as operative in software development as it is anywhere else. Most developers aren’t doing things that seem stupid or wrong because they themselves are stupid, but rather because decisions previously made reduce the options that are available to them.
Nearly every developer I know would love to work with better designers and spend more time on design. They’d like to do continuous deployment, spend time writing test suites for their code, do code reviews, and use the latest and greatest tools to get their work done. And yet they are stuck using antiquated tools and processes because that’s what their boss understands, or because their project has been around awhile and it’s too difficult to make time to migrate, or because it’s hard to reach consensus about change on their team.
To put it more simply, things rarely suck because nobody has come along and told them that they’re not good.
Marco Arment’s theory on why Facebook “open sourced” their data center design via the Open Compute Project makes a lot of sense to me:
My best guess is that this is primarily for recruiting engineering talent. There’s no shortage of engineers, but there’s always a shortage of great ones, especially in Silicon Valley. Google has been a talent vacuum for a long time since it’s so appealing for most engineers to work there.
With this move, I think Facebook is telling the geek world that they’re just as big and serious of a tech company as Google, and if you want to work on large-scale, interesting engineering challenges that affect hundreds of millions of people, you should work at Facebook.
This is all that needs to be said about the budget deal:
Details on the appropriations deal are still hard to come by, but you don’t need the details to know that substantial short-term cuts in domestic discretionary spending will hurt the poor while harming macroeconomic performance. The problem with not agreeing to the deal, of course, is that a government shutdown would also hurt the poor while harming macroeconomic performance. If you genuinely don’t care about the interests of poor people and stand to benefit electorally from weak economic growth, this gives you a very strong hand to play as a hostage taker. And John Boehner is willing to play that hand.
The other problem is that Democrats somehow think that cutting a bad deal to free the hostages is something to be proud of. Here’s Senator Claire McCaskill on Twitter:
Compromise. That wasn’t so bad was it?
Ugh.
It’s important to remember that the reason patents and copyright are included in the Constitution is to “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” Keep that in mind when you read the following two blog posts. One, from Alex Tabarrok, looks at why DVDs of “WKRP in Cincinnati” can’t be released with the original music. The other, by Matthew Yglesias, looks at why Google would bid $900 million for Nortel’s patent portfolio.
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Navigating among tabs in Vim
Last week I mentioned that the only thing I was struggling with in my transition to Vim for editing code was juggling multiple open files at once. Switching from one file to another is really easy, especially if you’re working on a Rails app and using rails.vim. There are a number of really nice navigation features built in that make it easy to open any file from your project and to switch among related files.
This morning I noticed that these navigation commands all have “open in new tab,” “open in new split window,” and “open in new window” variations. So to open a model called “store.rb”, in command mode you just type:
To open that model in a new tab, you type:
Navigating among tabs using the keyboard is easy as well:
So, to switch to the third tab, you just type “3gt”. In command mode you can also just type “gt” to move to the next tab.
Suddenly, my problems are solved.
I’m also getting the hang of split windows, which I should have mastered years ago. They have two advantages over tabs, the first being that they make it easy to look at multiple files at once. The second is that you can use them in terminal sessions as well. Another nice thing about split windows is that you can split your view of one file so that you can look at one section of the file while you work on another.
I think the real lesson here is that not taking the time to master your tools is false economy.