Category: Programming

A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.

Ultimate geek respect for Adrian Hands

Here is something that touched and moved every geek out there:

Adrian Hands was suffering from ALS and had lost motor skills when he used his legs to type in Morse code and fix a 9-year-old bug in Gnome. The patch was submitted three days before he passed away.

I think the following comment does the best job expressing the feeling:

There are so many who benefit from the community, and so relatively few who give back. So many people claim some excuse to not contribute anything to anybody without getting paid. Then there’s this guy. I am honored to have shared a planet with him.

Old MacDonald had a file

Here is a bit of office humor from today:

Old MacDonald had a file, ee-i-ee-i-o,
And on that file he had a change, ee-i-ee-i-o,
With a diff-diff here, a patch-patch there,
Diff-patch, diff-patch everywhere,
Old MacDonald had a file, ee-i-ee-i-o.

P.S.: Those of you who don’t get it, should take a moment to learn about diff and patch utilities. For example, by reading this article.

Debugging with git bisect

Via Sebastian Bergmann’s blog I’ve learned about git bisect and how it can used for debugging. Sebastian demonstrates the functionality together with PHPUnit. I am a git newbie, so that was quite interesting for me.

git bisect can be used to find the change that introduced a bug. It does so by performing a binary search on the list of commits between a known good and a known bad state of the repository. A tool such as PHPUnit can be invoked at each step of the binary search to check whether or not the current state is broken.

Here is a shortcut on how to actually use it:

$ git bisect start
$ git bisect good someVersion
$ git bisect bad someOtherVersion
$ git bisect run someCommand -with SomeArgument

There are, of course, more resources online covering the feature. I found this section of the Git Community Book helpful. Hopefully, I’ll remember about it when I actually need it.

Coders are humble

Here is a Geek And Poke comic from a few days ago, which demonstrates how humble coders are. This equally applies pretty much to any IT specialization. More often than not we tend to think that we know a better way.

Happy Programmer’s Day!

Yes, you’ve heard that right – it’s Programmer’s Day today. At least in Russia, this is an official and recognized holiday. Not a public day off, though. Programmer’s Day is celebrated on the 256th day of the year, which falls on September 13th, except for leap years, when it’s on September 12th.

Congratulations to all programmers all over the world and kudos for your hard and often boring work. Keep it up and enjoy the day. I wish you fewer bugs, faster compilers, and flexible libraries.

And while I don’t dare to call myself a programmer, I’ve wrote enough to code to join the celebrations today. Beers, vodkas and tequilas are waiting for the evening!

P.S.: And if you are an outsider and have no idea how a typical programmer spends his day, here is a chart.