Dudley.Codes

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” — Unknown.

My oldest son Noah turned 7 three months ago.

I discovered something a couple of years ago: Almost all culture, old or new, is designed for consumption by people under 40.

In June of 2004, Arno Rafael Minkkinen stepped up to the microphone at the New England School of Photography to deliver the commencement speech.

The famous French philosopher Denis Diderot lived nearly his entire life in poverty, but that all changed in 1765.

One of the most common anti-patterns I see that can create conflict in an otherwise collaborative environment is people asking for permission instead of advice.

Motivation is a powerful, yet tricky beast.

In 1843, Soren Kierkegaard published his first major book, Either/Or (ebook), in which he tries to answer the question, “How should we live?”

If you want to get anything done, there are two basic ways to get yourself to do it.

A core component of making great decisions is understanding the rationale behind previous decisions.

In a world of more requests than we can possibly fulfill, learning how to say no with grace and style is a skill we all need.

John Boyd is described by some as the greatest military strategist in history that no one knows.

Western philosophers have not, on the whole, regarded Buddhist thought with much enthusiasm.

The factors that are easiest to measure or most visible are the ones that get the most attention, regardless of their importance in comparison to other factors.

Hiya guys!

Well I’m in the working world again.

In this post, I’m going to introduce you to the concept of Linux network namespaces.

Please Don’t Say Just Hello In Chat 2010-07-19 12:32:12 you: Hi 2010-07-19 12:32:15 co-worker: Hello. ## CO-WORKER WAITS WHILE YOU PHRASE YOUR QUESTION 2010-07-19 12:34:01 you: I'm working on [something] and I'm trying to do [etc...] 2010-07-19 12:35:21 c…

Brian Kernighan famously wrote: Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place.

Some people build skyscrapers.

Beyond the Dead Sea: When Good Software Groups Go Bad I recently posted what turned out to be a pretty popular post called “How to Keep Your Best Programmers,” in which I described what most skilled programmers tend to want in a job and why they leave if…

More people should do what I’m doing right now.

Abstractions are vital, but like many living things, dangerous, because abstractions always leak.

As riches grow, empathy for others seems to decline Who is more likely to lie, cheat, and steal—the poor person or the rich one?

Imagine something a wee bit outside your comfort zone.

Bill Caputo, through repeated conversations we’ve had, has convinced me of something very surprising.

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity.

Yesterday I wrote a post about how much capital your startup should raise.

My neighbor introduced me to The Office back in 2005.

Like many Unix users, I long ago created a ~/bin/ directory in my home directory and added it to my PATH so that I could supplement the wonderfully rich set of basic Unix commands with some conveniences and shell scripts of my own devising.

I thought Ligaya Turmelle’s post on SQL joins was a great primer for novice developers.

Rich Skrenta writes that code is our enemy.

One of the rules of system design ought to be this: When the users keep doing it wrong, the users are right and your system is wrong.

Backup

Way back in September 1983, I started my first real job, working at Oranim, a big bread factory in Israel that made something like 100,000 loaves of bread every night in six giant ovens the size of aircraft carriers.

(This essay is derived from a guest lecture at Harvard, which incorporated an earlier talk at Northeastern.)

Something important is almost never mentioned in all the literature about programming and software development, and as a result we sometimes misunderstand each other.

A talk given by Michael Crichton, April 26, 2002, at the International Leadership Forum, in La Jolla, California.

JavaScript, aka Mocha, aka LiveScript, aka JScript, aka ECMAScript, is one of the world’s most popular programming languages.

Copyright Copyright (c) 2000 by Eric S.

Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta.

Network Working Group Request for Comments: 1925 R.

Dear Mr.

“They’re made out of meat.”

BOOK 1 The Silent Void Thus spake the Master Programmer: “When you have learned to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave.” 1.1 Something mysterious is formed, born in the silent void. waiting alone and unmoving, it is…