Justin McGuire's Programming Blog

Hulu auth in an endless loop.

I moved some files between folders, and this happened.

Saw this on a job application.

Be direct.

I used Codex to build out a real project, a dictionary generator for Dungeon Crawler Carl.

Still don’t like Python’s "separator".join(my_variable) v my_variable.split("separator").

Found this in a 2023 image folder, back when I was programming in Rust.

I've had a smidge of extra time with my recent unemployment, so to stay sharp and learn a few new things I followed Seiya Nuta's guide to building an Operating System in 1,000 Lines.

I followed the Operating System in 1000 Lines tutorial to understand what it means to work without the safety rails.

In 2010 Elif Batuman wrote Get A Real Degree.

Whenever people ask me about JWTs and stateless auth, which has happened twice, I answer: No, No, Maybe.

Sometimes science fiction gives a peek into a possible future.

Stack Overflow should not discourage repetitive answers.

My name is Justin, and I have 20 years of full stack experience with a speciality in backend and application development.

Let’s pretend this is all fictional and not at all based on a real story I can't talk about.

Scrum does a lot of things wrong, and a lot of the things it does right are mystifying.

I partially implemented SCIM.

Site assembled with Hugo, vi, Visual Studio Code, and zsh scripting.

These rules didn't used to exist, because they didn't need to exist, because web design used to not go out of its way to kneecap the basic functionality of a person using a website.

Will be fixed later.

These are articles that I've kept around and reread over the years.

When Fernando Corbató accepted the Turing Award for, among other things, inventing the computer password, he described my new favorite bug.

Should you use full variable names, or abbreviated?

Who uses UML?

C.A.R.

It took me too long to realize that the paper I just read was directly relevant to me.

Google Source has tremendous uptime.

Use two choices.

Forming.

In 1984 Microsoft decided to port MacWord to Windows.

I'm doing this project from the top-down.

I've always wanted to be able to put simple diagrams in this blog without going through the trouble of graphically creating them in LucidChart or Balsamiq.

Three months ago I started a new job with a huge jump in responsibilities.

Here's the inevitable followup to my last post about things I was right about.

Some bloggers have strong opinions and are just right all the damn time.

The TLDR is simple: if you have a disappearing/reappearing bug, just run it again.

Programming languages can be categorized in a number of ways: imperative, applicative, logic-based, problem-oriented, etc.

25 years ago, a simple question was asked about storage, access times, and economics, and the result was a simple paper.

This paper reads like an old man yelling at clouds, but then, halfway through, he simply writes a better cloud.

Algol 68 is the Cronus of programming languages.

When there are failures at a small level, like a deployment goes wrong, there's a meeting, and a blameless post-mortem written is shared publicly.

I went to dig into some of the sources cited in Peopleware (see my previous two blog posts), and I fell in love with this 1984 article on Japan's software industry and Hitachi Software Engineering.

Timothy Lister and Tom DeMarco didn't include a bibliography in Peopleware, so I swept through the book and produced one for curious readers.

I just finished reading that old software classic, Peopleware.

Mark Richards runs the Developer to Architect website, and puts out a video every Monday.

I've been reading about failures in distributed computing.

Here are my notes for week 2 of my product management education.

I've started an online Product Management class because, I dunno, I like learning new, non-coding things related to my job.

In the aftermath of GE's price fixing scandal, we learned that GE executives had a culture of winking while they told subordinates not to break the law.

NEDD is a one day conference in Cambridge.