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June 2007 - Posts

Saturday, June 30, 2007 10:52 PM

Why Computers Can't Play Go

About a decode ago a computer finally beat the best chess mind on the planet. Computers can play nearly every game we've invented better than us. However, one game stands out as unbeaten. The ancient Chinese game of Go . The Times of London has an interesting
Posted by SteveRowe | 6 Comments
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Saturday, June 30, 2007 2:35 PM

When Should You Refactor?

Refactoring is the process of changing the structure of code without changing its behavior. It should be used to ease the addition of features. Because the outcome is code that "smells" better, sometimes people get confused and think that refactoring
Posted by SteveRowe | 3 Comments
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Thursday, June 28, 2007 5:19 PM

Avoiding Overdesign

I'm reading Dreaming In Code and I came across this really cool quote from Linus Torvalds: Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You should start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll
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Thursday, June 28, 2007 1:34 AM

Trade Accuracy for Understanding

I found myself giving this advice to two people today. It came in the context off preparing a presentation for upper management. The desire was to communicate an understanding of what (and why) we are creating a piece of technology. The difficulty was
Posted by SteveRowe | 4 Comments
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Thursday, June 14, 2007 8:10 AM

Some Thoughts on Smalltalk

As part of my OO class, I'm learning Smalltalk. More specifically, I'm learning Squeak which is an open implementation of Smalltalk. What follows are some of my observations about the language. I'm assuming that most readers are unfamiliar with it as
Posted by SteveRowe | 7 Comments
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Wednesday, June 13, 2007 11:21 PM

Week-Long Management Class

Microsoft invests in its managers. This week it has sent me to a week-long residential management class. This is the second such class I've taken. In this one we learned some common management techniques and theories, but most of the time was experiential.
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Tuesday, June 12, 2007 12:41 AM

Coding for Humans

For this class I'm in I have to read Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck. He has an interesting quote in the first chapter. He says, "[W]hen you program, you have to think about how someone will read your code, not just how a computer will interpret
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