Russell's RamblingsI recently re-read On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. At least, I listened to it on Audible. It was originally published in 1859. More than a century and half later we live in a time when de-platforming is common in universities around the World. Institutions where, surely, the free exchange of ideas is essential. Mill […]
It’s a privilege & sometimes a challenge to live in a time & place where information is so easily available. A privilege precisely because of the abundance of easily accessible facts and analysis. A challenge because information overload can just drown out understanding. Sometimes there’s so much to learn it’s hard to organise and absorb […]
It’s not all grim grinding at the millstone of coding wonderment at chez Gilbert. Assembled this in recent days. It now stares at me across the study, making sure I’m back at the grim grinding.
Watched Kevlin Henney’s talk on ineffective programming habits last night. Interesting talk, engagingly presented. His call to not put the word ‘Exception’ at the end of exception classes raised an eyebrow. He was specifically talking about .Net & it flies in the face of Microsoft’s explicitly stated best practice (“and?” is his response to that […]
Joe Eames recently put up a poll on Twitter asking whether developers thought the correctness of code was more important than maintainability. I voted for maintainability but many responders disagreed. Given the constraints of a 140 character tweet I thought I’d write a blog post to clarify my thinking… Right up front I should say […]
I really like the looking of what’s coming in C# 9. My favourite features so far scratches an itch that previously just wouldn’t go away. When creating a class with readonly properties prior to C# 9 you had to write something like this… … which is fine in as far as it goes but you […]
I have some great friends from school but looking back on it the actual education was, for the most part, pretty indifferent. I love science & technology and I’m utterly absorbed by history, current affairs and all forms of general knowledge. Maths is a bit of bugger, but I’m still plugging away at beating it […]