Stacey on Software: Learning

  • Unit Testing: It's About Confidence

    I was reading this post , which raises some interesting points, but it sidesteps what I believe is the absolutely most important reason…

  • Software Developers

    I was reading this post the other day and thinking about my particular challenges with software developers. Which I believe I have some…

  • Sanitizing your input considered harmful.

    Yeah, you heard me. I love those sensationalist headlines. I've been frustrated lately trying to bring some associates along in their web…

  • Database Queries - Programmatic Criteria vs. EQL?

    So, an associate of mine is really enjoying programmatic database query criteria, and now it's spilled over onto me :) The use-case that…

  • Learn Your Tools, Learn Others Too

    I've always lived at the fringe of computing, with a foot in the popular and a foot in the obscure. When I was a kid, I had a Tandy TRS-8…

  • Keeping A Lid On It

    So I went to the TSOT Rails Project night last night, it was good to see some familiar faces and I enjoyed the presentations. There was some…

  • Living with Maven2

    I often see a lot of complaining about the Apache Maven build tool. In fact, sometimes I do a lot of complaining about it myself. The fact…

  • [DRAFT] The 'No Code' Constraint

    When you've done a code kata many times, it helps to find new ways to increase the level of difficulty of the kata. We often introduce…

  • Signed and Encrypted Email on OSX and iOS

    I'm writing this as much for me as I am for you, my fellow netizen. Signing and encrypting email on iOS is a black art. Get your incense and…

  • Why Kata?

    In 2011, Daniel Kahneman launched a book called Thinking Fast and Slow. It summarized decades of research and presented one core thesis…

  • [DRAFT] Specialize or Generalize?

    I've seen some thoughts floating around today around what kind of mix of generalists or specialists should you have on an agile team. It…

  • [DRAFT] Getting Started In Software Development

    More than occasionally, I get asked, "How can I learn programming as a beginner?" I have many thoughts on this, and here is just one of them…

  • The Long Road

    More than occasionally, I get asked, "How can I learn programming as a beginner?" I have many thoughts on this, and here is just one of them…

  • How To Build Good Software vs. Learn a Technology

    The Problem Go find any "learn X in 21 days", “X boot camp” training material and look at how it treats Technology X. Go to the Angular or…

  • Thinking over Typing 2.0

    Thinking over Typing 2.0 As a developer, I've found it possible to describe to ChatGPT my general programming style and have it generate a…

  • Diversion #1: Agents

    The idea of an Agent is something that has developed over the course of applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to problem solving. You can…

  • Simplistic Example

    A Simplistic Example Let's start from a simplistic example so that you can get a sense of where I'm thinking. The way I work as a developer…

  • Diversion #2: LangChain & Pydantic

    I've been doing a lot of my ML coding in Python. Honestly, for a long time I resisted it, but the tooling moves so fast and is so simple to…

  • A Quick Update - Trying to Dig Myself Out

    It's been 4 months since the last post, and I wanted to put out this interstitial post just to cover the time lapse. Since my last post…

  • Systemic Oppression and Machine Learning

    Many words have been written about the biases in "AI" training datasets. I last blogged publicly on this topic about 6 years ago, and it…

  • Leveraging Iteration and Decoupling

    You gotta love the "AI" newsfeed these days, fast and furious. So, along the path of writing this 6th instalment, a number of things emerged…

  • Structured Semantics

    Back in June, I was playing with structured semantics as a way to interact with an LLM for applications. Today, I watched a video that made…

  • Complex Example

    Stepping Up the Complexity Up to this point in the blog series, we've laid a little groundwork, and demonstrated a very simplistic example…

  • The Bionic Coach

    Introduction Being extraordinary, it's a good feeling. My first electronic enhancement was a calculator. Forget long arithmetic, this was…

  • Agents are Hard

    Today, in "building LLM agents is hard". I'm experimenting with a novel problem-solving model using the little Qwen2.5 14B parameter model…

  • It Will Do Whatever Fool Thing You Ask It

    A group of us sat down to do the Bowling Kata the other day, to see if we could get the GenAI to do the implementation as we wrote the spec…

  • What Is a Developer? Part 2 - Test Boundaries

    The seed for this article series is here , it's long and a bit ranty, but I wanted to draw a bunch of ideas into one place that we could…

  • Tacit Knowledge

    Following up on yesterday's post , we can't digitize empathy, feeling, etc. I have a certain kind of person that starts looking at me funny…

  • What Is a Developer?

    Thanks to a colleague, I came across this article today, and it's been energizing. The author and his editors at O'Reilly have put together…

  • Gen AI in Software Development, Not Coding 1

    I feel like I want to do a "stop talking about Gen AI generating code" series. Maybe I'll just drop a few of these out ad-hoc, see how folks…

  • Making a Small Pencil Tray

    Making a Small Pencil Tray I wanted to write this detailed walk-through to try and lay out visually some of the workflow I use on my…