“The Ultimate Code Kata”

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Jeff Atwood has a good article on using practice-programming to continually hone your programming skills:

Contrary to what you might believe, merely doing your job every day doesn’t qualify as real practice. Going to meetings isn’t practicing your people skills, and replying to mail isn’t practicing your typing. You have to set aside some time once in a while and do focused practice in order to get better at something.

I continually stretch my programming skills, seeking out new and better ways of doing things and trying to find ways to incorporate them into my code. When the project I’m working on doesn’t lend itself to that sort of thing, or I find a neat-sounding technique that doesn’t fit with whatever I’m doing, I write a small test program to play with it, or (if I can’t immediately spare the time) make a note to do it later. I’d like to practice with another programmer as he suggests as well, but I just don’t know that many personally, and none of the ones I do seem to have the interest (or the time) for “mere” practice.

Designing and writing software isn’t something I do to make a living, it’s something I do because I love doing it. Being able to make a living at it is merely icing on the cake.

Weekend Trip

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GoddessJ had a wedding shower to attend, so we packed up and took an overnight trip to the shores of Lake Huron. It was interesting… I saw a large number of power-generating windmills, including a couple that were still being put together (the first time I’d seen them close up — they’re freakin’ huge! I was fascinated by them, much to GoddessJ’s bemusement), and met someone who works for a large company’s “executive e-mail” section (one of many people who handle the e-mail directed at the company’s president). I managed to get a small but crucial portion of Project X coded too… I love portable computers!

We were staying at the home of the bride-to-be’s mother, who doesn’t have Internet access. I knew that in advance, and made preparations. But when we returned this afternoon, I discovered that blog-comment spammers had pounded Geek Drivel unmercifully in my absence… roughly eight times the usual level of spam comments, on a variety of posts. Do spammers have some kind of spy watching me or something? If so, it didn’t help them, Spam Karma stopped every one of them before they were published. 🙂

Now back to your regularly scheduled drivel.

Follow-up on “Spam from spock.com” Post

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Earlier this week, I posted a rant about three near-identical spam messages I’d received from spock.com. It turns out that they (apparently) weren’t spam at all, but that the site was contacting me on behalf of someone (as yet unknown) who had my addresses listed as part of their contacts. The messages were supposed to have that person’s name in the from-field, instead of mine.

There’s still something that smells a little fishy about this — very few of my contacts have that particular set of addresses, for instance — but I’m willing to accept that explanation until more evidence appears.