While medical science has given us the ability to extend life, it does not ask – or answer – the question of if that extended life still has meaning. I read this book last year, but never got around to summarizing my notes. It is written by Dr. Atul Gawande, the author of “The Checklist Manifesto”. In this book, Dr. Gawande calls for change in the way medical professionals deal with illness and final stages of a patient’s life.
I usually don’t read satire, but so far the best one has been “The Age of Absurdity” by Michael Foley, and it was one of the best books I read in 2017. It critiques the eccentricities of modern life, revealing some rather uncomfortable truths. I have tried to summarize the book to the best of my understanding, but it goes much deeper than my naive first impressions.
Since I started learning to program, one of the most confusing topic has always been how to pass data, without having unintended side effects. Sometimes, we want the data to be immutable, sometimes we do want to modify it within a method. Eric Lippert’s Essential C# does a wonderful job of explaining this topic in depth. This entry tries to summarize my understanding and how it works in C#.
Software development is difficult. Especially if you are working on a 25-year old enterprise software that has gone through multiple platforms, technologies, and has seen multiple generations of developers. All of which makes it hard to understand and difficult to develop. What can we do as developers? Turns out, a lot.
I was really struggling at work this week. Spent hours banging my head to parse a simple XML document. According to pragmatic programmers, I was programming by coincidence, without any clear plan, just hoping to get the code working somehow, and failing completely.