The Digital Lumberjack - When life goes digital

Before considering joining one professional network evaluate the following assertions:

• You care about your career
• You care about the career of your colleagues
• You want to be valued
• You love or hate your job
• You must deal with many professionals

If just one of the above points got your attention you should already be on your way to open an account in at least one of the best known professional networks: LinkedIn and Xing

Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Tweeter... why should you join? or why even care? Just because everybody is doing it? Exactly! and also because it is not the waste of time you might be thinking about.

Social media and social networks will change the way you think and relate to other people. You might still remember what life was alike before the internet, when finding something worth reading was an achievement, when it was easier to concentrate in one task or in one long article... but now you might be struggling to find the skills and discipline to cope with so many interruptions and filtering so much information.

How many people died because they insisted that the Earth was not flat? How many people were accused of witchcraft because they knew too much about medicinal plants? And just to make the list shorter: how many people die today because they don't think like the rest?

For centuries the biggest civilizations have fought to spread the light of science and proper living standards. Many people feel sorry for indigenous cultures not having roads, factories and a stable economic system. No doubt we have endless paths towards happiness, and while we mock the style of living of Buddhist monks, they feel disappointed of us.

You should not be surprised that a guy who deals with garbage also feels concerned about the smell of your code. If you want to save the click to the Wikipedia article, I can summarize the concept rather quick: Code smell is all those symptons or things you see in code that raises a warning flag in your mind.

Thinking about how to implement a tool for measuring source code smelliness, my main concern was extracting the syntactic elements I wanted from a programming language.

Obviously plain regular expression matching are not the way to go. I decided to opt for a reduced AST representing the common elements of most imperative languages: functions, variables and some type of packaging (name spaces, files and/or classes).

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute Abelson & Sussman, SICP

Right before my first programming assignment at my University, we all had big expectations regarding the language we had to work with. Back then Visual Basic, C++ and Delphi were the big guys, but I as much as my colleagues agreed, maybe that was a too much for starting. C seemed the most promising option, it was after all, the language of the hackers. All the real macho programmers could code any thing they dreamed in it.

You cannot imagine our surprise when we found out that our assignments were to be made in something called Ada. Greatly concerned about the quality of our education, we started our own research.

Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts
Edsger Dijkstra, CACM, 15:10

Just as filthy as garbage collection sounds, it is the annoying feature many computer scientists disregard. The most common opinions are that it encourages bad programming practices, it will prevent you from learning important mechanics about the memory consumption of a program and finally, even the most complex problem can be solved with explicit memory deallocation.

When the Internet was born many people understood how important it was the ability to publish any content and reach the whole world at almost no cost. The freedom and the resources have ever since been there, but maybe this was never really exploited until the blogs appeared.

A blog by definition, is just a personal journal published on the internet. Usually they are focused in one specific subject. Think one word about any hobby, political trend, professional activity... anything! and you will find someone blogging about it.

The big difference from any other of your reading sources (and the reason because people don't usually take it seriously) is that most of them are written by normal people. Anyone can have a blog for free in a few minutes. This usually comes along low quality, non reliable, non professional and many other non desirable things. However such freedom gives a voice to interesting people who would never get noticed.

The greatest hope of internet generation is that you can share your thoughts with everybody in the world. The greatest letdown of the same generation is that nobody cares. Still, that doesn't keep us from trying.

Ted Dziuba

I don't have any doubt that the first thought of many of my friends reaching this blog will be something like "I knew this guy was nuts!"

Yeah right. Why would any normal person keep a blog? Don't only nerds and such sort of socially troubled people do it? Come on! It is a lot of work for just exposing one's private life and simple minded thoughts. Isn't it?

The foremost of all the forces that drive the world is falsehood. More than any before it, twentieth-century civilization has depended on information, teaching, science, culture - in short, on knowledge as well as on a system of government which, by its very definition, seeks to make knowledge availabe to all: democracy. [snip]Those who act have better data on which to base their actions, and those on the receiving end are much better informed about what those who act are doing.
 
It is therefore interesting to inquire whether this preponderance of available knowledge - with its detail, its abundance, its ever broader and swifter disseminiation - has enabled humanity to guide itself more judiciously than in the past. The question is all the more inportant since the perfecting and accelerating of the techniques of transmission and the steady increase in the number of individuals who benefit from them will make the twenty-first century an age in which, even more than in the twentieth, information will be a central element of civilization.