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2024

  • 1 min read

How I stopped worrying and loved Makefiles

Link: How I stopped worrying and loved Makefiles: "First contact with make When I was invited for my first job interview in the IT, I’ve been asked such question: How would you typically build a program from sources, what commands will you use? I answered: It’s obvious: ./configure make make install Those times belong to the past now and nowadays not many programmers use GNU Make1. Try asking this question and you will see disgust at best. For many it’s the fist contact with make and often the last one, but not for me 😉"

Great reminders on how and why to use the ancient and ubiquitous “make” tool.

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Best Practices for Working with Large Language Models

Link: Best Practices for Working with Large Language Models: "Generative AI has revolutionized programming. Based on his own experience, Jon Udell codifies how to partner effectively with LLM assistants."

We’re all doing it now, right? Using LLMs for all kinds of things? Well here are some useful rules of thumb. By the way, as far as employing a team of assistants, take a look at Poe.com. It’s a single front end to all (almost all) the LLMs out there. And in fact it bakes in the question of what would the other LLMs say to the same prompt.

A brave new world!

  • 1 min read

Grading for Growth

Link: Grading for Growth: "Research and ideas about reforming grading practices in higher education and beyond. Click to read Grading for Growth, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers."

This article lays out many of the things that worry and bother me about the way we teach, assess and grade.

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Software Needs To Be More Expensive

Link: Software Needs To Be More Expensive: "Software, like coffee, is too artificially cheap, and we need to make it more expensive. I have one suggestion for how to do that."

I agree with the high level argument. The open source situation does need a solution. But in general, we need to find ways to pay software developers more for the work they put into writing software. Wait! What do I mean? We have trained the world to expect to pay $0 for software that took huge numbers of person months to create. $4.90 is expensive! I know this is how the market weeds out useless products. But lots of useful ones need to fight this too. Try-before-you buy should remove the risk factor. But once you adopt an app and use it regularly then be willing to pay a serious amount for a serious app. People just don't have a sense of how much time and effort it takes to create even something as simple as an exellent solitaire game.

  • 1 min read

So your teacher wants you to do open source

Link: So your teacher wants you to do open source: "If your teacher (or tutorial/video/hackathon/etc) says "go do X in an open source project" and then sends you off unsupervised, they haven't adequately prepa..."

Teachers, like me, might think it’s a good idea to suggest that students do a quick open source contribution. This article explains why that might be doing harm to the project’s.