Joe Blogs
October 17, 2022
I was prompted to write this by a conversation with a friend I had about debugging in general. These are two stories from my early days as a programmer. They both illustrate the point that good debugging is like a Magic Trick. It’s really amazing until you explain how it was done. Story 1: I was working at my first programming job at a bank in Albany NY. I came in one day and the other 3 programmers were all working on trying to solve a crash from the night before. This is in the […]
April 17, 2018
So this is Martin Gardner. He died almost 8 years ago but he affected so many lives that a gathering in his honor is held once every two years. At this year’s Gathering 4 Gardner 13, I was fortunate enough to be one of the 325 folks to attend. Martin wrote the Scientific American Mathematical Games column for 25 years as well as many other books on a wide variety of topics, all of which resonate with me. Whether it’s recreational mathematics, puzzles, magic, skepticism, annotations, cryptography or even biography; I benefited greatly from seeing […]
October 10, 2016
After SIEGE 2014, I wrote a blog entitled: SIEGE 2014: Don’t Judge This Book by It’s Cover. This is it’s sequel, and as before, I will be using mostly code names for individuals and leave it as a puzzle for those reading this to figure out (if they feel like it). Before I get started, I was coming into SIEGE this year on a high from releasing Clutter VI and my team was all there at SIEGE at different points in time. If you met me, I’m sure I talked your ear off about how […]