How Tall is Your Ladder? Premature Optimization or Prudent Foundation?

July 14, 2008

Premature optimization: it’s the hater-programmer’s trump card. These days it seems everywhere I look I see these folks yelling, “Stop, you’re optimizing prematurely! Thou shalt perish in programmer hell!” To this I always want to respond, “What exactly is premature optimization, and why do you think I’m doing it?”
It’s funny, really. In the past six [...]

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Hello C, My Old Friend!

July 9, 2008

Recently I needed to parse a large ASCII flat file. The files are generally about 230 MB large with about 1.1 million records each, but there are some that are as large as 1 GB. To do the heavy lifting I decided to use C, something I’ve not done in a very, very long time. [...]

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Holy Q Batman!

July 1, 2008

One of my hobbies is looking at financial markets. Market microstructure is fascinating, especially when you take a deep look at not only how the markets function (price discovery, information propagation, etc.), but also the various types of market participants and their motivations and expectations. Needless to say, investigating markets and the associated reams of [...]

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Why Do I Always Have to be Different?

June 30, 2008

I like to use my personal projects as opportunities to learn about new things. Sometimes I explicitly try to reinvent the wheel — after all, this is my time to learn how to make a useful round object. I dedicate a certain amount of time every week to this type of tinkering, and the tool [...]

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Better Late than Never, I Suppose

May 22, 2008

Well, I suppose it’s time. I’ve avoided jumping online with an official-like presence for long enough. At this point I feel like the guy in the 90’s who was still using a Walkman listening to cassette tapes.
What will you find here? Mostly a discussion on software development, software teams, and other related technical bits and [...]

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