A Real-World Example Of "Duck Typing" In Ruby: Or, an Illustration of the Generalized Peter Principle

“Duck-typing” is a very useful tool in Ruby. But sometimes, tools break. Every tool is useful, until the day the tool stops being useful, and it’s time to do some debugging…

Untold Problems of a Software Blog: Bots

According to a 2015 report by Incapsula, 48.5% of all web traffic are by bots. If you are running a small website (10 to 1000 visits per day), 85.4% of your web traffic are by bots. Even if you happen to run a very large website (100,000 to 1 million visits per day), 39.7% of your web traffic are by bots.

Why I Will Avoid 'Speaking Out': Fear Of The Consequences

Today, many developers feel the need to express their non-technical political opinions online…in a wide variety of different, public forums (Twitter, Facebook, blog posts, comments on blog posts, etc). I can understand why people may feel the need to express their own views to random strangers on the Internet. After all, politics is an important aspect of a civil society, and it is essential to understand how a country is run. I, myself, have posted Tweets about non-technical issues (mostly condemning the growing national debt, the polarization of American society and the rise of extremist politics), and may have posted comments on popular blogs using dubious pseudonyms.

EPICAC XIV Shows Potential Dangers With Human-Machine Collabaration: A Parable From Player Piano

Recently, the term “Human-Machine Collabaration” has came in the vogue, to describe a sort of alliance between mankind and their tools to accomplish a specific purpose. There has been much talk about the potentials of such collabaration. There has been less talk about its dangers.

The Difficulty of Writing About Cutting-Edge Technology: Or, My Experience In Writing About Text Generation

This month, I finished a blog post series about “text generation” – or less jargony, programming computers how to write. This blog post series is available on the Practical Developer website (for mass consumption by a technical audience).