Author Archive: Paul Epps

The Professional Programmer

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The single most important trait of a professional programmer is personal responsibility. Professional programmers take responsibility for their career, their estimates, their schedule commitments, their mistakes, and their workmanship. Read full article. Read more →

Aging Boy Bands

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A Facebook friend posted some photos from the Backstreet Boys concert in L.A. last weekend. Most of the “boys” now have worse hairlines than I do. Shouldn’t bands named Boys or Kids be forced to retire when they start to go bald? Or at least change their name from, say, New Kids on the Block to Old Guys on the Porch? Read more →

Ask “What Would the User Do?” (You Are Not the User)

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We all tend to assume that other people think like us. But they don’t. Psychologists call this the false consensus bias . . . Users don’t think like programmers. They don’t recognize the patterns and cues programmers use to work with, through, and around an interface . . . — Ask “What Would the User Do?” (You Are Not the User) Read more →

Pursuing the One True Good

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Most of us believe in our hearts that there is only one good and that ideally everyone should pursue it. In a perfect centrally planned socialist state everyone is part of a hierarchy pursuing the same end. If that end is the one true good, that society will be perfect in a sense in which a capitalist society, where everyone pursues his own differing and imperfect perception of the good, cannot be. Since most socialists imagine a socialist government to be controlled by people very like themselves, they imagine that it will pursue the true good—the one that they, imperfectly, perceive. That is surely better than a chaotic system in which all sorts of people other than the socialists perceive all sorts of other goods and waste valuable resources chasing them. People who dream about a socialist society rarely consider the possibility that some of those other people may succeed… Read more →

Will Financial Regulation Make a Difference?

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Banks are expected to find ways to offset the impact of the new financial regulations on their earnings, though they face a potentially complex process of adapting to the new requirements, analysts said on Friday. The share prices of some of the biggest United States banks, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, were higher in afternoon trading, hours after a House-Senate conference committee completed work on a bill that would toughen financial regulations. Analysts pored over the specifics of the deal as they emerged on Friday and expressed a wide array of views about the impact it would have. Some saw the bill as more of a political statement than a practical measure that could prevent another financial meltdown. Others said banks’ costs would increase, but banks would pass the increased costs along to consumers. — NYTimes.com Read more →

Twitter: 2010-06-26

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RT @SarahKSilverman: Sometimes people act like the US isn't the only country in the whole world. # Ignore the influencers: The dangers of a social media world | Conversation Marketing http://shar.es/mIRWQ # Watching the World Cup unfold on Twitter at http://twitter.com/worldcup/home # Read more →

Northwood High School, Irvine, CA

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— I see you’ve got a real international student body here. — Um, not really. It’s 49.6 percent Asian, 49.6 percent white and 0.8 percent everything else. Try finding a black kid. — I’ve seen a couple of black kids. They play football. — Try finding one in a classroom. Try finding a Mexican kid. If a Mexican kid walks on campus, the whole school goes into soft lockdown. Read more →

Barack Obama’s Impersonation of Harry Truman

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What has defined us as a nation since our founding is the capacity to shape our destiny–our determination to fight for the America we want for our children. Even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet know precisely how we’re going to get there. We know we’ll get there. — Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President to the Nation on the BP Oil Spill”   Or, as Harry Truman might have put it: There is as yet no consensus on where the buck stops. And so I’ve established a national commission to understand the buck’s velocity and the degree of kinetic friction between the buck and the surface across which it is traveling. Even if we don’t know precisely where the buck is going to stop, we know it’ll get there. — Best of the Web Today Read more →

Happy Father’s Day

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When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years. — Mark Twain A wise son maketh a glad father. — Proverbs 10:1 Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later . . . that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called ‘Being a Father’ so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. —Tom… Read more →

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