Curt Doolittle

Category: AI, Computation, and Technology

  • the value of programming is that like writing an individual can accomplish great

    the value of programming is that like writing an individual can accomplish great transfer of information from one set of conditions to another with just time and very few resources.

    my expectation is that the future will require, as it generally does, increases in capital in this sector. And that if we are correct that biological modification (medicine) will continue to be the favored growth industry instead of physical consumer goods; and if I am correct in that there will be a clamp down on medical, health and fitness pseudoscience fairly soon, then; then the era of moneymaking from programming might go the way of other crafts, and continue to devolve into a hierarchy similar to the construction business where some people effectively do labor, and some design buildings and others supply standard components according to ‘code’ so to speak.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-02-22 12:05:00 UTC

  • “Hey Curt, I’m a fan of your work. I’ve been following your facebook posts latel

    —-“Hey Curt, I’m a fan of your work. I’ve been following your facebook posts lately, and I enjoy a lot of what you write. I see you talking about coding, and I was wondering if you think it’s recommended for someone like me (economics major) to learn coding and programming through self-study? I want to develop software for the financial sector or work on smart contracts. Or do you believe that it may be better for me to hire or partner with a software engineer or computer scientist to make this possible? Thank you in advance”—

    I usually prefer to answer general rather than specific questions if for no other reason that I have a very hard time putting myself in the position of forecaster. I am pretty sure Cassandra should have been burned at the stake.

    that said, if anyone asks me if they are capable of learning programming in addition to one of the STEM majors, whether they should, the answer will ALWAYS be yes. Economics and programming come very close to studying the ancient combination of politics and philosophy, but in empirical terms.

    I expect the decline in the the market value of programming to continue outside of the west coast of the USA as cheaper labor continues to come online (at least until some new method arrives).

    Source date (UTC): 2017-02-22 12:00:00 UTC

  • OVERSING UPDATE I’m pretty much working around the clock. I write a little in th

    OVERSING UPDATE

    I’m pretty much working around the clock. I write a little in the morning and then respond a few times during the day, but largely I”m working on the software from waking until sleeping.

    It took me most of October and part of November to get my health back, but I spend the down time doing a lot of research and planning the effort. Lets keep in mind that I was pretty out of my head at the time, but work is work and I got it done.

    What we discovered during the summer is that the app was too hard for us to update and maintain. This was somewhat intentional because I was trying to get to beta before the investment market cooled in the fall of ’15. But what we heard from investors is that we needed 50k of revenue before they would take on an enterprise product of this scale. What we also heard from Analysts is that to dominate the market we needed the accounting features that I had cut. What we heard from early beta sites was that it was still in late alpha stage. (which is true). But what I discovered when going through the code for my customer, was that it was overly dependent upon a series of factors: the speed of jquery/ractive (even if it was very well coded), mixing front and back end code, a terribly overdependence upon google datatables, a terribly unmaintainable use of callbacks to construct response objects, some serious abuses of memory, and a problematic implementation of accounting transactions.

    Now you might think this is serious but as someone who worked on Microsoft commercial products, and as someone who has worked almost exclusively with enterprise scale software (oh…. and games of course), I just view this as the normal shaking out of a rapidly prototyped and iteratively developed beta product.

    Now the fault here is mine because I had engineered my life to allow me to work on philosophy and the product at the same time, and to slowly hand over responsibility to the ukrainian development team so that I could return to the states, and start building the company from there. But these technical issues were larger than i’d planned for, and the team was frankly not as strong as i had thought (they led me to believe), and so I had not kept my nose in the code.

    My view was that it would take me 90 days to fix the existing code, or it would take me an unknown number of months to do some substantial upgrading. But that if I wanted to take the product to market at low cost and get 50K of initial business, and attract the investors that I want (and I do know who they are), I had the opportunity to stay in the states and get that done, and nearly eliminate my cash burn.

    So, during November I moved the back end to the most recent Laravel version just because if I was going to do a substantial change, I felt it was better to get it over with. Then I added the backend features that we needed to simplify what I’d found in our beta customers this summer. These are things that make debugging, adding or changing features easier.

    Then I spent (far too long) traveling to Seattle to settle some affairs, and returning in time for christmas. Then Starting the week after christmas I began spikes for the front end. And since then I’ve been converting the front end to much, much, simpler code, that is much much faster. i’m also using the design we came up with this summer so that I get a little higher contrast experience with the default theme.

    When I’ve finished that work – which I really don’t know how long it will take me, i’ll connect the functionality one service at a time. This reduces our backend to a pure API, without any UI services. The real reason this app is hard to debug is that lack of separation.

    The resulting apis will be:

    0) oversing.com (marketing site)

    1) app.oversing.com, (application)

    2) api.oversing.com, (data api)

    3) search.api.oversing.com (full text/file repo api)

    And then I just have a few new entities to add that complete the accounting system.

    Now I am not sure what this sounds like to everyone, but what it means is that I don’t have to do much application logic other than the modifications to permissions and the accounting system. So most of the work is what you’d normally do when upgrading an enterprise application to a new major release.

    And honestly, I love doing it.

    We’ll get there. Probably about the time the investment market adapts to the shock of the past two years.

    Curt

    Source date (UTC): 2017-02-19 14:59:00 UTC

  • “programming is low-level (fault-intolerant, syntactical) intuition is high-leve

    —“programming is low-level (fault-intolerant, syntactical) intuition is high-level (implicit, contextual non-falsifiable)”– Kashif Vikaas

    Source date (UTC): 2017-02-14 20:38:00 UTC

  • ( I can finally ‘think in React’ after a month. I must be gettin’ old. Damn this

    ( I can finally ‘think in React’ after a month. I must be gettin’ old. Damn this is fun. )

    Source date (UTC): 2017-02-13 14:32:00 UTC

  • PROGRAMMING IS AS IMPORTANT AS MATHEMATICS —“Programming should be part of bas

    PROGRAMMING IS AS IMPORTANT AS MATHEMATICS

    —“Programming should be part of basic education if for no other reason than to promote humility. Trying to write a program is like being Phil Connors in Groundhog Day – you fail at life, again and again and again… until you realize and accept responsibility for ALL the errors of your ways. In that way, being a good programmer is more about emotional resiliency than brilliant problem solving.”—Siraaj Khandkar

    Programming teaches you how little you know, and how precise you have to be. It teaches you just how often you don’t knw what you’re talking about, and neither do the other people you’re talking to, but because you’re all using words and ideas you don’t understand, but are using words and ideas that others do understand, you’re able to use conceptual tools like any other complex tool you don’t understand, but can still use for the purpose at hand.

    THE SERIES

    … Perception,

    … … Identity,

    … … … Arithmetic,

    … … … … Mathematics,

    … … … … … Logic,

    … … … … … … Programming(grammar),

    … … … … … … … Contract(reciprocity),

    … … … … … … … … Argument(rhetoric),

    … … … … … … … … … Communication (essay),

    … … … … … … … … … … Illustrating (literature),

    … … … … … … … … … … … Hyperbolic Illustration (mythology),

    … … … … … … … … … … … … Symbolic (arts).

    Source date (UTC): 2017-02-13 09:05:00 UTC

  • ( Tip. Facebook easily can get into an infinite loop under certain conditions. S

    ( Tip. Facebook easily can get into an infinite loop under certain conditions. Social Fixer for Facebook plugin seems to catch it. And displays an message that it’s stopping FB from doing it, and returning manual control of loading to you. Grammarly can get caught in this infinite loop, and take down your browser. (I’ve reported it). I’m testing it now, but it looks like Social Fixer for Facebook protects Grammarly from causing browser crashes. )

    Source date (UTC): 2017-02-13 08:55:00 UTC

  • Programming teaches you a great deal about the hubris of human intuition

    Programming teaches you a great deal about the hubris of human intuition.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-02-13 08:47:00 UTC

  • Vitalii Maslianok Jeez Vitalii. The farther I get in to rewriting it, the more I

    Vitalii Maslianok

    Jeez Vitalii. The farther I get in to rewriting it, the more I find of this code that is elegant. I mean, architecturally it’s excellent. The whole CSS bundle looks like it got our of your control, and clearly the maintenance pages that you didn’t build are a big hole, but the entire workspace/sliding-pages thing is quite nice. React is actually a hell of a lot faster, and quite a bit more readable, but damn…. you do nice work. Gutting the backend into an API makes everything so much easier too.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-02-12 15:07:00 UTC

  • ( It’s always the case. The quiet guy in the f–king corner writes beautiful cod

    ( It’s always the case. The quiet guy in the f–king corner writes beautiful code despite the domineering braggadocio of the leadership he must tolerate…. This stuff is beautiful. I keep stumbling across these little gems. I mean, it’s elegant. And sure I overpaid him but damn, he wrote great stuff. It’s so easy to rewrite. It’s just syntax changes. Architecturally it’s elegant. I .. I have some criticisms that have to do with the extreme wordiness of the css, and without better use of gulp and webpack it’s crowded, but man … the rest of this stuff is gorgeous and fast as you can make it. I should have written the back end myself and just let this guy roll….. damn. )

    Source date (UTC): 2017-02-08 17:22:00 UTC