On the blog: The Golden Mile Conversion
"Historically, we had measured the world against ourselves — the foot, the cubit, the distance one could plough or march — but were moving to measure ourselves against the world and beyond— the nautical mile, the kilometre, the distance from the Sun to the Earth. In this reframing, we are fractions of the world rather than the world being multiples of us."
https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/the-golden-mile-conversion-05481974ad64
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Empirically, we can conclude that none of these decisions has survived contact with reality, and that revisiting the decisions and improving testing is what needs to be done.
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If they regression-tested the visual effect with any thoroughness, this would be picked up. If they unit-tested the code responsible for calculation, this would be picked up.
But I guess that either the calculation code is so messy that "There's no way we can unit test that" or it's considered so trivial that "There's no point in testing that". And for UI-level testing, they may have made an explicit decision to not worry about things visually being misplaced by a pixel or two.
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One of the most common I notice is blind spots in a product's testing. E.g., it's fairly obvious that testing of font-spacing in Microsoft PowerPoint is very weak.
A common consequence of an update I notice is text gets nudged one way or another in an existing file (and sometimes when you're editing). This means that sometimes previously carefully sized text will wrap around or that it will misalign from slide to slide.
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One of the interesting things about being in software development and also being a consumer of software is you notice oversights or (less often) niceties in how things are done.
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New essay on the blog: The Golden Mile Conversion
"This time I want to dive into the delightful and coincidental relation that ϕ km ≈ 1 mi, i.e., the ratio of statute miles to kilometres, 1 mi:1 km ≈ ϕ:1, is approximated by the golden ratio."
https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/the-golden-mile-conversion-05481974ad64
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Blog post: FAQ: Why 97 Things?
"100 is a popular number for lists and listicles, but perhaps too popular. 97, however, is close to 100 but, unlike 99 and 101, is not trying too hard to not be 100. That also makes it more search friendly. And it sounds good."
https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/faq-why-97-things-825ce0fc7862
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Program with GUTs - Good Unit Tests
Join me online for this 2-hour masterclass on Tuesday, 28th January, 11:00-13:00 GMT
https://techcornwall.co.uk/training/program-with-guts-masterclass/
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Designing for Change: The Role of Architecture in Agile
Join me online for this half-day course on Monday, 24th February, 10:00-13:00 GMT
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/thetechnologytrainingconsultancy/1440413
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New blog post: FAQ: Why 97 Things?
Where I answer the most common question I get about the 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know and the 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know books I edited.
https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/faq-why-97-things-825ce0fc7862
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The Maritime Approximation
"At ¾ km (within ⅐%), a nautical mile on Titan falls midpoint between that of the Moon and Mars. Of course, Titan’s seas and lakes are of liquid methane and ethane rather than water, and a human landing is exceedingly (and disappointingly) unlikely within my lifetime. But who knows, perhaps one day explorers will navigate Titan using a new nautical mile across new seas."
https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/the-maritime-approximation-8b71d5041cd5
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As we're still within a short calendrical distance of the new year, here's a couple of old posts on when years and decades start:
https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/happy-new-decade-344901254b7a
https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/new-years-1093fe1ab9cb
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The Maritime Approximation
"Euler's identity describes an intimate and mathematical relationship between different fundamental constants. And now, thanks to the maritime approximation, we also have a loose and coincidental one."
https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/the-maritime-approximation-8b71d5041cd5
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Some nerdery for the new year, a new essay up on my blog:
The Maritime Approximation
A transcendent measure of coincidence, maths and metrology
https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/the-maritime-approximation-8b71d5041cd5
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New blog content coming in the new year. In the meantime, here's a post that collects links to the essays on esoteric algorithms and related topics that I've recently been revisiting.
https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/esorterica-31e10f568d94
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In the latest and last of the recent round of essay revisits, I have updated the code and formatting, some links and clarified the wording in Out of Control, which explores coding styles and paradigms, refactoring and the Roman Numerals kata.
[#]RomanNumerals #Kata #Python #JSON #Refactoring #ControlFlow #Code #Data
https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/out-of-control-97ed6efa2818
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Continuing my revisit of old essays, I've fixed links, tweaked wording and updated the code formatting on Taking Months to Bits, which is all about NSFW coding and low-level bit twiddling intermixed with calendrical trivia and coding advice.
https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/taking-months-to-bits-f66f3eb2476a
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Lifting the Recurse of Factorial
Following on from the revisit of the previous factorial essay, I've just updated the code formatting, some wording, fixed a couple of errata and broken links. In this essay, we cover lookup tables, code generation, compile-time computation and approximations.
[#]Python #C #CPlusPlus #Ada
https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/lifting-the-recurse-of-factorial-9b705d4fe888
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The Recurse of Factorial
I've just revisited this essay on recursive functions, data structures, functional thinking and control flow, reformatting the code, fixing a couple of links, clarifying a few points and rewording some things.
[#]C #Python #Rust #Erlang #occam #LISP
https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/the-recurse-of-factorial-d29475407ffe
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text/gemini
