John Leacox

Software Engineer and Philosopher. I think deeply about code quality, abstractions, and how to teach and learn high level programming skill.

[John Leacox @johnlcox]

@JJSantaniello Herman Miller Aeron. It has 3 different base size options and is super comfortable for long periods of sitting. It also has a 12 year warranty.

[John Leacox @johnlcox]

@SarvasvKulpati @visakanv What sort of data do you plan to be searchable with your personal search engines?

I've been working on a personal data infrastructure platform with a plugin-based architecture for exporting/importing, indexing, and exploring personal data.

[John Leacox @johnlcox]

@AlexAndBooks_ Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

Read it in 3 days, and would have read it even faster if I had started it on a weekend.

[Kent Beck 🌻 @KentBeck]

The goal of software design is to create chunks or slices that fit into a human mind. The software keeps growing but the human mind maxes out, so we have to keep chunking and slicing differently if we want to keep making changes.

[John Leacox @johnlcox]

@Skillachie This looks great.

[John Leacox @johnlcox]

@visakanv Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon by Jeffrey Kluger is excellent.

[John Leacox @johnlcox]

@jackdomleo7 I also enjoy all of these things; I have a bachelors degree in philosophy and in computer science.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes good code "good".

Current theory is something with the ability to create abstractions and think at multiple levels of abstraction.

[John Leacox @johnlcox]

I've also been building a custom text expansion app to help me with my common snippets across multiple operating systems.

[John Leacox @johnlcox]

I've been thinking a lot about @karlicoss's personal infra page: https://t.co/tGZCXm9WJi and how I've accidentally started building something similar for extracting my book highlights from @BookFusionHQ and reformatting them into my @RoamResearch knowledge base.

[John Leacox @johnlcox]

This is great advice.

Writing Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) and storing them with the system is a good way to track why a particular approach was taken. The ADR can be referred back to, to recall why a decision was made rather than second-guessing it due to forgetting.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

"How do I get better at designing systems?"

Next time you design something, architect it two different ways. Choose the better approach and explain the tradeoffs. WHY did you not choose the other design? Even better, write all of this down and share with your team.

[John Leacox @johnlcox]

While the SOLID programming principles are largely defined in terms of Object-oriented programming, they can often also be applied in other programming paradigms.

For example, the Open-Closed Principle can be implemented via higher order functions / anonymous function params.

[John S Nolan parody @johnsnolan]

Been thinking a lot about Locke’s musings on the difference between liberty and license. License being doing what you want to do, liberty being what you ought to do. Ought comes from the idea of “what you owe others”.

[Emmanuel Acho @EmmanuelAcho]

Dear white people,
For days you’ve asked me what you can do to help. I’ve finally found an answer.

Let your guard down and listen.

[Dino A. Dai Zovi @dinodaizovi]

Tech friends: I think now is a good time to submit PRs to systems you work on that replace terminology like whitelist/blacklist with alternatives like allowlist/denylist. Besides not having any racial overtones, they are clearer to non-native English speakers too.

[JJ @JJSantaniello]

#BlackLivesMatter If someone saying "Black Lives Matter" makes you automatically want to respond with "All Lives Matter", you are part of the problem.

To put this in gamer context:

[Chad Wathington @twchad]

The biggest impediment to racial justice is this country is the denial of systemic and structural racism by a large portion of whites. Before Ferguson, it was somehow acceptable to say, “I don’t believe systemic or structural racism exists, yet I am not a racist.” 1/

[John Leacox @johnlcox]

I think a key skill in programming is being able to operate at two (or more) levels of abstraction simultaneously.

1. The consumer of the code - what the code does
2. The owner of the code - how it does it

[John Leacox @johnlcox]

Two Astronauts are launching to space from US soil (Kennedy Space Center) for the first time since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, today at 4:33 EDT, weather permitting.

[John Leacox @johnlcox]

Other essays I'm considering:

Frege: Concept and Object, Compound Thought from Logical Investigations;
Peirce: On a New List of Categories, Prolegomena to an apology for pragmaticism;
Quine: Levels of Abstraction, Natural kinds.

[John Leacox @johnlcox]

I suspect that abstraction is the core programming skill beyond language syntax. We don't (yet) have a good way of talking about abstraction skill or measuring the quality of the resulting abstractions created in using the skill.

[John Leacox @johnlcox]

I also read the more recent essay Abstraction and the Origin of General Ideas by Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis.