Last week I got to spend an evening reinstalling my wife’s laptop because she picked up some malware.  She received an email from a friend with a link to a YouTube video that prompted her to install a new codec. Except the codec wasn’t really a codec. The link wasn’t really to YouTube. The email wasn’t really from [...]

The term "computer science" is a laughable misnomer.  Outside of universities and operating system development, there isn’t a lot of computer science involved in the daily grind of computer programming.  There’s some, of course, but not enough that I would call myself a computer scientist.  Not by a long shot. I’ve long thought that Donald Knuth [...]

Think back to some nontrivial piece of code you wrote.  Now mentally crumple it up into a ball, douse it with gasoline, and light that sucker on fire.  That is what some future coder is going to want to do to your code. (Take a moment to let it sink in that Future Coder might very [...]