Developer Voices at NC State
**SPOILER ALERT**SPOILER ALERT**SPOILER ALERT**
Successful peer interaction occurs in social contexts where users have peers that they can observe, such as in a collocated team, but also in technical contexts where such observations are facilitated, such as when one user can see the outcome of another user’s tool use.
How Do Users Discover New Tools in Software Development and Beyond?
by E. Murphy-Hill, D. Y. Lee, G. C. Murphy and J. McGrenere
If I believed in a deity, I would know in my heart that they invented blogs to capture in bits the thoughts of Jason Young. Back in the day when you did your own damn conversation threading, Jason’s emails fell out of the screen like Venus rising from the sea fully grown and perfectly formed. By the time he had finished he had covered the topic so thoroughly, there was rarely any sense in replying to them–truly a master of communication. I might be thinking:
“OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT QUESTION WAS ASKED AGAIN”
But Jason was nearly always patient, except maybe that one time I asked him if “architecting” was a real word. Well, if it wasn’t then, it certainly is now.
With no apology at all to Jim Croce, check out Operator, can you help me place this call.
In this not-quite-Jason-Young length post, Dustin Wheeler has some sage advice on dealing with legacy systems and upstream systems of record. He really captured my mood when he said:
You’re happy! You have all the data you need to build “Next Big Thing”;
Darned skippy I am. Mass quantities of data satisfy like no other thing on the planet.
Representing Changes in a Database as a Stream of Events
The WordPress 5.0 update included their new Gutenberg block editor. There’s plenty of advice, opinion and tutorials out there, but this blog post from Miles Elliott really spoke to me:
Now, I know you’re probably a perfect developer. You write things with no mistakes and get it on the first try. You foresee all use cases and you write functions that win Nobel Prizes. When people use code you’ve written, they feel an unexplained warmth from their bottom of the soul and walk away a fundamentally better person.
So true, so true, Elliott. And I’m going to add your ideas about “going (almost) all dynamic blocks in WordPress” to my bag of tricks. Can’t wait to get to part 2 and find out if “Dangerous Markup” is finally defeated.
Sharing is caring.
Every time I’ve thought of starting a blog about software development at NC State I got about this far then immediately started self-censoring what I should say. Today it dawned on me that my talents are less authorial and more editorial. Today I asked myself, are there developers out there that have a post or two in them, but really can’t afford the time sink of a regular blog? Today I said out loud, “OIT makes it too easy for folks with ideas to just go off and implement them!” So, here we are.
If you’re a developer and want to get in on this gig, send your blog post to me in an email–huck@ncsu.edu. I’ll publish it in full, using your real name and such, and you’ll be able to brag that you are a caring developer at NC State University.
If you’re a developer and could care less about submitting something, feel free to lurk. If someone recommends a post you have out in Internetland, I may excerpt it and point at it anyway.
Best Regards,
Margaret Hudacko