Joel slams Twitter's blog as boring, saying it's essentially rewritten press releases but Twitter does have an engineering focused blog that has much more interesting content (for Programmers anyways).
True. Though as it turns out she was actually helping him organize the conference which was due to be on the next day. (The Interview must be from Friday)
"There will be somebody that will contribute code actually, but most of the times this code will be about features you don't want to implement, or will not look like sane enough to be merged without a profound review, or will solve a good problem in a way that is not general enough, or simply the coder does not understand enough of the Redis internals or about your future plans to provide an implementation that is acceptable."
When this happens should the maintainer write back to the contributor and explain to them how they would like to code to be written instead (can be very difficult to explain). Or if the maintainer has time should they fix the code up themselves and merge it in?
Solving Sudoku isn't exactly rocket science. I can understand if you don't have the cleanest, most elegant solution in the world, but if you can't even make a tiny bit of progress toward writing a Sudoku solver in a few hours, then I don't think you have any business holding a programming job, much less telling other programmers how to do their jobs.
I mean, those Ron Jeffries blog posts read like someone who has never solved a non-trivial programming problem in his life. He literally makes no headway on any difficult part of the problem, and he spends what appears to be the better part of several hours working hard to get nowhere on code that does very little. If someone is listening to him about how to approach programming projects, I've got a bridge to sell that man.
In fact, solving Sudoku puzzles was a programming assignment given in my first year of undergraduate study. We were given input/output specifications, and told to write in C++. That was it.
Seeing as how most of the class passes, I assume almost any joker can write a half-decent sudoku solver if sufficiently motivated.
It's not just that Norvig is smart; he's specifically skilled at writing really good code, apparently because that's something he cared about and worked on. At JPL I worked with a bunch of smart researchers with PhDs but some wrote better code than others, and it didn't mean they were on a different level intellectually.
Norvig's book _Paradigms of AI Programming_ has 900+ pages presenting code as instructive as that Sudoku solver; I've never seen a better collection. http://norvig.com/paip.html
Dude, a sudoku solver is really directly solved via brute force search. If a coder can't come up with the brute force algorithm for a 9x9 sudoku board, there's something wrong with that person.
How many stories like this are out there now? Hundreds?