Hacking the Grepson

Matt and Mike finally get to some fundamentals about programming: variables. In Part 1, we discuss so-called "primitive" types, such as Boolean and String.

It's best not to get too hung up on terminology, especially as it relates to people's skills and job titles. That being said, Matt and Mike decide to ignore this advice and bikeshed the intention of three tech terms for a time.

All things come to fruition through process. In programming, as in music, that process can be called iteration. In another installment of the MusicDev series, Matt and Mike go over (and over (and over)) this phenomenon.

Matt and Mike discuss a new daily obsession, Progle, which tasks one with identifying programming languages from both their attributes and their actual code.

https://progle.net

Artificial Intelligence is having a real hey-day late-lay in the form of ChatGPT, and it seems like advances are happening at a rapid pace. Fear of our potential robotic overlords resulting from said advances have spurred a recent petition to pause said efforts. Matt and Mike discuss.

* ChatGPT 4: https://openai.com/product/gpt-4

* Petition to pause: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/

Mike and "Matt" and "Matt2" discuss a form of programming in gaming: automation. Two examples, PlateUp! and Minecraft, offer up their own version of this particular skill.

PlateUp!: https://www.plateupgame.com

Minecraft: https://minecraft.net

Matt and Mike discuss the importance (and sometimes harmfulness) of backlogs, and an interesting model of software development, framed as plain old human interaction.

* Backlogs are Useless: https://lucasfcosta.com/2023/02/07/backlogs-are-useless.html

* RailsConf 2020: Tidy Up?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFFY9Zor6zw

Codebases are like houses, in that they can take on different shapes, sizes, and levels of organization and maintenance. Matt and Mike explore an article called "Uncovering Your Code's House" and discuss this interesting metaphor.

https://betterprogramming.pub/uncovering-your-codes-house-120d8f31075d

Sure, writing code can be fun, but is it always "right" to write that code? Matt and Mike discuss the boundaries and responsibilities programmers should be aware of when developing.

Matt and Mike explore the messy, but inevitable, topic of technical debt. Developing the "correct" way is often less efficient and less immediately satisfying, but it can avoid a potentially insurmountable mountain of spaghetti code later.