Maëlle's R blog

This week I took time to re-read The Programmer’s Brain by Felienne Hermans. Among the many gems one idea that stuck with me is that not learning how to do something and looking it up every time will make you less efficient. Therefore I starting feeling bad about one particular thing I never get done on my own: extracting parts of a string, even in simple cases. Avoidance tactics For instance, how do you extract names from the following templated sentences?

Prompted (😉) by some AI dread, I decided to go back to some basics and re-read The Programmer’s Brain by Felienne Hermans. Felienne Hermans’ work caught my attention when she gave a keynote talk at a Posit conference years ago. The book was a highlight of my week: extremely interesting, and easy to follow. Here are some notes, thanks to tiny bookmarks I added as a I read. The main characters The main characters in the book are

Last month, Vicki Boykis recommended the book “Code that Fits in Your Head” by Mark Seemann. I was intrigued, especially by her takeaway that “Writing good software should be a slow and deliberate craft”. The book reminded of The Pragmatic Programmer in the breadth of topics it covers. However, I much preferred its tone. Sustainability Throughout the book, the author makes it clear that he believes one should pay attention to the code one writes, to its internal quality.

Here I am again, writing about crochet and programming! I’ve continued creating my tons of shitty stitches cute creatures. New Git analogy! The crochet lifeline First Git/crochet analogy. I read a great crochet book about creating your own amigurumi patterns: Créer ses propres modèles d’amigurumis au crochet by Clotilde Massot and Lise Grandjonc. One of its authors (Clotilde Massot) is a software developer who, among other things, published an octocat pattern that I bought and used… Anyway in the book they explain that when you create a pattern, you will probably have to undo your work several times.

I’m not mad when current AI tools or tips1 make Git look cool and important. Something old and stable to cling to! 🤗 In particular, it’s now trendy to have agents work on different tickets in the same project in parallel by using Git worktrees. Git worktrees are even useful for us humans, even if we should probably not work on a dozen things at the same time. I had learnt about Git worktrees a while ago, but only viewed them as a way to open a read-only view of a past version of a repository: I have written about loading different R package versions at once with git worktree.