a.k.a., my very own soap box (TM)… odds & ends I’ve found useful, interesting, and/or wish I had seen earlier on.

I found that I was repeatedly re-googling links to share with new mentees, so I decided to shove it all in one place.

markers denote highlights.

🔗 Version Control

• GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5 Billion Undo Button
  • big-picture practical (& philosophical ?!?) implications of git/GitHub
• How to Write a Git Commit Message
• The Elements of Style makes for terse commit messages, especially
  • Rule 11
  • Rule 12 and
  • Rule 13
  • (great resource for effective writing in general, too)
• An emoji guide for your commit messages
• use git add -p to spot-check your changes while preparing a commit
• Version control concepts and best practices
• Git commit fixup and autosquash
• pull with rebase

🔗 Comments & Documentation

• C++ projects documentation best practices
• C++ Doxygen Notes
• 5 Best Practices for Commenting Your Code
• Putting comments in code: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
• How to Write Good Documentation (And Its Essential Elements)

🔗 Good Code: Philosophy

• C++Now 2019: David Sankel “C++: Engineers Wanted, Programmers not so Much”
• Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement
  • don’t bother with the original TED talk, it’s mostly hero-worshiping B.S.
• The Zen of Python
• CppCon 2019: Kate Gregory “Naming is Hard: Let’s Do Better”
• CppCon 2018: Kate Gregory “Simplicity: Not Just For Beginners”
• The Commandments of Good Code according to Zach™

🔗 Good Code: Nuts & Bolts

• CppCon 2019: Jason Turner “C++ Code Smells”
• CppCon 2018: Jonathan Boccara “105 STL Algorithms in Less Than an Hour”
• CppCon 2017: Kate Gregory “10 Core Guidelines You Need to Start Using Now”
• GoingNative 2013 C++ Seasoning
  • no raw loops!
  • no raw synchronization primitives!
  • no raw pointers!
• CppCon 2019: Jon Kalb “Back to Basics: Object-Oriented Programming”
• Better Code: Runtime Polymorphism - Sean Parent

🔗 Testing, Debugging, Benchmarking, & Profiling

• Unit Tests, How to Write Testable Code and Why it Matters
• 10 Debugging Tips for Beginners: How to Troubleshoot and Fix Your Code Without Pulling Your Hair Out
• How to Debug Any Problem
• also, use a proper debugging tool
• or, consider giving up and trying a different approach
• perf zine by Julia Evans
• flame graphs
• gperftools how to
• tools: Compiler Explorer, Quick Bench, and C++ Insights
• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

🔗 Horrible, C++-Specific Gotchas

• static initialization order fiasco
  • “A subtle way to crash your program.”
• type aliasing
  • basically, never cast pointers to pointer types besides char * or void *
• macro operator precedence
  • macro X: 1 + 1
  • macro Y: X * X
  • aaand… Y == 3 (not 4)
• The Most Vexing Parse
  • A a();
  • you’re just tryna make an A called a
  • but compiler bae thinks you’re tryna declare a function a that returns an A
• std::numeric_limits<T>::min()
  • returns smallest finite positive value for floating-point types (not the most extreme finite negative value)
• template and typename keywords
• CppCon 2017: Louis Brandy “Curiously Recurring C++ Bugs at Facebook”
• start reading from the TOP of horribly long compiler error messages: unbuffer make 2&>1 | less -r

🔗 Text Editor & Shell

prevent whitespace errors:

• ensure consistent use of tabs and spaces
• strip trailing whitespace from your files

getting around faster:

• go to last edit
• multi cursor
• jump ten lines
• dynamic hotkeys
• history-based shell suggestions via Oh My Zsh

🔗 History

• John Füegi and Jo Francis. 2015. “Lovelace & Babbage and the creation of the 1843 ‘notes’”. ACM Inroads 6, 3 (August 2015), 78-86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2810201
• Donald Knuth and Luis Trabb Pardo. 1976. “The Early Development of Programming Languages.” Computer Science Department, Stanford University
• Edsger W. Dijkstra. 1972. “The Humble Programmer.” Commun. ACM 15, 10 (October 1972), 859-866. DOI=10.1145/355604.361591
• AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System
• There Aren’t Enough Women in Tech. Here’s Why.
• Home/Front: Silicon Valley Rebels Vs. The U.S. Air Force : Rough Translation : NPR

🔗 Ethics

• KILLED BY A MACHINE: THE THERAC-25
• How Technology Led a Hospital To Give a Patient 38 Times His Dosage
• “Uncle” Bob Martin - “The Future of Programming”
  • starts out as a history romp but ends with discussion of programming as a discipline and profession
• Why Are There Razor Blades In My Walls?
  • a fun parable of technical debt

🔗 Personal Narratives & Anecdotes

• Stitch Fix’s CEO says there should be more seats at the table, not in investors’ hot tubs
• Q&A With The Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems
• Twitter Thread on MIT Media Lab by Dr. Sarah Traber
• Why I’m Firing Michigan State: Sexual Harassment, Online Harassment, and Utter Institutional Failure
• Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber
• Life as a Black Academic
• My Body is a Book of Rules
• SimCopter Easter Egg
• Advice from an Old Programmer

🔗 Miscellaneous Clever Tools I Like

… some of which I made

• your very own static url shortener
  • including password-protected links
• store & extract metadata in filenames
• Journal Like a Hacker
• Blog Like a Hacker
• write web apps in C++
• compute-cluster friendly containerization
• open science framework
  • and their awesome command-line uploader

🔗 Fun

• Fast Inverse Square Root — A Quake III Algorithm
• Grace Hopper on Letterman
• Grace Hopper’s Bug
• Wat, A lightning talk by Gary Bernhardt from CodeMash 2012
• The Story of Mel
• A Story About ‘Magic’
• The case of the 500-mile email
• The Origins of the <Blink> Tag
• A Collection of O’rly book Covers
• New Yorker Radio Hour: Unearthing Entombed
  • digital archaeologist is a job you can have now (?!)
  • twist ending about intellectual property

🔗 Let’s Chat!

What resources have you found most useful on your journey as a programmer? What else should I add to this list?

I started a twitter thread (right below) so we can chat

nothing to see here, just a placeholder tweet 🐦

— Matthew A Moreno (@MorenoMatthewA) October 21, 2018