Entries tagged ‘thoughts’
UDP packets are like soldiers, running across the battle field, trying to reach their destination. Packet loss occurs when they are shot down, but nobody realizes this. The soldiers won’t bide their time until it’s safer to cross, like the mindless packets they are they will try and try again until they have all been killed.
TCP packets, on the other hand, are soldiers led by smart generals. If the field gets too dangerous, they’ll try a less massive approach. When the dust settles they’ll suddenly spring to action and make a run in massive numbers, but when the field gets congested they’ll slow down considerably.
They’ll also slow down when the UDP soldiers are among them, making them all easy targets. Let the UDP squadrons fight the hard battles, TCP fights a smart one.
In this tech-infested world, the question really is how to balance the tech. Are you better of with less tech?
When I made the presentation for BarCamp, I didn’t make it in S5 but in Keynote. S5 makes you write in HTML, makes you think in two different levels: the markup and the presentation. And you can’t see those at the same time — constantly switching the presentation of your content hurts the way you think.
I didn’t write this post in HTML. I use Markdown: plain text with some syntatic sugar to extract semantics. But the only sugar I’ve used this far is grouping the text in paragraphs (and adding two links after the fact).
When I want to code something I turn on some music, stand up and walk to a whiteboard. Pick up a pen and start sketching stuff. Pause, walk around a bit, drink some water, and improve things. Get your mind in a flow state, design the app. Then, start coding. Throw away parts you don’t need. Get up again if you get stuck, rethink.
Would OmniGraffle work here? Although, to be honest, I haven’t tried, I don’t think it would. It’d be sitting at my desk, typing away and connecting dots on the screen. Quickly drawning some physical lines is easier than doing it in the virtual world. And since these wireframes won’t reflect the actual code, does it matter in what medium I make them? If necessary I can always redo them in the virtual space later.
At uni, we had to make UML charts for Java code with Together. Aside from annoying the crap out of me, because seriously, that app is confusing, did it really make me code better? Not really, since I thought of the abstractions in my head, then put them into Together, and then wrote the code. Sketching on a real whiteboard would’ve been faster.
No-tech is important, don’t let all the shiny tech blind you from that.