programming

See the first post in The Pragmatic Programmer 20th Anniversary Edition series for an introduction. Challenge 1 Design a small address book database (name, phone number, and so on) using a straightforward binary representation in your language of choice. Do this before reading the rest of this challenge. Translate that format into a plain-text format using XML or JSON. For each version, add a new, variable-length field called directions in which you might enter directions to each person’s house.

See the first post in The Pragmatic Programmer 20th Anniversary Edition series for an introduction. Exercise 9 You are asked “Which has a higher bandwidth: a 1Gbps net connection or a person walking between two computers with a full 1TB of storage device in their pocket?” What constraints will you put on your answer to ensure that the scope of your response is correct? (For example, you might say that the time taken to access the storage device is ignored.

See the first post in The Pragmatic Programmer 20th Anniversary Edition series for an introduction. Challenge 1 Could some of the requirements of your current project be expressed in a domain-specific language? Would it be possible to write a compiler or translator that could generate most of the code required? Yes and it is something that my team an I would like to investigate actually implementing. The current project is a REST API and the requirements in question are user authorisation.

See the first post in The Pragmatic Programmer 20th Anniversary Edition series for an introduction. Challenge 1 Time for a little quantum mechanics with Schrödinger’s cat. Suppose you have a cat in a closed box, along with a radioactive particle. The particle has exactly a 50% chance of fissioning into two. If it does, the cat will be killed. If it doesn’t, the cat will be okay. So, is the cat dead or alive?

See the first post in The Pragmatic Programmer 20th Anniversary Edition series for an introduction. Challenge 1 Consider the difference between tools which have a graphical user interface and small but combinable command-line utilities used at shell prompts. Which set is more orthogonal, and why? Which is easier to use for exactly the purpose for which it was intended? Which set is easier to combine with other tools to meet new challenges?