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Conversation with a Machine. Part 3
This will be the final post in the language series. For now, I can’t get any closer to the core of the problem that has both bothered and fascinated me for years. Many of its aspects remain mysterious to me — just like the enormous mystery of where language itself...
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Conversation with a Machine. Part 2
In the previous post I wrote about programming languages in the context of their relationship with natural languages. The goal was to arrive at a somewhat uncomfortable conclusion: programming languages are not really languages in the everyday sense of the word. They are closer to a system of formal rules...
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Conversation with a Machine. Part 1
Writing code is only the first step in the interaction between a programmer and a machine. What happens next sits somewhere between magic and a very sophisticated act of translation. In this post I take a look at high-level programming languages and their relationship with natural languages. It’s a topic...
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Spoiler Alert
The holiday season is in full swing, so today’s topic is something lighter: cult movies about computers, technology, and digital obsessions from years ago. Recently I fell into a small marathon of retro computer movies. Some classics, a few forgotten gems, and plenty of technological fantasy. I have a couple...
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The Blog’s New Clothes
It happened. I said goodbye to WordPress and Home.pl services. Good riddance. Seriously, I’ve been working in IT for years, but sometimes I behave like it’s my first time on the internet. I set up my Devwhisperer.pl blog in July 2024 using Home.pl services. They lured me in with a...
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Therac-2025
Reflections on Bugs and Doing Things Half-Assed Mistakes are part of our lives. Not only experience confirms this, but also proverbs and folk wisdom. “Only those who do nothing make no mistakes”, “to err is human”, “only fools never make mistakes”, and so on. This makes sense, because errors are...
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Feedback Is Not A Gift
layout: post title: Feedback Is Not A Gift published: true lang: pl Because not every piece of feedback is a gift. The end of the quarter arrives: the carnival of one-on-ones with managers, sometimes also with other team members. Conversations summarizing our “performance,” which determine whether we get a bonus....
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IT (News)peak
This entry will somewhat resemble a linguistics article. Just a bit more biased and without the footnotes. I don’t count myself among the linguistic purists, as I wrote here. I don’t believe that using feminatives will significantly improve the well-being of women in Poland, just as the presence of feminatives...
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The Entitled Programmer
Who are they? How do you recognize them? Apparently money motivates people only up to a certain point. After crossing some arbitrary income threshold, a person simply stops caring about cash. Their brain is no longer able to grasp its real value. A thousand more or less makes no difference...
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IT Doesn’t Need Humanists
A story about the clash between humanists and technocrats. Our reptilian brain likes black-and-white concepts and revels in oppositions that repel each other like the two poles of a magnet. Examples of such oppositions include: conservative vs liberal left-wing vs right-wing extrovert vs introvert Democrat vs Republican humanist vs analytical...
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Grace Hopper – Lecture for the NSA (Part 2)
layout: post title: Grace Hopper – Lecture for the NSA (Part 2) published: true lang: en alt_lang: pl A continuation of my reflections on Rear Admiral Grace Hopper’s lecture titled “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People”. In the previous post I tried to show that Hopper’s lecture is an...
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Grace Hopper – Lecture for the NSA (Part 1)
The American National Security Agency (NSA) released a lecture by Rear Admiral Grace Hopper from 1982. Its title is “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People”. The future as Hopper saw it in 1982 is now our present. It’s 2024, and the core problems of software and hardware engineering remain...
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English Is OK (for Polish natives)
A post deliberately peppered with numerous anglicisms. Once, a guy at work responded to my request to “share the screen” with a sulky “I don’t understand.” I asked what the problem was, because judging by his tone of voice I suspected that—contrary to what he had just said—it certainly wasn’t...
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Remote Work - A Dithyramb
In other words: How to work remotely and not go feral… Oh, wait, I actually don’t know that. And I really wanted to use the word “dithyramb” in a post title. I belong to the group of COVID beneficiaries. Ever since the global lockdown was decreed, I’ve only occasionally left...
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How to Harm a Programmer?
The difficult art of promotion — how to promote a programmer without harming them. Junior – Mid/Regular – Senior. The evolutionary path of a developer looks roughly the same. It is rather independent of the programmer’s age. So you can imagine a 23-year-old prodigy who has written 8 commercially successful...
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The End of Scrum
TL;DR: it’s impossible to point to the value of Scrum or the benefits of Scrum Masters being present in dev teams. The phenomenon should rather be considered in the context of belief and wishful thinking. This is my first post in an anti-Scrum series. It is somewhat biased and full...