Lazycoder

Classic Texts In Computer Science

Classic Texts In Computer Science: “”

More for my reference later, but I also wanted to share this link. “Bayesian Networks without tears” and “The early history of Smalltalk” are pretty interesting. At least they are to me.

Yes it should Frans

Frans Bouma’s blog : Jeroen vd Bos on Why Visual Studio should be part of Windows: “”

I’ve been saying that Microsoft should put the Express versions on the Vista DVD for some time. The only reason I’m doing any Cocoa development at all is because the tools came free on my OS X DVD. The only reason I’m doing any Rails development at all is because the framework is free. Giving things away for free is a great way to get people involved.

Heck, with all the features they’ve been pulling from Vista they should have plenty of room on the DVD for the IDEs.

So sign me up for that petition or whatever. Add my voice to the chorus.

Open Source in Healthcare BOF as OSCON

The BOF I submitted for OSCON 2006 has been approved. I’ll be moderating the “Open Source in Healthcare” BOF on Monday. All the details I have are located here. I’m hoping to meet up with other healthcare IT professionals and see what kind of systems they are using in clinical and research environments. How they link the clinical and research worlds together. Often Open Source systems come with open standards, which makes data interchange a little easier. But there are usually massive legacy systems in place that you have to glue together somehow.

Is going to medical school worth it

A looming healthcare crisis n America: Not enough doctors! (Health Blog On 10)

I came across this article at the on10 healthcare blog. Dr. Crounse mentions that the medical school enrollment is down, but the baby boomers aren’t getting any younger (or healthier). I guess I would be one of those young people that turned away from medicine. I got a degree in BioChem with the intention of going the MD-PhD route and starting clinical research. Took the MCAT, even interviewed at K.U. medical school. Why did I choose not to interview the next year? I took a look at 4 years of medical school, about 2 years of PhD work, plus internships and post-doc work. It would be about 10 years before I was looking at any real money. Not to mention the hell that is medical school and internships, where a 12 on – 12 off with one 12 hour on-call shift is the norm. Who wants to be responsible for peoples lives at the tail end of a 36-hour shift? For ~$20K/year?! I’m happy with my position now, I get to use my degree to a certain extent but still focus on using my tech skills to improve patient care.

My number one suggestion for getting more people into medicine: Lower the hype around medicine. Doctors aren’t gods. You don’t have to be a super-genius to be a doctor. I knew plenty of dumb people who got into medicine and haven’t killed anyone in their clinical work. One girl that stuck out in my mind used to pipette silver nitrate using a mouth pipette. She got in to med school her first try.

Talking about software development is hard

Jeffrey Palermo [C# MVP] : Writing software is too EASY these days – 300

“The only type of programmer should be the good type.

This is what it comes down too.  Companies should not trust an unskilled person to be a programmer for them.  “

So, effective immediately, the available employee pool shrinks to just “good programmers”.

How does one go about making the mistakes that have to be made in order to learn how to become a “good programmer” if one can’t get hired because they aren’t the “good type”?

No, don’t tell me. Let me guess. If everyone followed the agile programming practices, then everyone would have no choice but to become the “good type”. Agile programming practices don’t let you write bad code. And what are those EXACTLY again? No one knows, the agile practicies have been diluted by marketspeak and mass adoption.