Biodegradable Geek

Learning to Program on Your Own

Learning how to code is like learning anything else – You have to do it. The hardest part is figuring out where to begin, and then you need some mechanism to show you that you’re making progress. The latter is important because it motivates you to keep going. First, have a goal. I initially wanted to [...]

What Firefox’s Memory Leak Feature Taught Me About Life

(draft) I’ve been using Firefox since the first public beta, and the one thing always on my wish list was fixing the sluggishness and unbelievable memory consumption (2 GB of RAM?) that results from keeping Firefox open for too long. This is still on my wish list today (almost 2010), and I know it’s unlikely to [...]

Learning to Read and Grok Other People’s Code

One reason many people don’t contribute to open source apps is because they find it daunting to look through somebody else’s code. Some might even think that it’s just simpler to write something from scratch than to study someone’s work. This isn’t true, and reading foreign code is something get used to and excel at [...]