Nate Taylor

What’s the point of programming? It’s to solve a problem, right? We work in a field that strives to attack real-world problems. Providing solutions that help make life easier for users. Whether that’s simplifying how you do taxes (TurboTax) or helping people stay in touch regardless of geography (Facebook.)  The main focus should be to ...

How often have you left work exhausted. Gone home and said (or at least thought) “I don’t want to think about that project for the rest of the night. I want to think about anything else BUT that project”?  Once in your career? Once a year? Month? Week? Every night?  I have had my share ...

Over the past 13 years of my professional career, I’ve gone through several phases. I had a phase where I did little-to-no extra work or education. This would be the first couple years of my career, when I was recently married and then a little over a year later, had our first kid.  There was ...

Late last year i started training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. You can read about my journey from couch potato to BJJ student, over at my other blog, CouchJitsu. But as part of my journey, I went from just doing technique classes, to sparring and conditioning and even competing in a tournament. As I added more ...

I’ve known about TDD for quite a while now. My first introduction was when I left Caterpillar and became the only Windows developer at my  new job. I was used to having an entire team do regression testing before we released our software. I wasn’t afforded that luxury so I started looking at what I ...

Over the last 3 or 4 years, I’ve started to get frustrated with something I see a lot in code. It’s a two-headed monster. The first head is lack of classes, and the second is not properly using the classes that do exist. No Class First things first, I find despite the fact that my ...

A lot of us in the software field have a 4 year degree where we focused on the “hard” facts of “hard” sciences. Personally, I have a BS in electrical engineering. I took fun classes like differential equations, fields & waves, analog filter design. My afternoons and evenings were filled with donig derivations and proofs, ...

This afternoon I was reading a local website that was comparing candidates for the up-coming US election. Obviously the “big guns” were there, such as Romney & Obama. But this site also covered smaller local elections. As I was reading some of the answers from each candidate, I was struck with something. Even when the ...

This past week, everyone at my office got new Mac Book Pros. We are a software company that currently writes in .NET.  I think I abstained from the computer selection (or said whatever everyone else agreed on was fine.) The reason for this was that I consider computers to be commodities.   Background I’ve been ...

I remember learning about strings in programming languages. It wasn’t in class, it was on a production application. I had just written a tool that would log all of the data link traffic between Caterpillar’s ECMs and their PC based service tool. Now I needed to do the sister task of writing a viewer for ...