After Advent of Code has ended I’ve started looking for another challenge and found weirdtext. It’s a recruitment test, but as I’ve found it quite interesting I’ve decided to do it and have coded it in Go. To make initial version of encoder and decoder was quite easy, but then I’ve started to add other cases to my tests and made some improvements, and also fixed some bugs. I’m not big fan of TDD, but I’m fanboy of unit tests.

As I’m lone, self-taught “programmer” I miss challenges and cooperation in my life. That’s why I’ve welcomed Advent of Code. It allowed me to check my skills, learn new things and talk about code with other people. I’ve scored 43 out of 49 possible stars, so not a big success. But as I’ve played against myself I consider it a win as I’ve thought I wouldn’t get past day 15 or something.

Some time ago I’ve tried my skills in coding golf competition, and had a second place, at least for a while. I’ve originally written it in JavaScript as this language is fresher in my mind than Python. But then I’ve rewritten it in Python because I’ve got stucked. Even though it’s been a while, I’ve coded more lines in Python and read more about it, so I was able to find the bug and proceed.

I keep saying that you never know when some knowledge would be useful. So there’s no such thing as useless knowledge. You’ve just not found usage for it yet. Some time ago I was praising The Imposter’s Handbook. I’ve liked it so much that I’ve bought and started reading A Curious Moon of the same author. I was doing some SQL at the time, but it wasn’t my major task. And I knew nothing about PostgreSQL, apart that it existed.

I’m working with memoQ (CAT tool) for more than four years now. It’s quite good comparing to other localisation tools. Which isn’t maybe such a great achievement as there aren’t too many. But anyway, it’s decent. But memoQ team has made some weird design decisions early on. The most annoying one is the choice of encoding. Entire world uses UTF-8 which is great and everything works fine with it. However memoQ decided they’ll use UTF-16LE and it’s a nightmare.

We have this publicist in Poland, Daniel Passent, who’s one of the greatest to me. He once said that the Economist is the greatest newspaper in the world. And I agree with him. I’ve tried many, but there’s no single one which I would enjoy as much. There’s at least one which is close, but let me tell you something else first. I’ve been subscriber to Economist many times, usually it was digital subscription.

When you’ve created some solution which is essential to the company you work for, it’s tempting to make it as proprietary and as little documented as possible for obvious reason of job security. But it’s short sighted. If your value lays only in maintaining this single piece of technology you still can be replaced at some point as this technology becomes obsolete or company would buy some other solution. I’ve always opposed the idea of irreplaceable people.

Recently I’ve revived my subscription to Wired. I’ve bought yearly subscription for $5 which is a great price. I’ve used my Gmail address when ordering it and received confirmation to this address. However, after logging in I’ve found out my subscription wasn’t active and I couldn’t activate it. Let’s create a support ticket I’ve thought and off to the support page I went. I needed to log in again and it’s asked me to activate my subscription, again.

Some time ago I’ve created a tool which was testing our Translation Memories (TMs). It was useful, because they’ve become corrupted quite often and sooner we knew about it the better. So I’ve set it to run every day. These days problems with TMs are sporadical, but I’m still running it just in case. Process is automated and all it requires from me is to read short report each day, so no biggie.

Agile is the hype these days and there’s probably no single startup which isn’t using this approach right now. In big corporations the adoption is slower, but they are also moving toward it as it simply works. Develop in small steps, measure how well product works so far, move forward or take a step back and fix. Data is really crucial here. Measure how well new improvement helped you with your problem, or measure how it’s made some things harder, as it can go both ways.