The Deep North

The Julian Assange Saga: A Journey of Truth, Controversy, and Injustice The Beginning: Wikileaks and the Unveiling of Secrets In 2006, Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks, an online platform dedicated to publishing classified and sensitive documents provided by anonymous sources. The organization's mission was clear: to reveal hidden truths and hold powerful entities accountable. WikiLeaks gained global recognition in 2010 when it released a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These included the infamous "Collateral Murder" video, which showed a U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed several people, including two Reuters journalists. The Fallout: Global Controversy and Legal Challenges The publication of these documents ignited a firestorm of controversy. Governments, particularly the United States, condemned WikiLeaks, accusing Assange of endangering lives and national security. Supporters hailed him as a champion of transparen...

What qualities make a senior software developer successful? Many of them are the same qualities that make anyone successful at work. Here, I break down the general qualities necessary for anyone and then drill down to particulars for software developers.  General Qualities for Success at Work Presentation and Grooming : Presenting well Dressing appropriately Being well-groomed Behavior and Interaction : Acting appropriately Being polite and friendly Having a sense of humor Genuinely being a 'team player' Practicing cooperative habits Turn-taking Promoting other team members Contributing to the mission Upholding esprit de corps Supporting supervisors and subordinates Professional Attitude : Not necessarily being a superstar Keeping abreast of changes in the zeitgeist and corporate culture Being comfortable in your own skin Being principled and respecting others' convictions Work/Life Balance : Maintaining a reasonable work/life balance Satisfying Maslow's hierarchy of ne...

This will be objected to and ignored by most, but take it from an old hacker who has production code in place decades after designing, writing, building, testing, and delivering it: Try/Catch, thrown exceptions, and assert() are things I associate with poorly designed code — code likely to fail in non-trivial production. Avoid these idioms. If possible, avoid languages that support them. Suspect development paradigms that blissfully support these things. By their nature, ‘exceptions’ are pathological instances of uncaught bugs. The discipline of putting these things in place violates an old rule of thumb as to how code should behave. It is something of a prior commitment to the acceptance of bugs. Bugs are enemy number one. A single defect can ruin an entire system that took man-years to build. A single defect opens security defects that can annihilate systems and cause tragic stress in individuals who, empirically, we know have no effective backups to roll back to. Serious code is ser...