Alan Skorkin

Alan Skorkin on building software, and the teams that build it, as AI changes both.

Visit skorks.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Mar 2010 – Sep 2011

Why developers rarely use state machines, seeing them as overkill until it's too late to switch, and what the state_machine gem did for CrowdHired.

The bash (Readline) shortcuts worth knowing for editing, recalling and controlling commands, plus the ! and ^ history tricks.

Why programmers shouldn't work themselves into the ground for the company, told through the story of a brilliant developer called John.

Why the claim that 99 in 100 programmers can't program says more about a company's job ads and interviews than about programmers.

Everything a web developer should know about URLs: their nine parts, special characters and encoding, and how relative URLs resolve to absolute ones.

How a computer scientist, a programmer and a developer differ in skills, focus and priorities, even though the terms are often used interchangeably.

Why everyday CRUD work needs little math, but search, machine learning, cryptography and other interesting fields need plenty.