TITLE: Milestones and Nostalgia
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: November 30, 2004  5:48 PM
DESC: This month ends with fewer posts than usual, but Knowing and Doing is going strong.
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BODY:
November 2004 will enter the books as my least-blogged month
since starting
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/">
   Knowing and Doing</A>
back in July.  I'm not all that surprised, given that:
<UL>
<LI> it is the last full month of my semester,
<LI> it follows a month in which I was on the road every
     weekend and for a full week at OOPSLA, and
<LI> it contains a 5-day week for Thanksgiving.
</UL>
Each of these would cut into my time for blogging on its
own, and together they are a death knell to any free moments.

When I
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2004-07.html#e2004-07-09T12_37_46.htm">
   started Knowing and Doing</A>,
I knew that regular blogging would require strict discipline
and a little luck.  Nothing much has changed since then.  I
still find the act of writing these articles of great value
to me personally, whether anyone reads them or not.  That
some folks do find them useful has been both gratifying and
educational for me.  I learn a lot from the e-mails I receive
from Faithful Readers.

I reached the 100-post plateau ten days ago with this
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2004-11.html#e2004-11-20T13_33_58.htm">
   puff piece</A>.
I hope that most of my posts are of more valuable than that!
In any case, reaching <B>1000</B> entries will be a real
accomplishment.  At my current pace, that will take me three
more years...

While on this nostalgic kick, I offer these links as
some obligatory content for you.  Both harken back to
yesteryear:
<UL>
<LI> Brian Foote waxes poetic in his inimitable way
     about watching undergrads partake in the
     <A HREF="http://www.laputan.org/catfish/archives/000071.html">
        rite of initiation</A>
     that is a major operating systems project.  He
     points out that one thing has changed this experience
     significantly since he and I went through it thirty
     and (can it be?) twenty years ago, respectively: unit
     tests.
<P>
<LI> John O'Conner has a
     <A HREF="http://www.joconner.com/javai18n/articles/MagicNumbers.html">
        nice little piece</A>
     on generalizing the lesson we all learned -- some of
     us long ago, it seems --  about magic numbers in our
     code.  Now if only we turned all those constants into
     methods a l&aacute; the
     <A HREF="http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SmalltalkBestPracticePatterns">
        Default Value Method</A>
     pattern...
</UL>
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