Zac muses, semi-frequently and with zest.

In my day to day job at Microsoft , I find me repeating myself, a lot. This happens both in code as well in conversation. Such is the life of a test software developer. We spend our days hammering our Dev’s APIs to make them break, squealing in pain and agony. Don’t get me wrong, [...]

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§60 · March 26, 2012 · programming · (No comments) ·


I’ve come to realize that I do not know nearly as much as I ought to. As such, I’m endeavoring to remedy this abysmal realization by reading more non-fiction. Current things on my list to read: Salt – Mark Kurlansky Free Culture – Lawrence Lessig (reading this again) Chivalry – Maurice Hugh Keen Medicine’s 10 [...]

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§40 · August 4, 2011 · learning · (No comments) ·


<Engage stream of consciousness mode> This past week I’ve gone out of my way to visit some food trucks and farmer’s markets that I don’t typically get a chance to go to. Those included Where Ya At Matt (Creole foodtruck), Maximus/Minimus (Pork truck) and the Queen Anne Farmer’s Market which has Proper British Bacon as [...]

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§44 · July 31, 2011 · dining · (No comments) ·


Caroline and I were discussing some issues I was seeing in a dogfood version of the next version of Visual Studio. I noted that I was having trouble with Intellisense and C++. It was making programming with some APIs that I’m not entirely familiar with difficult. In trying to describe this I quipped this little [...]

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§36 · July 28, 2011 · programming · (No comments) ·


Chuck Moore is the creator of the Forth programming language and a brilliant engineer. The creation of Forth is unlike many of the older languages in that it was created by an engineering need, not an academic need (i.e. Smalltalk or Lisp). I’ve been relearning Forth lately, trying to get a stronger footing in the [...]

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§33 · June 30, 2011 · programming · (No comments) ·


The other night I posted something of a stream of consciousness about my impressions of where programming paradigms are headed. In short I tried to state the following (even if it was not obvious): Object-orientation, while useful, does not scale well to the size of the data sets we now work with and try to [...]

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§19 · May 9, 2011 · programming · (No comments) ·


The core purpose of a computer is to manipulate data. Regardless of what a person does with a computer, ultimately they are transforming data. With the addition of the Internet, we have even more data to manipulate. In my recent ponderings, I’ve been reading William Cook’s thoughts on a new “Smalltalk of Modeling” which has [...]

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§16 · May 2, 2011 · programming · (No comments) ·


It was a dreary February day in 2010 when I started at Microsoft. I sat bored, reading my Kindle in New Employee Orientation (NEO). Now, a little over one year later, I seem to be endlessly busy. I am okay with this as it is preferable to the wretchedly boring first two to three months [...]

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§12 · April 27, 2011 · career · (No comments) ·


I ultimately got fed up with the old blog. It had cruft contained within as well as having successfully confused SimpleScripts, the shoddily made but useful installation manager I use for WordPress. SimpleScripts had somehow managed to come under the impression that there were in fact two identical WordPress installations in the same location on [...]

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§7 · April 25, 2011 · cooking, programming · (No comments) ·