The Professional Programmer

We're all busy. Probably busier than we'd like to be. But in all of the chaos that is the daily life of a professional programmer, we have to remember to stay up to date - not only with our own areas of technical expertise, but with what's going on in the world around us. So to kick off this reading list section, I'm going to give a quick run down of the things I try to read on a daily basis.

Last week I posted about Arrays of Structures vs. Structures of Arrays , and the response was pretty great. I did get some feedback that I had left out one important concept:

It's one of those things that might have an obvious answer if you have ever written scientific software for a vector machine. For everyone else, it's something you probably never even thought about: Should I write my code with arrays of structures (or classes), or structures (or classes) of arrays. Read on to see how both approaches perform, and what kind of readability you can expect from each approach.

I'm going to say this right up front: I'm not a fan of Facebook. In fact, I've turned down offers to interview with them before, because I am not a fan of the platform, how it is used by people, and how it monetizes the resulting breadcrumb trail from that use. As you might guess, I don't have a Facebook account. I was deleting my Facebook account before that was a cool thing to do (2015).

People always want to know what the leaders of technology companies have to say on all sorts of topics. MSNBC realized this and has a limited-run series called " Revolution " where they speak to different technology CEOs. Tonight's was Apple CEO Tim Cook (the first one was Google CEO Sundar Pachai and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki). It was a serendipitously-timed interview, coming on the heels of revelations about potentially ALL of Facebook's user profiles being inappropriately (if not unlawfully) being made available to groups like the now-infamous Cambridge Analytica (check out my thoughts on Mark Zuckerberg's Senate testimony here ). Mr. Cook spoke about several different subjects in the course of the 1 hour special, focusing mostly on the role technology plays in the evolution of employment and education. But he also dipped his toes into data, privacy, policy, and politics.

I have two young children at home, one of whom is school age. If your home is anything like mine, mornings and evenings sometimes descend into chaos . Sometimes it seems like the evening ends and my wife and I have forgotten to eat dinner, but we're too tired to bother. Mornings are sometimes the same way: wake up 2 hours before we need to head out the door, and still somehow manage to run 10 minutes "late" (late is relative here - we always get our oldest to school on time, but we don't always leave the house at the target time). Regardless of your life situation, stuff happens. It's inevitable. But you can do some things to make the one-offs a little less frantic.