Yesterday I’ve attended my daughter’s “Curriculum Night” (yes, I am a very good and responsible dad, I even managed not only to recall where the school is, but also to successfully follow my wife’s instructions on how to find the classroom).

Listening to the teacher’s presentation, I was surprised by how process-oriented the education is (not having US education experience myself). Here is one of the processes that were presented by the teacher as a part of 5th grade curriculum:

Design Process

1. State the Problem
2. Gather Information
3. Explore Ideas
4. Select a Solution
5. Test and Evaluate
6. Redesign

And this is taught in elementary school! One question that I have now is: did most of software engineers skip the 5th grade? Or this is something new that was added to curriculum less than twenty-something years ago? The “Design Process” I see again and again, not only with interns or junior engineers, but also with some experienced people:

1. Pick the Task (or Get Assignment)
2. Pick a Solution
3. Implement
4. Try if it Works (sometimes)
5. Implement Whitebox Tests (only if forced to do testing. In a lot of cases tests are matching implementation one-to-one; if code has bugs – tests are ensuring that bugs are there)

Sometimes it even extends to:

6. Restlessly Defend Picked Solution as the Best One

Nope. Please, go back to elementaruy school. They can teach you how to do your job!

In case you forgot your root password for MySQL installed with Homebrew on OS X Mountain Lion.

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launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.mysql.plist
/usr/local/opt/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables --skip-networking &
mysql -e "UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('new password') WHERE User='root'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;"
/usr/local/bin/mysql.server stop
launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.mysql.plist

Different versions may have different paths to be used with launchctl load/unload

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s = " To\tbe  or\nnot\tto  be  "
s.split(/ /)
#=> ["", "To\tbe", "", "or\nnot\tto", "", "be"]
s.split(/( )/)
#=> ["", " ", "To\tbe", " ", "", " ", "or\nnot\tto", " ", "", " ", "be", " ", "", " "]
> s.split /\s+/
#=> ["", "To", "be", "or", "not", "to", "be"]
s.split(' ')
#=> ["To", "be", "or", "not", "to", "be"]

From the ruby docs:

If pattern is a single space, str is split on whitespace, with leading whitespace and runs of contiguous whitespace characters ignored.

Note that split by regex without groups omits trailing matches. Undocumented?