Hidden Figures

What I liked the most about the movie is that (even though it is dramatized) I thinkit shows and/or reaffirms something that I believe is true and I think we can actually see clearly in the world today (especially when compared to the time in which the movie is set): oppresive culture ebbs progress.

Even though I believe the movie is a dramatized representation of the events, I also believe that, at the time, at least some people at NASA came to that realization. In the movie it is shown very explicitly when Katherine has to tell Al Harrisson (the boss - already on the moon guy) where she goes for forty minutes a day, and why she does it.

Nowadays it can be observed in highly productive environments such as big companies, and organizations alike, where non-oppresion organically becomes part of the culture (like it happens in the movie, but maybe not that dramatically).

I'm not sure how or why exactly, but I have a feeling that an one can use the fact that an oppresive culture slows down progrss as an argument for proving human equality to a certain extent. The body of the argument or it's specifiications are content for some other, much longer blog post (maybe even another medium).

On an entirely different topic, another thing that I liked about the movie was the usage of the word computer. Apparently, there was a time where people were computers. I don't think that I was familiar with that. Never in my life I had heard that. Now every that I'm performing some complicated - enough computation I start calling myself a computer because of it.

Something that bothered me about the movie was that lots of other allegedly smart people were very uncomfortable with black people. I understand their uncomfortable feelings, as they were raised that way, but I do not understand their inability to overcome those feelings like only the boss did.

Ethical Reflection on Ready Player One

The discussed quotations as well as the original questions can be found at this activitie's site.

Do you agree with the quotations?
I do not. I believe that the quotations are valid personal judgements of the value of what I'd call alternate / artificial realities. I think that these characters have these opinions because they see more value in the real world than in the one they created, but I wouldn't be comfortable with producing the same judgement or sharing that opinion before actually experiencing the two 'realities' they are comparing.

I do understand that, in that particular story the OASIS can be seen as a distraction that takes away time from otherwise be humanity progressing, but I don't believe that that is something inherently wrong or flawed with the OASIS. I think that the real flaw is the human tendency of seeking distractions(?). I believe humans find other distractions or 'shelters from their problems' even if something like the OASIS isn't there.

Do you personally see any virtues in a system like the OASIS?
I do. I think that the ability to 'live out'/'actually experience' basically anything imaginable (do anything, be anyone) would empower humanity to have a different perspective on the human condition that could help us overcome flaws and limitations that we share as a species.

Do you think our value system (personal and cultural values) could be altered if we spent most of our time in an OASIS like system?
Yes. Particularly the things we value. I think that, as humans, the things we desire are not always well lined up with what is best for us. Both individually and as a group. Like I mentioned, maybe if we got to spend most of our time in a reality where anything is possible then that migh help us shift our priorities towards something that is truer for the betterment of everyone. (I could also see it going the other way around too though, like in the novel)

It'd be important to mention that I believe that the more the experience in a system like the OASIS becomes indistinguishable from the real experience, the more I'd stand for the answerst to my last two questions.

Metaprogramming

I think that most of the people taking this course have actually already worked directly with metaprogramming! At the Programming Languages course that it is taught here by our professor, a significant effort is made towards using what I'd call Clojure's runtime-self-metaprogramming tool called macros. Pieces of Clojure code that would 'expand' into more Clojure code before being actually evaluated.

I certainly did all that, completed all my macros homework and solved the exams macros excercizes. I enjoyed it. It felt super powerful to have metaprogramming integrated to such an extent into a language, because it meant that you could build on top of the language itself. It allowed you to basically extend the syntax itself to do whatever you could imagine. We even read some articles telling tales of how this flexibility allowed some website company to out-perform their competition.

But, in my personal experience, I see the impact of metaprogramming in another area: the issue of compatibility, interoperability and portability. Particularly with frameworks.  The projects that I work with the most these days simply wouldn't work without metaprogramming. I work a lot with projects in which I code in a node (ecmascript) environment, but the programs that end up being the result of my code and are actually executed do not look like my code at all, but instead are products of what I guess could be called 'metaprogramming' pipelines that adapt it to whatever environment it is targeted at. Things such as the Babel and Typescript libraries are powerful examples that I work with every day. Those libraries basically translate between versions of programming languages. Even more obvious examples are the cli interfaces of frameworks like Angular or Rails, where a single command automatically translates into N different programs of N different programing languages (such as when components are created in Angular, or 'entities' in rails).

That is where I see metaprogramming practices being more impactful.

Microservices

I feel like this article is trying to rationalize / justify something that needs no justification. It felt like it was overly defensive  about the architecture it talks about, when it really didn't need to be in my opinion. Another thing that I feel is important to mention about it (especially in the context of the material covered in previous blog publications) is that from the very start it was clear to me that this article came from a much more recent time than the other ones. Not only because of its mentions of companies such as Amazon and Netflix, or terms like 'cloud' but also because it didn't talk about change in a worried or scared way like the ones that date back to the birth of agile.

Another aspect of this article I'd comment about is that, in general, it gave a vibe and it made it fee like the things it talked about operate at a larger scale. A very large scale.

This leads me to a thing that I've been liking about this course that I hadn't commented on before. It had happened in the past ( in the post about software craftsmanship i think ) that I've felt that the practices mentioned in the content would only work on projects and industry slices that are only beyond a certain size or scale level. I've been both liking and disliking this to be completely honest. I like it because it makes me feel confident that we are going over some for real sruff in the course. I dislike it because in our shallow experience, very few of us have gotten to work and operate in those scales, and it is our perception that a majority of the industry around us is not of that scale.

The 4+1 View Model

Throughout all of the courses that our degree goes over, I believe that we actually go through a significant amount of theory about the UML, with its many methods and diagrams.  (the diagrams are the things that stick with me the most because their visual nature). From what I can remember, we did not actually go over a model (such as the one presented) that would integrated all these different tools. We kind of saw the UML as a toolset, went over every tool in detail, learnt what they did, but never actually covered a method that would bring them all together.

I'll start out by saying that there is a particular thing that I really appreciated about this video explanation: It brings together a bunch of UML tools that I knew about but never looked at in that context. When the presenter argues that certain diagrams or documents (the tools) cover certain 'views' of a project, the presenter helps me make sense of them, it makes them look more obviously useful as a part of a whole, not as isolated tools.

But, what bothers me a bit about the explanation is that I don't actually know if this view model came about to try to make sense of all the different assets offered by the Unified Modeling Language or if it was the other way around. I looked it up and I was happy to find out that the 4+1 view model is generic and does not actually require the use of any particular language or notation. So it was the presenter that was fitting the UML tools into the view model. This is important to me because the view model would have made less sense to me if it existed as a way to fit UML tools into a process. I can rest easy now. Now I'd want to find out if there are other view models for software architecture out there that might make even more sense to me, but that'd be a story for another time.

The SOLID Principles

This one is a hard one for the blog. At the moment I can't begin to produce an opinion about the material that can remotely be 300 words long. I think this was the shortest reading material I've had to blog about ever. Especially in class. Not only that but it was uncomfortably informative. Blogging about it is like being asked to write a 300 word 'comment, opinion or critique' about a random set of five entries in a dictionary.

I guess that from this reading I'd say that I'm getting continually more and more impressed the complexities and details of software making beyond solving complicated abstract algorithm problems. It starts to make sense to me why there's so much worrying for the role of a 'software architect', following best practices, crafting and so on.

These principles (or best practices) particularly are very much focused on situations that arise in very object oriented progamming, which is why I am not ultra familiar to the situations. If looked at in greater detail, I believed that all of the 5 refer to a greater principle we hear a lot about when talking about OOP: the concepts of coupling and cohesion, and how we're supposed to have very little of the first one and a lot of the second one. Particularly coupling.

The SOLID principles addres inter-class dependency, which to me is a form of coupling, of having one class care a little too much about another. Perhaps they don't solve or address coupling directly.  I think it would be more accurate to say that, if followed, they prevent high-coupling situations from happening. Unlike refractorings, principle like this aim at preventing those situations.

At the moment I have a feeling that I have not worked in a project that was big enough for these better practices to be of use, so I am very curious to reach the time (if it ever comes) in which I go like 'Oh! this is it! here and now good software architecture practices are explicitly needed.'

GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR (War Games)

Ever since I read through the part of Ready Player One where the movie 'War Games' appears I've been thinking that we should watch it in class one day instead of the other media that we usually do watch (Silicon Valley). I even mentioned it to some of my classmates out loud. I know that watching it was probably planned in the course all along (I believ that it's in the nature of our professor to have things planned like that all along) but a tiny part of me still likes to believe that he overheard me saying it in class and thought 'you know what? yeah we should watch War Games one of these days' and so he mercifully got it and played it for us.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the movie. Even though our professor warned us that the movie was old and that it showed a lot I don't quite believe it did. Not enough for that warning. Where it did, it didn't bother me at all. I think that when a movie is good like that my brain just accepts the universe it presents to me without questioning it. Another influential factor is (I think) that our professor was there in the setting that the movie presents, and I think he can remember and/or relate to the things in the movie, looking back. He sees and has lived the aging with the movie (Gracefully).

One of the things that I enjoyed the most about the movie is that despite having been around for a long time it actually kind of touched upon the single thing that actually worries me about computer security nowadays: with so so many super important, mission-critical or classified or life dependant information and procesess being hosted or automated with computers and the internet, I sometimes consider the possibility of two or more powerful groups (not nations necessarily) getting into conflict or crysis because of something that happended in the computer-data or internet social media world. Just like the characters in the movie, it's a scenario that I wouldn't like to live through.