I began to learn Adobe In Design in college – I first used it to lay out a student literary magazine when I accidentally stumbled into the Senior Graduate Editor position. I’m not sure how that happened. But it mean that I needed to learn a real layout tool, since the extent of my experience with layout software before that was limited to Microsoft Word. Which is to say: I didn’t have any layout experience.
Since then, I’ve come a long way – I’m using the program to lay out a …

There’s a problem-solving method that I taught my students when I was teaching – a method I strongly believe in. I stole it from my 11th grade programming teacher and it’s been useful for me ever since. It’s called it “Algorithm-based Problem Solving.”
Programmers are familiar with algorithms, but for the rest of us: algorithms are the steps that a computer programmer must take solve a programming problem. Since computer programs must be laid out in exact steps so the computer knows what to do, writing algorithms is essential to planning …

Yeah, this post is inspired by the O’Reilly book of the same name. It’s a few years old, but it’s a good one.  When I first read the title of the book, I thought it was about beautiful looking code. It’s not… necessarily, but I found something peculiar when reading it. Code that implements a beautiful design usually ends up looking, well, beautiful.
I find in large designs the most beautiful lead up to a bang. Say there is a class that has a handful of functions. If you trace into …