catharsis

I had no idea who Nathan Marz was. When I saw the title, I assumed "Leaving Twitter" was implying discontinuing usage of Twitter from an outsider's perspective, not an employee parting ways with the company. The original title is completely unambiguous.

Soma.fm is my go to for internet radio. I personally find Mission Control the perfect thing to relax my mind and just zone out. For the uninitiated, it's a blend of down tempo atmospheric ambience and real recordings of astronauts talking to mission control.

This assumes that it is known that the password is four random words. The security of this method hinges on the fact that that information is not known.

This sounds like state based programming. IIRC this was a moderately popular way of programming games in the past. The resulting code is somewhat monolithic however, hard to maintain.

You could always scrape plain text from the PDF files. It might even be better, since I imagine some books in plain text may be outdated. I did have K&R C and SICP in plain text, but I'm not sure where they've gone off to. Good luck though.

I'm not in a place to find the link, but 37signals has a very good article about this. Start right from the core function (for example if the competitor is photoshop, make paint). The only real issue I think of with this method is bloat of code and UI, but I still think this way lends itself better to a strong product.

Any IRC channel would work (##programming or ##python for example.) However, I wouldn't overthink it. There's really only two things you have to worry about when naming classes, variables, etc. That the name conveys properly what it's trying to represent, and also that it won't conflict with other names. A more minor point would be sticking to a naming convention (ie all_like_this or allLikeThis). Variables are the easiest, since they represent something specific at all times, even if the value changes (something like position.x for a sprite). Functions while harder, are still (if you're not overpacking functionality) a concrete input and output. Data goes in, data comes out, the name should describe what that processing is going on within (such as forierTransform). Classes are a lot like variables, they represent specific things no matter how they are changing inside (if your class is capable of representing a giraffe or an elephant for instance, then a broader Animal or Mammal title would apply better.) It's not supposed to be rocket science, so I don't think second guessing yourself on all your namings is going to do you any good. Learn more about what works and what doesn't and go from there.

I understand it's beyond the discussion here, however, I'd really appreciate a link to that study. It sounds very interesting.