As We May Think

Ideas of Vannevar Bush in practice

Referencing your entire knowledge-base

Vannevar Bush in his seminal essay As We May Think

One of my very favorite strategies is prototyping all of my solutions with unit tests, and having all of my solutions locally, because with a simple text search I can easily reference code I have used in the past.

Refer to past work for convenience

Languages like Java can be frustrating Even the most quotidian operations are often difficult to remember. For example, I KNOW I have converted an int array to an integer list in the past, dozens or hundreds of times. Especially with Java, I never expect anything to work exactly as anticipated, so I reference past work, and put it to the test (with unit testing)

How the heck did I do that?

When your past work is indexed, you can instantly scour reams of code to derive solutions from existing content. That’s working smart.