Joël has been thinking a lot recently about array indexing. Stephanie started volunteering at the Chicago Tooele Library, a non-profit community lending library for Chicagoans to borrow tools and equipment for DIY home projects!
It's the end of the year and often a time of reflection: looking back on the year and thinking about the next. Stephanie and Joël ponder if open source is a critical way to advance careers as software developers.
This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medium=website). Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack.
Chicago Tool Library (https://www.chicagotoollibrary.org/our-organization)
Circulate and Ruby For Good (https://github.com/rubyforgood/circulate)
Glue Work (https://noidea.dog/glue)
Being the DRI of your career (https://cate.blog/2021/09/20/being-the-dri-of-your-career/)
The Manager's Path (https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-managers-path/9781491973882/)
Kingship (https://acoup.blog/2022/10/07/collections-teaching-paradox-crusader-kings-iii-part-iii-constructivisting-a-kingdom/)
What technologies should I learn? (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/what-technologies-should-i-learn)
Learning by Helping (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/learning-by-helping)
"Comb-shaped" Careers (https://killalldefects.com/2020/02/22/specializing-vs-generalizing-careers/)
Transcript:
STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn.
JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we are here to share a little bit of what we've learned along the way.
STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world?
JOËL: I've been thinking a lot recently about array indexing. I feel like this is one of the areas where you commonly get confused as a new programmer because most languages start array indexing at zero. And what we really have here are two counting systems, either an offset so how many spaces from the beginning of the array, or a counting system where you count 1,2,3,4. At first, it feels like why would computers ever go with the offset approach? It's so illogical. Counting 1,2,3,4 would feel natural.
But then, the more I think about it, the more I've started seeing the zero-based pattern show up in everyday life. One example, because I enjoy reading history, is how we talk about centuries. You might talk about the 19th century is the Victorian age, roughly. But you might also refer to the 19th century as the 1800s. So we've kind of got these two names that are a little bit off by one. And that's because when you're counting the centuries, you count first century, second century, third century, fourth century, and so on.
But when we actually go by the first two digits, you start with the zeros, then the 100s, then the 200s, 300s, and so on. And so we have a zero-based counting system and a one-based counting system, and we sort of have learned to navigate both simultaneously. So that was really interesting to me to make a connection between history and programming and the fact that sometimes we count from zero, and sometimes we count from one.
STEPHANIE: Yeah, I will have to admit that I always get confused when we're talking about centuries and making the mental connection that 19th century is the 1800s. It always takes me a bit of an extra second to make sure I know what I'm hearing, and I'm attributing it to the right year.
I think another example where I get a bit tripped up is the numbering of floors because, in the U.S., we are counting floors using the one-based counting system, whereas I think in Europe and places outside of North America, to my knowledge, the first floor will be considered the ground floor, and then the second floor will be the first floor and onward. So that is a zero-based counting system that I can recall.
JOËL: I never noticed there was a pattern