Simply Jonathan

User-defined Order in SQL 

Permanent location of 'User-defined Order in SQL'

This is the sort of problem which on the surface seems so simple, but where the immediate solution is so wasteful, and can indeed be hard to pull off; my side project Oversigter has been doing this incorrectly for years.

The solution is elegant, although it can be difficult to pull off in practice if you don’t have a lot of control over your hosting environment, as I don’t where Oversigter is hosted.

Via Simon Willison

Learn how to write 

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No one wants to invest countless hours in a losing technology… you want to learn something that will be useful in the long run. I have just the skill for you, and it doesn’t matter what language you work with.

Learn to write well.

This is exactly why I want to study English at university, and not something like Computer Science, or other things specifically related to what I want to work with. This also points out a deeper thing about me as a software developer: I am not that much into mathematics. I appreciate it on a simple level, and I do not avoid applying mathematics to my programming, but I am just more interested in communication. This I probably one of the reasons I started working with the Web, and stuck with it. (The other of course being, that when you start out as a 12 year old doing programming, HTML is just a bit easier to grasp.) I am not one of those who want to solve the performance bits of a program, making it run n% faster by tweaking some engine using clever natural science; I am one of those who want to write software that helps people communicate.

This is Simply Jonathan, a blog written by Jonathan Holst. It's mostly about technical topics (and mainly the Web at that), but an occasional post on clothing, sports, and general personal life topics can be found.

Jonathan Holst is a programmer, language enthusiast, sports fan, and appreciator of good design, living in Copenhagen, Denmark, Europe. He is also someone pretentious enough to call himself the 'author' of a blog. And talk about himself in the third person.