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Welcome to the Zeroth World Wiki!

This is the nonlinear, less-polished companion site to the blog "Zeroth-World Problems". I guess you could call it a Bliki.

[...] I decided I wanted something that was a cross between a wiki and a blog - which Ward Cunningham immediately dubbed a bliki. Like a blog, it allows me to post short thoughts when I have them. Like a wiki it will build up a body of cross-linked pieces that I hope will still be interesting in a year's time.

—MartinFowler

I started this bliki to create a SemiPublicSpace where I could experiment with different analyses of of CS and software engineering concepts without any social pressure to use common terms, or to use terms for their commonly understood meanings. I'm prone to Neologizing on the bliki, and you'll find that my definitions of, say Function, Method, and Object are slightly different from the definitions you'd find elsewhere. However, that is no longer the primary purpose of the bliki. I'm now using it as a place to to keep notes and write rough drafts that might someday turn into a book.

Levels of Polish

You can assume everything is just a draft/notes unless it says otherwise.

I'll annotate pages with headers like STATUS: DRAFT or STATUS: PUBLISHED to indicate how fully-baked I think the ideas are. The levels go something like this:

• NOTES: the ideas are rough and unorganized. These pages are not meant to be intelligible to anyone but me.
• DRAFT: the ideas are structured into sentences and paragraphs, but the argument may trail off or have logical holes. I might not use terms consistently. The ideas might be bad. Use with caution.
• PUBLISHED: I'd publish this as a blog post if it weren't linked to so many other ideas as to be unsuitable for a linear format.

Interesting Starting Points

• Meta:WhyIsThisAWiki
• TestDrivenDevelopment
• Behavior
• FifteenPropertiesInSoftware
• UIDesignPrinciples
• SoftwareTesting
• Abstraction
• ObjectOrientedProgramming

Subscribing

RSS feed: https://github.com/benchristel/benchristel.github.io/wiki.atom

Questions? Comments?

In general, I have more thoughts on these things than I've had time or inclination to write down. If you have questions or feedback about anything on the bliki, please email me, and we can chat about it! My GMail username is the same as my GitHub one.

Cloning and Editing

git clone https://github.com/benchristel/benchristel.github.io.wiki

I highly recommend Obsidian as an editor for GitHub wikis. After cloning this repo, you can open it as a "vault" in Obsidian and (almost) everything just works!

Be aware that GitHub and Obsidian use opposite conventions for wiki-style links with aliases (e.g. [[Foo|Bar]]) so I advise using Markdown-style links like [display text](url) if you need an alias. Wiki links with no alias (e.g. [[Foo]]) work fine in both GitHub and Obsidian.