---
title: Patrick Fitzsimmons - Startups, Programming, and Life | programming
description: programming | The blog of Patrick Fitzsimmons, a software engineer and entrepreneur in Cambridge, MA
---

## [How to name variables and methods when coding in a dynamic language](https://pfitz-old.hs-sites.com/how-to-name-variables)

December 12, 2013

Dynamic languages lack the perfect IDE intellisense that tells us the type of every variable. Thus it is necessary to use variable names that allow future readers of the code to unambiguously determine the type and contents of the variable.

[Read the whole post…](https://pfitz-old.hs-sites.com/how-to-name-variables)

## [While-loops Considered Harmful](https://pfitz-old.hs-sites.com/while-loops-considered-harmful)

February 20, 2013

Your phone buzzes with the server alert ring tone. Your product manager taps you on the shoulder: "Um, it looks like we're down." Not a single screen in your web app loads. You attempt to SSH into your server but connecting takes for...ev...er. Finally you connect to the shell and see the CPU pegged at 100%. You tail the access logs, but nothing looks fishy. Site traffic is normal. Frantic and desperate, you reboot the server. The server comes back up ... but immediately the CPU spikes back to 100%.

[Read the whole post…](https://pfitz-old.hs-sites.com/while-loops-considered-harmful)

## [How to Turn Your Windows Machine into Unix](https://pfitz-old.hs-sites.com/2011/05/how-to-turn-your-windows-machine-into-unix)

May 13, 2011

For the many years, the requirements of my job forced me to use Windows for working on parts of our code base. When working in Windows, I dearly missed the tools of a unix environment (ls, grep, the shell, etc). But over the years I've figured out a bunch of hacks that make using Windows a lot more tolerable. Here they are:

[Read the whole post…](https://pfitz-old.hs-sites.com/2011/05/how-to-turn-your-windows-machine-into-unix)

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#### [Patrick Fitzsimmons](https://pfitz-old.hs-sites.com/)

I am a startup guy and software engineer based in Cambridge, MA. Current I am co-founder of [Grokky](http://www.grokky.com). Before that, I spent seven years at HubSpot. I joined HubSpot as the first employee. During the early days I cranked out the first prototypes, during later days I helped scale our software and team to serve ten thousand customers.

[Read more about me and my work](https://pfitz-old.hs-sites.com/about)

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