Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
agile
We’ve adopted Scrum for all of our software development at Vertigo. Although I’m totally in favor of Anything But Waterfall, Scrum is an unfortunate name: 1. It’s two additional characters away from a term for male genitalia. 2. The term is derived from rugby, an extraordinarily violent
agile methodologies
Steve Yegge’s scathing criticism of agile methodologies takes a page from Joel Spolsky’s book. It’s not merely an indictment of Agile, it’s also a celebration of how his company does business. Just substitute “Google” for “Fog Creek Software” and you’ll get the idea. It’s
programming languages
How in the world wide web did I not know about the “ I Rock at BASIC” t-shirt? We’ve all written this program at some point in our careers. But only those of us who truly rock at BASIC.
storage
I recently upgraded my home system with one of the 750 gigabyte Seagate perpendicular drives in order to consolidate a number of hard drives I had on my server. 750 gigabytes is a tremendous amount of storage space in a single drive – but it doesn’t quite get us across
productivity
In Quality Software Management: Systems Thinking, Gerald Weinberg proposed a rule of thumb to calculate the waste caused by project switching: Even adding a single project to your workload is profoundly debilitating by Weinberg’s calculation. You lose 20% of your time. By the time you add a third project
testing
Michael Hunter’s blog byline is unapologetically over-the-top: making developers cry since 1995. That’s probably why he’s such an awesome tester. Well, that, and the braids. Never before in the history of testing professionals have the top and bottom halves of a man’s head been so mismatched.
agile
James Shore’s nineteen-week change diary is fascinating reading: It was 2002. The .com bust was in full slump and work was hard to find. I had started my own small business as an independent consultant at the worst possible time: the end of 2000, right as the bubble popped.
operating systems
Windows Vista has a radically different approach to memory management. Check out the “Physical Memory, Free” column in my Task Manager: At the time this screenshot was taken, this machine had a few instances of IE7 running, plus one remote desktop. I’m hardly doing anything at all, yet I
video games
My latest gaming obsession is the new real-time strategy game, Company of Heroes. It’s easily one of the best games of the year for the PC. And it’s quite possibly one of the best real-time strategy games ever made. To give you an idea of what I’m
programming languages
O’Reilly’s History of Programming Languages poster is fascinating reading. If you trace programming languages back to their origins, you’ll find that we’ve been at this programming stuff a long, long time. * Fortran (1954) * Cobol (1959) * Lisp (1958) * Basic (1964) * Forth (1970) * Pascal (1970) * SmallTalk (1971) * C
software development concepts
Laptop magazine’s Attack of the 20-inch Notebook is a tongue-in-cheek look at using the Dell XPS M2010 as a portable system in a few different locations. Hilarity ensued. For context, here are the relevant specs of this semi-portable concept system: * 20" LCD * full-size bluetooth keyboard (with numeric pad)
software development
If you ask a software developer what they spend their time doing, they’ll tell you that they spend most of their time writing code. However, if you actually observe what software developers spend their time doing, you’ll find that they spend most of their time trying to understand