programming languages
In Maciej Ceglowski’s cutting counterpoint to Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, he cites a key difference between software development and painting: writing software doesn’t get you laid. There’s nothing whatsoever distinctive about the analogy to painters, except that Paul Graham likes to paint, and would like
user experience
I had a great time at today’s Raleigh MSDN Code Camp. There’s nothing better than geeking out with a bunch of guys and gals who are as passionate about this stuff as you are! For anyone who couldn’t attend, here’s a a local copy of my
software development concepts
If anyone reading this is local to Raleigh-Durham and signed up for the 2005 Raleigh Code Camp at NC State, fair warning: I’ll be presenting there. The speaker schedule is packed with interesting sessions. Mine is on User Friendly Exception Handling Strategies at 10:15am. I haven’t
c#
Why are the smallest bugs in the .NET framework always the most disproportionately frustrating? Take the wsdlHelpGenerator element, for example. Sure, it seems straightforward enough; you want to replace the default crappy, random hash sorted list of Web Service methods with one that’s (shock!) in alphabetical order. I know,
hashes
I learned to appreciate the value of the Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) algorithm in my 8-bit, 300 baud file transferring days. If the CRC of the local file matched the CRC stored in the file (or on the server), I had a valid download. I also learned a little
prototyping
Tim Weaver, channeling Robert Glass, on the five laws of prototypes: 1. The answer to any prototype / feasibility question is always yes 2. Whatever poor coding practices you use to build your prototype will be replicated in the final production version 3. No matter how poor the performance of the
software design
Rube Goldberg software design is the meme of the month, after being parodied by Rory Blyth and Scott Hanselman in this brilliant short video, and oddly enough, also currently appearing in Microsoft advertisements: Now compare that to an actual Rube Goldberg device: You can’t talk about Rube Goldberg these
presentations
Like most developers, I don’t get a lot of experience giving presentations. The golden rule is: practice, practice, and more practice. Then incorporate the feedback from those practice sessions into your presentation. Of course, it helps to perform practice sessions in front of people who have seen a lot
parsing
I’ve blogged ad nauseam about how much I love Regular Expressions, but even the mighty regular expression has limits. As noted in Daniel Cazzulini’s blog: A full-blown programming language cannot be parsed with regular expressions. But given the limited number of programming languages (successful ones, let’s
web scraping
If you’ve ever used Craigslist.org – a fantastic and rather odd resource – you may have noticed that it’s heavily biased towards per-city searches. This is a pain if you want to do a national search across all cities that Craigslist.org operates sites for. A while back,
usb drives
It’s a geek rite of passage: what’s on your keychain? Here’s mine: * 512mb Sandisk Cruzer USB 2.0 thumbdrive * Leatherman Squirt S4 * Arc AAA LED flashlight I carried a Leatherman Micra for years, but I forgot to ditch it prior to a business trip and it got
java
John Carmack, the primary developer of Doom and Quake at id Software, posted some great comments on his recent experiments with cellphone game development in Java. My favorite? there is something deeply wrong when text editing on a 3.6 ghz processor is anything but instantaneous. That’s quote of