software development
Every software project I've ever worked on has accrued technical debt [http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebt.html] over time: > Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham [http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?TechnicalDebt] to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing
code review
I am continually amazed how much better my code becomes after I've had a peer look at it. I don't mean a formal review in a meeting room, or making my code open to anonymous public scrutiny on the internet, or some kind of onerous pair
security
Lately, I've been seeing these odd little signs pop up in storefronts around town. All the signs have various forms of this printed on them: Only 3 students at a time in the store please We took that picture at a 7-11 convenience store which happens to be
psychological effects
A recent episode of This American Life [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/370/ruining-it-for-the-rest-of-us] interviewed Will Felps, a professor who conducted a sociological experiment demonstrating the surprisingly powerful effect of bad apples [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/370/ruining-it-for-the-rest-of-us] . Groups of four college students were organized into teams
software development
I think I have a problem with authority. Starting with my own. It troubles me greatly to hear that people see me as an expert or an authority, and not a fellow amateur. If I've learned anything in my career, it is that approaching software development as an
design patterns
A common response to The Ferengi Programmer: From what I can see, the problem of "overly-rule-bound developers" is nowhere near the magnitude of the problem of "developers who don't really have a clue." The majority of developers do not suffer from too much design
programming languages
There was a little brouhaha recently about some comments Joel Spolsky made on our podcast: Last week I was listening to a podcast on Hanselminutes, with Robert Martin talking about the SOLID principles. (That's a real easy-to-Google term!) It's object-oriented design, and they're calling
search engines
I was browsing the sessions at an upcoming Search Conference, which describes itself thusly: The way to online success is through being easily found in search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search. While developers have historically thought of search as a marketing activity, technical architecture has now
design patterns
The introduction to Head First Design Patterns exhorts us not to reinvent the wheel: You're not alone. At any given moment, somewhere in the world someone struggles with the same software design problems you have. You know you don't want to reinvent the wheel (or worse,
html
In The Sad Tragedy of Micro-Optimization Theater we discussed the performance considerations of building a fragment of HTML. string s = @"<div class=""action-time"">{0}{1}</div> <div class=""gravatar32"">{2}</div> <div
wiki editing
When you visit Wikipedia's entry on asphalt, you get some reasonably reliable information about asphalt. What you don't get, however, is any indication of who the author is. That's because the author is irrelevant. Wikipedia is a community effort, the result of tiny slices
keyboard
My beloved Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000 has succumbed to the relentless pounding of my fingers. A moment of silence, please. OK, it still works, technically, but certain keys have become.. unreliable. In particular, the semicolon key is now infuriatingly difficult to use. I don't know if this is