software development
Every software project I’ve ever worked on has accrued technical debt over time: Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is
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 programming regime.
security
Several things can trigger the sorry message. Often it’s due to infected computers or DSL routers that proxy search traffic through your network – this may be at home or even at a workplace where one or more computers might be infected. Overly aggressive SEO ranking tools may trigger this
psychological effects
A recent episode of This American Life interviewed Will Felps, a professor who conducted a sociological experiment demonstrating the surprisingly powerful effect of bad apples. Groups of four college students were organized into teams and given a task to complete some basic management decisions in 45 minutes. To motivate the
software development
[turns to fire commissioner] What do we got here, Kappy? Fire started, 81st floor, storage room. It’s bad. Smoke’s so thick, we can’t tell how far it’s spread. Exhaust system? Should’ve reversed automatically. It must be a motor burnout. Sprinklers? They’re not working on
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 patterns, or too much SOLID,
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 it agile design,
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, a flat
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
Imagine a scenario where three people will make contributions to a Wiki page at different points in time. Each person edits the page and then saves their changes to what becomes the latest version of that page. History Flow connects text that has been kept the same between consecutive versions.
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 God’