ergonomic chairs
In A Developer’s Second Most Important Asset, I described how buying a quality chair may be one of the smartest investments you can make as a software developer. In fact, after browsing chairs for the last few years of my career, I’ve come to one conclusion: you can’
open source
In Codeplex wastes six months reinventing wheels, Ryan Davis has a bone to pick with Microsoft: I saw an announcement [in March, 2007] that CodePlex, Microsoft’s version of Sourceforge, has released a source control client. This infuriates me. This cool thing they spent six months (six!) writing is called
computer science
Charles Petzold was kind enough to send me a copy of his new book, The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine. One look at the original title page of Turing’s paper is enough to convince me that we’
security
Bruce Schneier is something of a legend in the computer security community. He’s the author of the classic, oft-cited 1994 book Applied Cryptography, as well as several well-known cryptography algorithms. The cheeky Norris-esque design above is a reference to the actor names commonly used in examples of shared secret
regular expressions
I love regular expressions. No, I’m not sure you understand: I really love regular expressions. You may find it a little odd that a hack who grew up using a language with the ain’t keyword would fall so head over heels in love with something as obtuse and
web development
I may not be smart enough to join Mensa, but I am smart enough not to build websites like the American Mensa website. Do you see the mistake? If so, can you explain why this is a mistake, and why you’d desperately want to avoid visiting websites that make
xml
Occasionally I’ll write about things that I find sort of mildly, vaguely thought provoking, and somehow that writing turns out to be ragingly controversial once posted here. Case in point, XML: The Angle Bracket Tax. I’m still encountering people online who almost literally hate my guts because I
programming practice
As I was paging through Steve Yegge’s voluminous body of work recently, I was struck by a 2005 entry on practicing programming: Contrary to what you might believe, merely doing your job every day doesn’t qualify as real practice. Going to meetings isn’t practicing your people skills,
c#
I sometimes (often, actually) regress a few years mentally and forget to take advantage of new features afforded by the tools I’m using. In this case, we’re using the latest and greatest version of C#, which offers implicitly typed local variables. While working on Stack Overflow, I was
software development practices
Today’s rumination is not for the weak of heart. It’s from the venerable C2 Wiki page Code For The Maintainer: Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live. Perhaps a little over the top, but
physics
I’ve always been fascinated by physics-based gameplay. Even going back to the primeval days of classic arcade gaming, I found vector-based games, with their vastly simplified 2D approximations of physics and motion, more compelling than their raster brethren. I’m thinking of games like Asteroids, Battlezone, and Lunar Lander.
code review
Ben Collins-Sussman on programmer insecurity: What do you do when somebody shows up to an open source project with a gigantic new feature that took months to write? Who has the time to review thousands of lines of code? What if there was a bad design decision made early in