xml
Here’s a helpful article that documents common pitfalls to avoid when composing XML documents. Nobody wants to be called an XML Bozo by Tim Bray, the co-editor of the XML specification, right? There seem to be developers who think that well-formedness is awfully hard — if not impossible — to get
operating systems
John Gruber gloats that Windows XP does not fare well in a comparison against OS X: But everything about Boot Camp is calibrated to position Windows-on-Mac as the next Classic-style ghetto – a compatibility layer that you might need but that you wish you didn’t. Even the Boot Camp logo
c#
Here’s a question that recently came up on an internal mailing list: how do I create an enum with a name that happens to be a c# keyword? I immediately knew the answer for VB.net; you use brackets to delimit the word. Public Enum test [Public] [Private] End
data density
Edward Tufte, in his new book, Beautiful Evidence, continues on his crusade for information density. Here’s a representative recap of a Tufte seminar from 2001: Tufte spent most of his talk walking around the room while talking on a wireless mike. He had two projectors set up, but for
software development
Joel Spolsky came up with a twelve-item checklist in August, 2000 that provides a rough measure of – in his words – “how good a software team is:” 1. Do you use source control? 2. Can you make a build in one step? 3. Do you make daily builds? 4. Do you
productivity
I’ve always thought it was ironic that low priority emails are the ones I see first in my inbox. Marking something with a low priority makes it stand out from all the others. Doesn’t that make it implicitly high priority? One man’s urgent is another man’s
unit testing
J. Timothy King has a nice piece on the twelve benefits of writing unit tests first. Unfortunately, he seriously undermines his message by ending with this: However, if you are one of the [coders who won’t give up code-first], one of those curmudgeon coders who would rather be right
virtual machines
Now that Virtual PC is finally free, I've become obsessed with producing the smallest possible Windows XP Virtual PC image. It's quite a challenge, because a default XP install can eat up well over a gigabyte. Once you factor in the swapfile and other overhead, you&
indexes
Here’s a thought question for today: why can’t database tables index themselves? Obviously, indexes are a central concept to databases and database performance. But horror tales still abound of naive developers who “forget” to index their tables, and encounter massive performance and scalability problems down the road as
software development
Steve McConnell on diseconomies of scale in software development: Project size is easily the most significant determinant of effort, cost and schedule [for a software project].* People naturally assume that a system that is 10 times as large as another system will require something like 10 times as much effort
programming languages
A few people recently pointed out that my personal branding isn’t everything that it could be. Joseph Cooney even took matters into his own hands. Well, I contacted the big man himself, Steve McConnell, and he graciously provided me a high resolution vector file of the original Coding Horror
programming concepts
⚠ Please note, this paper was ultimately retracted by its author (pdf) in 2014: In 2006 I wrote an intemperate description of the results of an experiment carried out by Saeed Dehnadi. Many of the extravagant claims I made were insupportable, and I retract them. I continue to believe, however, that