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
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&
database management
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 naïve 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
programming languages
Brad Abrams was a founding member of the .NET common language runtime team way back in 1998. He’s also the co-author of many essential books on .NET, including both volumes of the .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference. I was at a presentation Brad gave to the Triangle
regex
The Visual Studio IDE supports searching and replacing with regular expressions, right? Sure it does. It’s right there in grey and black in the find and replace dialog. Just tick the “use Regular expressions” checkbox and we’re off to the races. However, you’re in for an unpleasant
power supply
A question recently came up on the internal Vertigo mailing list about surge protection for home equipment and computers: * Do you know if the cheap outlet strips work? I’m not sure if they are a good deal (work as good as more expensive strips) or a waste of money.
security
Cory Doctorow recently linked to this fascinating email from Jon Callas, the CTO of PGP corporation. In it, Jon describes the impossibility of brute force attacks on modern cryptography: Modern cryptographic systems are essentially unbreakable, particularly if an adversary is restricted to intercepts. We have argued for, designed, and built
communication
I’ve occasionally been told that I have a confrontational style of communication. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing – as Kathy Sierra points out, the smackdown learning model can be surprisingly effective: What happens to your brain when you’re forced to choose between two different – and potentially